> The industry kept moving to better and better formats
These formats were never made available outside "the industry". I've seen almost no artist (outside of Bandcamp which does it by default/for free) providing lossless downloads, let alone HQ tracks or 3+ channel tracks on normal albums. Reznor is the only one who comes to mind (he released multitracks and 24b/96KHz of Ghosts I-IV in the Deluxe editions)
Re:Kodak files for bankruptcy
by BHSPitMonkey on Thursday January 19, 2012 @12:11PM
(#3485393)
I think they weren't strictly talking about digital formats. From vinyl to cassette to CD to 128kbps MP3 isn't a strictly increasing curve in terms of quality, though one could argue that in terms of convenience the formats did improve.
Re:Kodak files for bankruptcy
by CrazedGeek on Thursday January 19, 2012 @04:16PM
(#3486757)
Off the top of my head, Peter Gabriel, The Beatles, OK Go, and Jonathan Coulton have all released lossless digital files before (and still do). Peter Gabriel and OK Go use Apple Lossless, JoCo uses FLAC, and The Beatles use FLAC (although not via download -- their USB Box Set was a flash drive and had 24/44.1 FLACs).
(Oh, and Reznor's released other lossless albums too -- The Slip [24/96] and the NINJA 2009 Tour Sampler.)
Re:Kodak files for bankruptcy
by mixmastamyk on Thursday January 19, 2012 @06:21PM
(#3487420)
Super Audio CD and DVD Audio were both introduced around the turn of the century.
Exactly what I was thinking of, and they've been DOA. Before that DAC was fairly widely available, but there wasn't much content available on them and were usually used as a studio medium.
He might be referring to
tape->phono->cd-!->mp3 (originally not well received)
\-> mp3 if called iPodTo say the mp3 was not well received before the iPod is goofy. You remember Napster right?!
Before that- in the '80s- it failed. We had "perfect" reproduction. Who was going to settle for less than that? Oh, I see, people who don't really care about perfect reproduction and want to listen to 1200 songs at the gym.
But to answer your question, I never used Napster (but I know it was popular).
Perhaps worse is better.
Which is exactly the same phenomenon that occurred with music. The industry kept moving to better and better formats, only to be confounded that people didn't mind lower quality lossy compressed mp3s with swishy sounding hi-hats.