Damn that was a depressing post...
I know a number of people who still have their 12" LPs but the problem
is not the the space and and prep that keep them from being commonly played
but the degrading of the media as it's played. Most of the LP collections
my friends have are only going to be played once or twice more, on a
REALLY good system, to be recorded to a digital media. This will preserve
the music in a playable state, and let them keep good conditioned LP's for
archive and historys sake :-)
ATRAC may not be doomed, and MP3 won't be the final word in audio compression.
ATRAC has changed quite a bit since it's first introduction, but the change
was to improve it to make each version better. As long as the future hold
decoders to play pre-existing MDs, the MiniDisc could have a great future.
Idealy being able to change the compression techniques based on the type
of recording you're doing.
I can't see the portalbe harddrives taking off too well, since the format
was never designed for portalbe use. Look at the history of portable harddrives
in the computer market. They are NOT rugged. This alone is where MD has
a major advantage...
There is a happy medium, but I have a bad feeling it's gonna be a long
time before manufactures recongize that...
-Jeffrey
--
The day MS makes something that doesn't suck
will be the day they start making vacuum cleaners.
On Sun, 23 Jan 2000, Romain Kang wrote:
>
> Let's consider the two essential aspects of MD as we know it today:
> ATRAC encoding and the 2.5" MO storage medium.
>
> Regarding ATRAC: I claim that ATRAC is doomed. Do most people give
> that much primacy to sound quality? I think not. The convenience of a
> medium wins out time and again. Even vinyl LP bigots I know have sold
> their collections because they don't want to deal with the space and
> time it takes to store, prep, and play the LPs.
>
> Regarding the 2.5" medium: As others have pointed out, MD as a storage
> medium has real advantages over RAM devices. The next challenger, I
> think, is hard disk storage. Right now, you can find $100 drives that
> can hold about 10GB (~$10/GB) and they aren't nearly as rugged as
> MD media. At some point, though, there will be be something that will
> be resilient, have the access speed of hard disk, be compact as MD,
> and cost $1/GB or less. When this happens, the MD medium will be as
> desirable as 3.5" floppies are today.
>
> Taken together, MD/ATRAC won't just go the way of LPs and 12 inch laser
> discs. It will suffer the utter oblivion of 8-track tapes, because
> other technologies will be able to sound better and take less space.
> (But you may still have to pry my cold, dead fingers from my two MD
> portables and home deck).
>
> Romain Kang Siemens Info/Comm Products, San Jose R&D
> [EMAIL PROTECTED] formerly Pyramid Technology Corporation
>
> Disclaimer: I represent myself alone, except where otherwise indicated.
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