The Demise of disc formats

QuadraphonicQuad

Help Support QuadraphonicQuad:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.
https://forum.blu-ray.com/showthread.php?t=259675
This type of discussion has been going on for ~6 years over in blu-ray.com.

One issue that hasn't affected (AFAIK) music (+[concert] videos) much is censorship to keep the content politically correct, over the years, I heard about edited versions of some songs prepaired for certain regions of the World, but nothing about editing the song for everyone.


Kirk Bayne
Right. Which is why I'm glad I got the blu-ray sets of Community and 30 Rock, for instance. And I have many other friends who were concerned about the episodes being pulled. But...not enough to do anything about it.
 
The thing that always gets me about soccer is a guy will skillfully "dribble" the ball downfield, guiding it ever so carefully toward the goal and some other guy sneaks up behind and kicks the ball away. It gets really boring seeing that over and over.

:D

Doug
 
I'll also note that I just sold about 200 classical CDs in Princeton. I went through my collection and took a hard look at what I actually wanted, versus discs I purchased because I wanted to own a copy of the work. With streaming and megaboxes in classical, it's increasingly only worth owning something on disc for fidelity/surround or lack of streaming availability. Given that probably 60-70% of my listening is via streaming in my office, car, or even sometimes at home, it was an obvious choice.
You dumped them at a used store for pennies on the dollar? I've been selling mine on Discogs for $7.99 to $12.99 a disc on average. Slow sales but steady. I'm thrilled that physical media is not dead at all. It's just dead at full retail as a new item. When a disc goes out of print, demand creeps up pretty quickly from there.
 
Amazon just shut down their disc manufacturing facility, so uh, start sweating.
When did Amazon manufacture discs? Or do you mean their "on demand" disc burning feature? I know they were burning discs and listing them right in with the silver pressed versions. But I never heard that they made discs outright, that was the labels I thought?
 
You dumped them at a used store for pennies on the dollar? I've been selling mine on Discogs for $7.99 to $12.99 a disc on average. Slow sales but steady. I'm thrilled that physical media is not dead at all. It's just dead at full retail as a new item. When a disc goes out of print, demand creeps up pretty quickly from there.
I've been selling the rare ones where possible online. These weren't rare.
 
One weird thing, and I don't know how this all fits in, is the rise of Megaboxes for Classical Music. They go OOP quickly and often go for significant markup on the secondary market, for instance the https://www.amazon.com/George-Szell-Complete-Columbia-Collection/dp/B079VD2YRP , which I managed to get new for $160 and now sells for over $500. I guess this is mostly evidence of a niche though, not market broadening. And these boxes are also side effects of companies digitizing their tapes for streaming.
 
s-l500[1].jpg
 
Just Arrived from Japan
Sony Music Labels Inc,

How Blue Can You Get - Gary Moore
Blu Spec CD made 2021


Fantastic quality above 24bit
Utter Bliss.

NO.

It's just Japaneese snake oil.

It's a Redbook CD 16/44.1 So the format is exactly exactly the same as the CD from 40 years.

They say they are manufactured with Blu-ray presing machines, and the 'dots' in the optical disk are better readable. So, exactly exactly the same as a tradicional CD without reading errors.

Perhaps they woud produce a very good master to have good sound. And there would be many that would say it sounds 'better'. Yes, it would sound 'better' than another compressed or altered master.
 
A CD with >24Bit resolution ? Really?
No.

It's a marketing statement, not a technical statement. Someone "feels like they hear better than 24 bit resolution" when listening to literally 16 bit at 44.1k from this CD. The actual technical meaning of those words are not intended.

Or, extrapolating from their blathering about avoiding the corruption of sound from errors and imprecise error correction... Maybe someone thought the read errors from their CD player were limitations in the format and not it's age (or perhaps cheapness)? Probably willful dishonesty though.

This is the scenario where you might have to begrudgingly buy one of these if it turns out to be the best available copy. (And it may be.) Otherwise you avoid it in principle.
 
A CD with >24Bit resolution ? Really?

CD's always contain 16bit/44.1KHz content that does not require any kind of special decoder. An exception is HDCD but that requires a player that can decode it.

Blu Spec and others like Sony's K2HD releases involve processing (K2HD) and transferring (Blu Spec) that is done in a high resolution digital format, usually 24bit/100KHz, as opposed to Redbook. At higher resolutions, remixing and other digital processing tends to result in less deterioration of the sound due to roundoff errors and other digital artifacts. High resolution remixing also yields more natural ambience, decay, microdynamic finesse, etc, in the final mix. Any artificial digital enhancements to the phase, volume levels, freq response, etc, can benefit from being done in the high definition domain.

The HD mix is then downsampled back to redbook format for the CD master and you're back to 16bit/44.1KHZ

Technically they should sound better but I'd be far more concerned about the mastering for any given release.
 
CD's always contain 16bit/44.1KHz content that does not require any kind of special decoder. An exception is HDCD but that requires a player that can decode it.

The HD mix is then downsampled back to redbook format for the CD master and you're back to 16bit/44.1KHZ
Thus rendering the process entirely pointless (apart from a lame attempt to make more profit).
 
Last edited:
I think it's funny how everybody thought, when CD's appeared, it would finally end all the snake-oil claims about various vinyl records being superior to others and various sources being superior to others and the format wars would end and we could finally just get down to enjoying the music, knowing it was all going to be the best recordings you could get.

The bullsh*t is the worst it has ever been.

Doug
 
Maybe someone thought the read errors from their CD player were limitations in the format and not it's age (or perhaps cheapness)?

Speaking of read errors, I'd be curious whether or not these fancy BluSpec discs display the same arbitrary troubles reading in some computer CD drives as regular CDs all too often do.
 
Dumping your entire music collection in favor of streaming is short-sighted, IMO. I had my ISP go out just the other day for 5 hours. No music. No movies. No YouTube. No nothing. That's OK.
Yep, I would never depend on the internet as my only source of quality music.
Another thing that really pisses me off is my Xfinity Cable/DVR box. I know it's still got it's own harddrive in it, I can hear it wurring away when quiet. But a few times when my internet connection was down, I couldn't view anything I had recorded either. :mad: When I had my old DishNet box up north I could view recorded shows whether I had a satilite connection or not. (That was 11 years ago, don't know if the same is true today?)
 
One weird thing, and I don't know how this all fits in, is the rise of Megaboxes for Classical Music. They go OOP quickly and often go for significant markup on the secondary market, for instance the https://www.amazon.com/George-Szell-Complete-Columbia-Collection/dp/B079VD2YRP , which I managed to get new for $160 and now sells for over $500. I guess this is mostly evidence of a niche though, not market broadening. And these boxes are also side effects of companies digitizing their tapes for streaming.
It seems like the record companies are underestimating demand and are pressing too few copies, afraid of being stuck with many copies in the warehouse. The Bruno Walter equivalent of the George Szell box is still in print and priced as it was on the first day.

As more stereo recordings are going PD in Europe, this is their last chance to cash in on many of these recordings.
 
Back
Top