iPods and CDs and cassettes and LPs...

[LC]

Since everybody here loves music, I had a few questions:

1) How many of you are into iPods/MP3s?

2) Does anybody listen to cassette tapes anymore? I'm figuring the cassette is more of a dinosaur than the LP.

3) How many of you who grew up in the LP era are holding onto 'em? And if so, do you ever listen to 'em?

Anyway, just curious.... (Especially curious to see if Eric weighs in on this one.)

[LC]

Actually, I should answer my own questions...

1) I'm a little late getting into iPods/MP3s. It's kind of ironic, considering where I was in 1984 (I was all over CDs, working as launch editor of a then-new magazine about CD players and CDs).

2) Nope. Haven't put on a cassette in years. Most of the ones I had were mixes I made for myself, and they're beat.

3) I'm holding onto my LPs, but I never listen to them. I don't even have a turntable set up, although I've thought about it.

In fact, when I ran down to the basement last week to sniff around (literally) for my Raspberries debut album so I could reply to another thread here, it was a real nostalgia blitz.

Amid my 600 or so LPs, I was able to find my original five Raspberries albums (including Best Of, plus two extra copies of the first one). Right there with them were all three Fotomaker LPs and one Euclid Beach Band LP. They were in my "A" box, with all my old Beatles, solo Beatles, Billy Joel, and ELO albums. (I hadn't yet become obsessed with the Beach Boys in the 1970s-early 1980s). Anyway, I was explaining LPs to my 6-year-old daughter, and she wanted to feel the vinyl! I thought that was kind of cute....

The last LP I remember buying: John Lennon & Yoko Ono: Double Fantasy.

--LC

[The Kiwi Connection]

kia ora LC. I still have all the LP's i ever bought, and up until a coulpe of years ago , before I could burn CD's I could only play tapes in my car.As for listening to my LP's it's the only way I can listen to EC or Raspberries.The only EC CD's I have are a greatest hits compilation and Winter Dreams.The rest just aren't available here in New Zealand. But by pulling out my LP's it makes me feel like a teenager again, only now it's my kids telling me to "Turn that noise down" instead of my parents. Oh well such is life.

[darlene]

I'm definitely into the mp3s Bernie features here, but I don't have an IPOD yet.

Haven't played a cassette for years. I have some precious ones of local bands and somewhere even an Eric interview he did on the radio eons ago.

We *do* have a lot of LPS and listen to them every now and again. There's so much great music in the world that it would be impossible to listen to everything we love, even just counting classical!

--Darlene

[stringer]

I liked the mp3 player idea, so my wife got me one for christmas. Great, but a problem arose. The screen text on those things are not for adult eyes. I can bearly read it, but I guess having large text would defeat the purpose of it being small, and portable.

Great unit though.

I haven't used a cassette since I don't know how long.

I do save my favorite lp's though. I have to admit though, I don't play those either.

My EC and Raspberries albums aren't going anywhere!

[TheScentLady]

1) How many of you are into iPods/MP3s?

I'm into mp3's when I'm doing tedious work on the computer.

2) Does anybody listen to cassette tapes anymore?

I listen to them when I want to hear some stuff that was recorded a long time ago (e.g. a radio blooper tape; Ron Lundy's (a NYC radio legend) last show)

3) How many of you who grew up in the LP era are holding onto 'em? And if so, do you ever listen to 'em?

I absolutely listen to them. Today I was listening to the Hooters' "Nervous Night." Over the weekend I pulled out the Beach Boys' "Endless Summer" & "Spirit of America." (I haven't played them in a few years so they sounded ESPECIALLY good!) I also still have my 45's & listen to them when I need to hear a particular song that I can't get out of my head. (Right now I'm jonesing to hear "Never Tell An Angel When Your Heart's on Fire.")

[JohnO]

(1) I'm not into IPODs or MP3s, although I do have a diskman and portable DVD player that will play MP3s.

(2) I still have tons of cassettes, but don't play them anymore. If I have a rare one that I don't have on vinyl or CD, I burn it on CD-R.

(3) I still have most of my old LPs, but don't listen much to them. As in the case of my cassettes, I've burned a lot of them onto CD-R to preserve the music. Also, I'll occasionally sell an old LP or two if the price is right.

[Julie]

1) Currently looking for an iPod as we've decided this is the coming thing

2) Have oodles of cassettes. Listened to one just a couple of days ago, but generally, they are just gathering dust.

Incidentally, my brother installed a Craig AM/FM Stereo tape deck into my Camaro back in 1976. People thought he was nuts to put that thing in the car! "Why don't you just get an 8-track??" My bro laughed them off and told them that 8 tracks were illogical!

3) I have all of my albums and we hooked up a Curtis Mathis turntable to our home entertainment center (although, I have yet to put an LP on for a spin!) When hubby went to prison, he put all of his stereo stuff in storage and it's in really good shape!

--Julie

[JohnO]

One thing available nowadays that I love, that's made it very easy to burn CD-Rs from LPs, is turntables with built-in preamps (I got a Sony turntable like this about 4 years ago). You can go directly from the turntable to the CD burner without messing around with a power amp or receiver, etc. - and monitor your recording via headphones.

[MAM]

1. Considering an ipod, have bunches of mp3s

2. have bunches & bunches of cassettes and still listen to them as most of them are commercially unavailable.

3. I had thousands of lp's. Kept all of the "A" items, though I rarely play them, re-bought most of them on CD. Sold the rest in a garage sale (and made enough to pay my real estate taxes!)

[Margaret]

We just got our iPod in December and I love it! I have downloaded pretty much my whole music library as well as plenty of songs from iTunes. It sounds great (to me anyway) when used with the Bose sound dock.

I no longer have any cassettes, and although I saved my favorite LPs, I don't have a working turntable.

[Craig Benfer]

1. I got into mp3's very early on. I bought one of the first available mp3 cd players. I started a project a several years ago to compile a collection of mp3 disc of the 70's. (a disc for each year) Each disc contains about 150-200 songs. So for the whole decade I have approx. 2000 songs. I download music from a site called allTunes. It is much cheaper than Itunes or Napster. You pay 2 cents per MB.

2. Can't remember the last cassette I listed to. I still have them but have seriously thought about throwing them away.

3. I still have quite a few LP's and a turntable that I purchased 5 years ago. Until I own everything on CD or convert to CD I will keep the turntable.

[John Shaft]

1. I haven't got into the iPod/MP3 player thing yet (I'm waititng to hit the 1,000,000 mark on this site). However, I have quite a few MP3s here on the computer and when I get enough of them in a certain genre (R&B, Rock, etc) then I make a mix CD of the tunes to play in the house. I do have, though, a "flash drive" which is a little portable device about the size of a cigarette lighter and I load a bunch of MP3s onto that and listen to them at work.

2. I am a major cassette fiend and I stil have a cassette player in my car. There's nothing I love more than going into a used record store and checking out all the cassettes they have for a dollar...

Shortly after I got my car I was planning on putting a CD player in it. However, thru the place I work at (Best Buy) I was able to get an XM Radio system for FREE (this was when XM first came out). So, I figured, between XM and my collection of mix tapes I should have PLENTY to listen to. Besides, a CD player in the car would give a thief one more reason to break into my car...

3. As far as vinyl goes, YES! I love vinyl and after I scope out the cheap cassettes I check out the vinyl bins to see what goodies I can find. A while back I found an autographed copy of EC's "Change Of Heart" and a copy of the first Fotomaker album signed by Wally. The best part was that I only paid a dollar each for them!

One of the things I enjoy about shopping for vinyl nowadays is that the people working at the store usually have no idea of what they have so you can get lots of gems for very little cash.

I still play my vinyl all the time and some of them (depending on the quality) I transfer over to CD (especially when the titles don't exist on CD).

[Poor4Life]

I don't have an iPod, and am not even interested in getting one. I've never even owned a walkman, just couldn't stand listening to music through headphones constantly.

Cassetes and albums? Yes, I have probably have close to 500+ albums, 200+ cassettes, and probably around 300 singles. Before CD's I had probably double that, but have been replacing them through the years. I only listen to them if I'm burning a song off of them onto a CD.

Jeff

[pierson]

i have an iPOD (thanks Tommy Allen) but I have yet to start using it... once i learn how to program it, i'll be addicted...

i have a gazillion CDs

3000 vinyl LPs

Hundreds of cut-tapes

i use everything for my radio show-- right now the easiest way for me to use stuff is burn the vinyl & tapes to CD and use the CD--- Some vinyl sounds better than the CD equivalent... (i.e. Smiths)

Cut-tapes, like cut-CDs are how i prefer to listen to music while driving a car...

As far as what's best as an overall item to store music, I would say it's vinyl mainly because it's very hard to misplace/lose and the sound quality holds up better if you care for it... space constraint is its only drawback...

plus it's very easy to find lots of stuff for dirt cheap in the dollar bins...

most people who store music on their hardrives without backing it up somewhere else, will eventually lose it when their hard drive dies...

[mamacote]

...........not so, vinyl-boy!

[FloridaPilot]

I still love analog tape. The fact is, a quality analog tape machine, properly calibrated, sounds much better than CD. Most anyone who has spent time in the studio can tell you of the sound quality lost when dubbing down to CD from the analog 2-track master.

Without getting too much into technical detail, CD is a mid-fi product, was conceived to be a mid-fi product, but was marketed as the greatest thing since the Stradivarius so electronics manufacturers and record companies could make money. In a nutshell, while CD does reproduce sound up to the limit of human hearing (20,000 cycles per second), the fact is that sounds above the limit of human hearing affect the tonal characteristics of audible sounds.

These "Harmonics" are lost on CD recordings due to the brick-wall 20kHz limit of CD Digital. This means that all sounds at the 20KHz upper limit of CD are reproduced as sine waves, not as their original waveform. This is why CD sounds cold, harsh, and lacks space, dimension, and vibrance.

The second problem with CD is the resolution is low compared to what the human ear can perceive. Each "Sample" of CD audio (which is analogous to a frame of film or video) is only 16 bits, yielding 65,536 discrete values. This is actually rather low. Think of a digital picture print from 5 years ago that looks "pixellated" if you look carefully. In its day, you might have been impressed with the quality. But compare it to a digital print from today's hi-res photo printers from a 6 megapixel camera, and the difference is staggering. Same thing with CD. The difference is, in the case of CD, the old technology capable of higher resolution than the new.

The exception is SACD, which is 24-bit resolution, but there is hardly any source material recorded that high. Too much of the music of the last 20 years was recorded at least partially on 16-bit digital equipment.

Worse yet, many of today's recording, mixing, and mastering engineers have cowpatties for ears. If the source material sounds lousy, the delivery format is only as good as the original.

As for mp3 and other compressed digital audio formats, let me first say that the term "compressed" is shameful spin doctoring in itself. It is really "Reduced."

Mp3 at its highest resolution (320kbps) is about 25% of the bit-rate (audio information, or level of detail in the sound) as CD audio, which is only so-so to start with. So best case with mp3 you have 25% of so-so.

128kbps mp3, which is so often marketed as CD-quality or near-CD-quality, isn't even close. It sounds absolutely awful. Not only is the detail lost and the trademark graininess of compressed digital present, but there are audible artifacts introduced all over the place.

AAC/MP4 is a newer codec with a better algorithm, but still is notably audibly inferior to CD.

I can't help but think that if the music industry educated its customers, instead of misinforming them, they might sell more CDs. I would much rather pay for the CD than have the crappy digital download for free. I never download music. Of course, releasing quality music on a widespread basis might help too!

Dolby Digital (AC-3) used on DVD's is pretty poor, too. All 5.1 channels are squeezed into a bit rate about 25% of that of a 2-channel CD. The digital sound of Laserdisc (uncompressed CD-spec audio) was much better, even though the channel separation was not as good.

To answer the question, I still use cassettes. A good tape formulation properly recorded on a good deck (like my Nakamichi), played on a good deck, will sound far better than any current digital music file format. And, for portable use, I have never heard a headphone amplifier in any portable music device nearly as good as that in my Sony WM-D6C portable cassette player.

I still have records. But it is very,very expensive to get records to sound like they are capable. You need an exotic turntable, tonearm, cartridge, and phono preamp. Even then there are few records mastered and pressed to audiophile standards. So, I have a middle-of-the road turntable.

I listen to CD, and I make the best out of a so-so format by using an outboard D/A converter from Krell. The D/A is what converts the numbers on a CD to audio. The D/A's in almost all CD players are junk, and an audiophile outboard unit makes a very noticeable difference. Most folks I have A/B'ed for with no critical listening experience can hear a definite difference.

I do actually own an iPod. While I despise compressed digital music, all iPod models except the shuffle are capable of using Apple's lossless compression. The file is identical to the CD, but takes up several times the space of a compressed file. In all honesty, 320kbps AAC does not sound bad, either.

The current iPod models have much better headphone output circuitry than most anything else on the market, including most portable CD players from the last 15 years. (surprisingly, the Shuffle is the best of all the iPods in this regard!) If you use Apple Lossless, or at worst 320kbps AAC, and you use a quality pair of portable headphones, the ipods are quite good for portable 16-bit digital sound.

In my opinion, the two best *portable* headsets available by far are the Koss PortaPro and Sennheiser PX100. If you like loads of bass, the Koss is for you. The bottom end is bombastic. The mids are smooth, and the highs are crisp but never harsh. The PX100's have a very good bass response- not as much bass as the PortaPro, but more accurate. The PX100's are a bit brighter with more high end, but on rock and pop music I find the highs to be a bit overbearding and subject to sibilance. Either set will make a HUGE improvement in sound to any portable music player.

OK, I'm done ranting, but I can't stand the dumbing down of the consumer and force-feeding of garbage that takes place in the music industry- from the music itself to the reproduction thereof.

[pierson]

back-up boi...

w/out vinyl it's a pain in the arse to get artful dodger, stories, april wine, pagliaro, dirty looks, blue, tin tin, tommy jitro, hawks, joey wilson, interview etc in premium shape (i.e. not p2p damaged)... i've got some 'mamacote' files from the hard drive... i had to go back to the vinyl...

[mamacote]

......ahhhhhh, that perfect world......where is it again?

[pierson]

......ahhhhhh, that perfect world......where is it again?

i gots me my computer, a cute lil' iPOD, burning software, itunes/crap tunes, bit tornet/tornado friends, record stores that sell loads of vinyl dirt cheap, CD burner that burns cassettes & vinyl very easily, a great turntable that i use regularly as much as my CD player... the perfect world is here... u need to make sure u have every possible format at your fingertips... i just wish i had my friends' reel-to-reel players... they sound amazing...

[mymooladi]

I have a Sony Music Box. It can store more music than I'll ever need. I use it for exercising, on plane rides, when I can't sleep and when I need to relax.

I have some cassettes and a few 8-tracks and some vinal but confess, I just use my CD's.

June

[pierson]

i still listen to too much music that's not readily available on CD... and there's a lot i'll never slap down more than a buck for... so vinyl is still very vital to me... & very user friendly, still... and the best pressings still sound amazing-- especially the Raspberries stuff...