If you read the news that ITunes has surpassed Wal-Mart as the top music retailer in the U.S., you might think that the bits-on-plastic mode of music distribution was on its way out, but even with the price of petroleum going up and bandwidth coming down, those little plastic discs still offer some advantages. For one thing, there is the sentimental attachment to and security of owning a physical artifact instead of just rearranging some magnetic domains in return for your $10 or so. Microsoft reinforced this notion when it announced it would discontinue supporting retrieval of license keys for music previously purchased from MSN Music. Also, it is so much more satisfying to give or receive a gift when an actual object changes hands instead of an email being sent and received. And if you are a musician with a new album you want someone to listen to, they are more likely to do so if they have a jewel case with some nice artwork on their desk instead of some bits on a hard drive.
In addition, there are a lot more bits on their way. Music has long been recorded and mixed at 96/24 LPCM (each second taking 96 k samples of 24 bits each, encoded with a lossless Linear Pulse Code Modulation) or in analog format, using 30 inch per second tape. However, producing a CD meant downsampling to 44.1 kHz and 16 bits, resulting in the loss of information. Digital downloads in mp3 or AAC went through compression which discarded even more information. While a new generation of consumers have grown up who have only heard digital music, musicians such as Neil Young have been quite vocal about the decline in quality. Indeed when T-Bone Burnett used a Jimmy Reed song for Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood he dug up the original analog tapes rather than use the commercially available CD.
While the CD has been frozen in time since the 1980s, its cousin the DVD has evolved to contain a number of more advanced, and larger formats. Most DVD players can play audio at 96/24. This was originally intended for use in movie soundtracks, but some albums such as Neil Young's Greatest Hits and John Mellencamp's forthcoming Life, Death, Love and Freedom use this feature to deliver a static video with a high resolution stereo soundtrack, effectively turning the home DVD player into a high-res CD player. In addition, the Mellencamp album will come with computer-ready WAV, mp3, and AAC files on the disc. All of this takes a lot of space, but that's not a problem with DVDs. Then there is Neil Young's new archive project which will fill ten Blu-ray discs with music, videos, and scanned documents. That would take close to ten hours to download unless you were my neighbor with four Internet connections. Of course he is the wave of the future and soon these downloads will happen in no time. My prediction is that we will still have bits on plastic, but the plastic will just contain a digital ID that will allow the user to download the content, perhaps caching it on a local hard drive. The consumer will insert the disc in the slot and press Play, unaware of precisely where the bits are coming from or where they are stored.
Hmm, interesting view on the matter. I think you might be right in regards to the "bits of plastic" merely holding the digital ids. I think we're still a good few years away from the start of that, though.
Posted by: blu ray dvd player | 28 August 2008 at 11:37 PM