As long as we’re talking music, here’s an interesting trivia note: the compact disc was introduced 25 years ago today. There’s a pretty detailed article about its development here… although I notice it failed to mention that the preliminary work in converting analog music to a digital file was done by a grad student at my very own alma mater, the University of Utah. Granted, the actual physical disc technology was developed later, by other people, but the ground work for the digital music revolution was done right here in my back yard.
Anyhow, primitive tribal chest-thumping aside, my own experience with the CD has been pretty much like every other major new consumer technology that’s come down the pike in my adult life: I became vaguely aware of this new tech long after its introduction and resisted getting involved because what I was using — vinyl LPs and cassettes, in this case — were perfectly fine for my purposes and I saw no need to “upgrade.” The very suggestion that one would need to upgrade, that your possessions are not eternal, offended my nature. Eventually, however, after these new gadgets were nearing universal acceptance, I finally weakened and decided to hop on the bandwagon (which was about a mile down the road by that point), but only to the extent of buying new albums — I wasn’t going to be a damn fool and replace my whole existing collection with these new-fangled shiny silver platters because that would be simply… stupid. And now, of course, with everybody buying an iPod and some people claiming that the CD is on its way out, I’m just getting around to picking up CD copies of ZZ Top’s Eliminator and The Traveling Wilburys‘ self-titled collection, two of the last cassettes from my old collection to be upgraded. Sigh… sometimes, I hate being so predictable…
To answer the question Scalzi posed earlier on his blog, my very first CD purchase was actually (and ironically, given all my talk today about rock and roll) a pair of soundtracks: Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and the New American Orchestra’s recording of music from Blade Runner (as opposed to the original recording by Vangelis, which was unavailable at that time — 1989 — because of some legal snafu). I’d heard great things about what these CD thingamabobs could do for instrumental music, especially if if that music had been recorded digitally, whatever that meant; Last Crusade was one of those digital recordings, and Blade Runner was… well, Blade Runner, so I had to pick those two up. And I’ll admit, I was impressed. It was amazing, nay, miraculous, to hear music reproduced so cleanly, without any scratches, pops, or background rumble caused by my el cheapo phonograph. It was like music had been invented all over again.
Now, 25 years down the road, that clarity is the default and we’re all debating over minutiae like whether the sound of cymbals gets clipped if you rip a track at too low a bit-rate — you know, that sentence may as well have been in Swahili back in ’89 — and, while some lament that we’re losing fidelity in the name of being able to carry our entire music library around in a shirt pocket, I find that I still miss the grubby, organic imperfections of vinyl. Never satisfied, are we?
I was finally convinced to go digital in 1989 when I heard Pink Floyd’s album Wish You Were Here on my friend Allen’s CD player. That was the first album I bought.
I think the CD is indeed going to way of vinyl, 8 track, cassette, VHS, Beta, smoke signal, beacon fire, cave wall painting, and the home telephone. The fact is that nothing keeps me in my chair writing or on my feet exercising like listening to music or an audiobook, and my iPod gives me everything I own, all the time, everywhere I go.
Given my track record, I’m sure I’ll probably come around to getting one of those gadgets eventually, after the newness and buzz has worn off, but I have to say that I’m not entirely comfortable with my music collection becoming nothing more than intangible data. What happens if you lose your iPod? Do you still have all the original CDs so you can re-rip them? And if so, doesn’t that mean that CD tech isn’t going anywhere, because we’re still keeping them around as backups? (I don’t think the basic tech is going away anyhow, it’s just that the application is shifting more to data than music. Which is data now, so I suppose it doesn’t make much difference. It’s just that the dang kids record the data now instead of buying it that way.)
And incidentally, I still haven’t owned a cell phone that gave me the clarity of a good old-fashioned landline. Convenience, yes, but at a certain sacrifice in quality. And I wonder if compressed music files on an iPod don’t require the same sacrifice in the name of portability. Any thoughts on the fidelity of mp3s (or whatever format the iPod uses) vs. CD?
Ah, where to begin:
Tangible vs. Intangible – I have ~100 CD’s, all of which have been ripped to the iPod, and all of which now enjoy a comfortable cardboard box in my basement, probably never to be seen again (at least until the Smithsonian comes calling). The music resides on my hard drive, and then iTunes synchs it to the iPod. Then, I also backup the hard drive periodically, so at any given time, I have three copies of my music stored digitally (four, if you count the original CD’s, although I’ve bought music exclusively in digital form for a couple of years now).
Fidelity – Apple has a “lossless” format which preserves CD quality sound, but is proprietary to the iPod/iTunes universe. The Windows equivalent is “wav,” but those files are huge. Personally, I rip everything from CD to a reasonably compressed MP3 file (I forget the exact bit rate). I find that I listen to my iPod in less than ideal conditions anyway (commuter train, broadcast over an FM transmitter to my car radio, etc.), so it seems pointless to have high fidelity sound competing with ambient traffic noise. (This, by the way, is the implication of portable music that no one seems to be talking about).
Also: tecnically, vinyl is higher fidelity than digital, because the music itself is analog (vibrating guitar strings, piano strings, drum heads, etc.) and the analog recording actually lets the sound waves “move the needle.” Digital is approximating sound waves to some extent (although these days, it’s a very, very good approximation). Practically speaking, though, the analog (vinyl) device will degrade over time (hence, the pops & scratches), where the digital one will not (or at least not for orders of magnitude more time). That’s why people rave about sound quality in digital music. Also, perfect copies can be made of digital music – not so with analog.
Sorry for such a long comment. I probably should have made it a blog post of my own…
Hey, Brian, no problem on length, it’s all interesting stuff.
I’m just beginning to play around a little bit with ripping tracks – I still don’t foresee getting an iPod anytime soon, but I would like to condense my CD collection a little bit by grabbing the tracks I like from all those albums I bought for the sake of one or two songs. What would you consider a “reasonably compressed” file? (Not trying to start a debate, just a total newbie asking soliciting opinions…)
As for vinyl, I simply the miss the sound of records — not the fidelity of the recording, but the difference in, I don’t know, ambience. Some people claim not to hear it, but analog recordings some more… alive to my ear. And I actually like the occasional imperfection, so long as the record isn’t totally trashed, of course…