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Looper's Delight
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Mark wrote: >"My point is that the average person can't tell an mp3 from a cd from a record from a cassette. Record companies just want control of what ever you listen to. Mark<" I agree, and that is so sad! (The part about the non-discerning public unable to tell the difference.) I do not do mp3's at all because the sound quality is generally quite bad. They say that i-tunes are better, but I haven't tried that yet. While I find overall that LPs played on a good turntable generally sound better than CDs, there are some very good sounding CDs and I have no problem eating macaroni and cheese casseroles, or rice and beans so that I can budget to buy them. (I've invented some great recipes for budget meals if anyone is interested.) I have been purchasing more and more LPs lately, thanks to the greater offerings of re-issues, etc. Regarding the copying of digital music, I have heard examples of stuff done in computers, and from my limited experience, they tend to have an even higher rate of digital glitch problems than commercially available CDs. To get around the music industry's barriers to copying CDs, so long as a digital recorder has decent A/D converters and a good signal path within it, one can make an analogue to digital copy of a CD that sounds pretty darned close, by taking the output signals of a CD player and going into the line inputs of a decent CD recorder. The HHB Burn-It works very well in this regard. This is just my opinion here and I realize that there are equally valid contrary opinions, but I have the greatest success in the recording of my own music (much of it loop-based, with DL4 and Headrush) by going to analogue tape first (Tascam 122 MkIII and 424 MkIII) and then transferring it to CD via the HHB recorder so that it can be distributed in CD format. This works well when listening on a decent CD player, like Arcam, Rega, NAD, etc.). I agree with Steve Lake of ECM records on this point: an analog recording mastered to LP sounds better and altogether quite different in character than a digital recording mastered to LP, as was typically done in the 1980s with the earliest of digital recordings. What that tells me is that a strong determining factor of the character of a recording is how it originally was recorded in a studio. Of course, MP3's seem to screw it up, something along the lines of multiple generation cassette copies of the past. Perhaps the greatest disservice the music industry has done to the listener is to compress everything in the mastering process so much to get that boring, soul-less "wall of sound" with everything crammed in at +0 db that one hears in so much of the crappy rock music of today. In other words, I complain about the lack of dynamic range in much of today's commercial music. So as far as I'm concerned, there are lots of dimensions to this question of the decline of the music industry. Cheers, Michael