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No App Store For Microsoft's Zune HD
Xerfas writes 'Microsoft's Zune HD, set to go on sale Tuesday, will not feature an open application store like its competitor the iPod Touch. It will come with some unique features, though, like an HD radio tuner, and with software that has been well-received by users. Those capabilities will determine whether the ZuneHD sells well — and whether Microsoft decides to keep selling its own music player, said Matt Rosoff, an analyst at Directions on Microsoft.' The Zune marketing manager was quoted in the Seattle Times on whether the Zune would open up for 3rd-party apps, and he gave a response of such mind-numbing PR-speak that John Gruber of Daring Fireball was moved to provide this English translation: "No, because our mobile strategy is a convoluted mess."
"Microsoft's Zune HD, set to go on sale Tuesday, will not feature a tightly controlled by control freaks with degrees in control freakery application store like its competitor the iPod Touch."
Fixed.
I have a cheap sansa. It plays mp3/ogg/flac. It plays little xvid videos and plays and records FM.
What more do I need?
Are these damn players becoming like cell phones? Do app stores matter? Makes no sense to me.
This is a major oversight if Microsoft isn't going to allow 3rd party apps. Maybe when they get around to supporting it, you'll be able to install apps without using an iTunes-style interface. Directly from app's website perhaps?
Arguing with an engineer is like wrestling a pig in the mud. After a while, you realize the engineer enjoys it.
Sure a dedicated app store is a great way to funnel your customers to your door. But that's like saying you only have one store available to you, and you have to pay in Stokessd-town dollars. I'm sure you would have less total customers than if the unit was open to applications from anywhere, although you'll most likely collect more stokessd-town dollars.
If my quick read of the article (what there is of it), there "does not have plans for an iPhone-like app platform", but that doesn't meant that apps cannot be run on the device. Much like the jailbroken iPhone app market, there could be a zune app market independent of microsoft's non-existent store. The unit has too much potential not to have apps developed for it. It's just a matter of who and how many.
Microsoft has done a very consistent job of managing the Zune. That management got it where it is today, and I see this revelation as being consistent with all the previous management decisions.
Sheldon
Can a third party develop apps on their own, can they be installed easily etc?
Don't try to find any meaning to "HD audio". It's pure Buzzword Bullshit. Me hates.
If they could only create a decent music storage device with multiple inputs/outputs that allowed you to record off a digital or analog signal or upload from your computer, put it on very stable media, and had great battery life...
Oh yeah, they did-the minidisc. Of course, Sony screwed that pooch. Let's do that again with an SD capable player and quit fiddling with video and all that other gimmicky crap. If MS could bring that to the table I'd buy one in a heartbeat. Until then I'll stick with my outdated antiquated MD player.
Here's an interesting article regarding the hype surrounding Zune HD (which isn't actually HD to begin with).
In Microsoft's world, HD means 480x272. HD Radio? It stands for Hybrid Digital, not High Definition and works only in US.
It's ironic that the "HD" in "HD radio" stands for high definition, when current digital, especially with lossy comression, has a LOWER definition than the old analog vinyl did.
A few things:
1) It's a good thing the HD in HD Radio doesn't stand for "High Definition" then. It's "Hybrid Digital".
2) HD Radio is higher fidelity than FM, and that's what it's being compared to. ("Definition" doesn't really work with audio, anyway)
3) Vinyl may have a higher theoretical accuracy, but CDs have a far lower noise floor, which in practice makes them far more accurate.
I guess that's why they changed it from "High Fidelity" to "High Definition, because at today's low sampling rates and especially lossy compression, the fidelity just isn't there.
Again, they didn't change it. And at the recording studio, they're using higher sampling rates and less compression than ever. The fact that the music you buy from iTunes is more compressed (And the fact that CDs in the "Loudness War" are clipped) is irrelevant.
Yeah. All those pops and scratches and distortion really make you believe being in a live performance.
Anyway, there are only a bunch of artists who sound good live making your rambling a moot point.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
Let's see, it's set to go on sale just about now. So how exactly has the software "been well-received by users"???
Why is his comment on the matter even being taken seriously? Regardless of what Brian said, Gruber's level of bias in this matter renders him unfit for citation.
Viable Slashdot alternatives: https://pipedot.org/ and http://soylentnews.org/
It has poor quality and the user experience when the signal fades is awful.
But you are completely insane about the vinyl thing. It's in your head.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
You know, I know this is slashdot and all, but this is a VERY biased article.
They don't have an open app store yet because they want all the games to be free, and developed in house, which isn't as bad as this summary makes it sound.
They aren't merging with windows mobile's store because they want to make extra sure the Zune is perfect, and I absolutely don't blame them.
I'm pretty annoyed that whoever wrote this summary was this biased, the Zune HD looks awesome and its really unfair to try to make it look bad on a site that gets 2 million hits a day. If it ends up being bad, that's one thing, but give it a freakin chance.
-Taylor
Worldwide Military budgets: $2100 billion. Worldwide Space Exploration budgets: $38 billion. Really, world? Really?
HD Radio stands for Hybrid-Definition. It's misleading marketing bullshit.
The guy who initially demoed Zune couple of months ago was scrolling the list of songs on the device and said (in reference to a 480-by-272 display) "Look at the gorgeous screen. You can really see the HD." I don't think people at Microsoft really understand the meaning of High Definition or lying through their teeth in their marketing materials.
Are these damn players becoming like cell phones? Do app stores matter? Makes no sense to me.
In the case of the iPod Touch, it's become a highly popular gaming platform, not to mention having things like iCal, wifi, safari bundled, etc etc. It's either filled a void by providing a hybrid PDA+music player+gaming device, or created that void and told people that they need this. Imho it's a bit of both.
Reply to That ||
... you realize this article is NEGATIVE towards Microsoft... right?
Have you ever heard a CD that you would confuse with a live performance?
No. Thankfully I can play at less than ~100dBA.
I have heard LPs played on high end equipment that you would confuse with a live performance.
No, I would not. It does not have the ambience of a stadium and the feeling of over 1000 people around me.
I am so sick and tired of "LP is analog therefore better" bullshit that I strongly recommend you to calculate LP's channel capacity (according to Shannon's nice theorem). You will be surprised how much you have to fiddle with the numbers before you get higher than 1.4Mbit/s (stereo).
HD stand for HIGH DISTORTION
Lets not also forget that HD is not a widely used system. Its closed source and only used in North America. In Europe DAB is the standard, so good luck using or selling the zune outside the states.
Choose your allies carefully, it is highly unlikely you will be held accountable for the actions of your enemies
That's true, but what if they already have tried enticing 3rd party developers with a sales pitch for some kind of store and got so little interest they decided to can the whole thing?
The reason I bring this up is that, as a mac/linux guy, I had an interesting experience this morning: I had to burn a disc image using windows vista. I discovered to my dismay that Vista doesn't contain this ability natively, whereas macs do and just about every linux distribution does. The question is why wouldn't MS take the time to write some software to do that natively? My only thought was that maybe it was because they've got something 90% of the market share for OSes, they don't need to write their own apps because there's a million different disc burning utilities just a mouse-click and an internet connection. Maybe apple with about 10% usage share just couldn't attract the developers for every little thing they considered important and turned to writing their own software. Now flip this around for the portable media players, Apple machines are ubiquitous and can afford to let others write software for them whereas Microsoft can't find the developers willing to do it and has to write their own. You see that with games on linux too, a lot of the "linux games" seem to be written by linux users themselves and not companies trying to sell their products.
Gentlemen! You can't fight in here, this is the war room!
after Apple dropped the price on the iPod touch. Regardless of how good the new Zune is, the point is that it has a LOOOONG way to go before it catches up and pricing yourself about the same as your already well-established competitor is pretty much a recipe for failure.
Monstar L
What happened to the day when microsoft made a million useless machines usefull again... now their just making a million useless machines
Zune does have a 'store'. There is the Zune Marketplace, around longer than the iphone app store. You can download games to your Zune (very limited) from the Marketplace, isn't that essentially what the iPhone app store does? The Zune isn't the iPhone or the iTouch (comes close), it is a DRM heavy Microsoft portable media player with the ability to run certain apps and share things with other Zune owners. If you have the cash and easy wifi access, then you are set on the media front. The Zune isn't for the pirate with a billion mp3's on their system as the Windows software is tailored to help you download from the Marketplace. The Zune is for listening to music, podcasts, watching videos and movies, being part of a Zune community.
An app store doesn't even make sense with the Zune fees. You can buy songs piecemeal but that would be idiotic when you can get all-you-can-eat plans. And if the smartest thing to do on the zune is pay for all-you-can-eat, why would somebody then pay extra for little games and apps?
The HD radio thing is not new, it's been in the Zune since the first incarnation. The newest feature would have to be it's ability to download tracks (from the Marketplace) that you hear and tag while listening to the radio.
There is an SDK for developing apps, if you are into that kind of stuff.
They got rid "squirting" feature which Balmar was so proud of.
First, Microsoft has removed the "squirting" feature, which let you send songs directly from one Zune to another. This feature was supposed to be a big selling point of the first Zune but was crippled by unreasonable rights restrictions that let you play songs only three times or within three days (whichever came first). Microsoft and content owners gradually loosened those restrictions, but the feature never made much difference--mainly because there were so few Zune users out there to exchange songs with. (The "first man with a telephone" problem.) Now it's gone
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13526_3-10352637-27.html
You make entierly untrue assumptions about HD radio, and unfair comparisons.
HD radio requires a fraction of the power of analog.
HD radio requires a fraction of the bandwidth of analog.
HD radio survives with 0% distortion over the majority of its receivable range.
HD radio is capable of CD-quality sound.
HD radio is capable of >2-channel encoding.
Similarly, your LP-vs-CD, while bordering on religious, is unfounded. Though LPs have a higher top frequency than standard CDs on their first play, both are well above human hearing.
The long-and-short is that the quality of playback on high-end equipment, when considered in light of the human ear, will be far more dependant on the mastering than on CD-vs-LP. And at that level we are usually discussing SACD and DVD-A... welcome to the 21st century.
And yes, I've heard CDs sound like live; and I've heard a number of SACDs that do. I suspect that you havent either because of a disparity in the mastering, a disparity in the playback equipment, or listener bias.
2) HD Radio is higher fidelity than FM, and that's what it's being compared to. ("Definition" doesn't really work with audio, anyway)
Partially True. A station has a set amount of data it can transfer. If a station splits its signal over too many channels (like High-Def's sub-channels), you can get down to a quality that is indeed worse than FM.
Arguing with an engineer is like wrestling a pig in the mud. After a while, you realize the engineer enjoys it.
Why do they only sell the Zune it in the US ? If they don't have the complexity of an application store, it should be relatively easy.
You have to wonder if Microsoft really wants to sell Zunes... As an iPod user, I would welcome a stronger competition.
Please Microsoft, keep Apple at work, else they will become another lazy monopolist !
*Zune HD AV Dock and an HDTV (all sold separately) are required to view video at HD resolution. Supported 720p HD video files play on the player, downscaled to fit the screen at 480 x 272 â" not HD resolution. Zune Pass subscription required; streaming via wi-fi available in U.S. only. HD Radioâ is a proprietary trademark of iBiquity Digital Corp. Learn more about HD Radio here.
So does that mean I need a "zune pass" to play video on my zune? What the hell is a zune pass anyway? Ok, so I look it up, but now why do I need it again?
...is how this time, M$ decided to leave behind their prior Zune models with any new features in the update. Discontinuing them should have been the sign. As a 18-month owner of a Zune80, I'm seriously disappointed. The only new features we legacy Zune (18months is legacy now?) users get are for the desktop app, which personally I only use to manage my device, and nothing more. Since I have it running on a Windows Media Center PC, why do I need yet another app that does pretty much the same thing, especially from the same vendor. Even more, in a time of recession, where I don't want to drop another couple hundred for a replacement device that's hardly showing its age or need for replacement, why would I possibly want to replace it?
If you read the Zune forums, its full of device feature requests for simple things...unicode support, crossfade, better playlist management, better integration with Windows apps (there is currently none for WMP or WMC). All of these pretty much since Gen-1 of the device, and all have been disregarded since the Zune marketing team felt it necessary to take this route instead.
Its simply a sad example of greed overtaking common sense at the expense of a bit more hard work. A philosophical example of modern capitalism and American excess too?
Anyone wanna buy a Gen-2 Zune80 is Good condition? I'll use the $ to buy a MiniSD for my cellphone to consolidate my gadgets instead.
From the HD Digital Radio FAQ
Q : WHAT DOES THE HD IN HD RADIO MEAN?
A: The 'HD' in 'HD Radio' is part of iBiquity Digital's brand name for its digital AM and FM radio technology. It does not mean either hybrid digital or high definition, it is simply the branding language for this new technology.
They are simply riding the wave of video High Definition hype nothing more.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
Obviously we're moving more and more towards convergence devices which will handle many or all of the mobile technology needs of people. But we're not at that point fully yet.
Knowing this establishing yourself as a solid contender in one venue (music/media playback) isn't a bad thing. Then put together future offerings once others have dangled around in the market and figured out what people really do and don't want.
I could see MS coming out with a version of Windows Mobile that is a "everything under one roof" approach, but probably in another year or so. Take the interface of the Zune's and put it with the backside of Windows Mobile. Forcing a convergence of these two ahead of time would probably only cause a bad product to be made. Also waiting until the Windows 7 release machine hits full force, then release a new mobile OS and tie it all together with Xbox becoming a full on media center and you have something Apple wouldn't.
I'm a fiscal conservative, it's a pity we don't have a political party anymore
Please read the gave a response link.
No amount of astroturf can cure the ridiculousification of messages in TFA.
-- I was raised on the command line, bitch
It will come with some unique features, though, like an HD radio tuner
Does "unique" mean "just like the iPod Nano"?
(The Nano's ability to show artist and song names, and its "iTunes Tagging" features, shared with some FM radio iPod docks, also use HD radio. Apple just doesn't, for whatever reason, put "HD radio" in giant flaming letters in its advertising.)
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
Have you ever heard a CD that you would confuse with a live performance?
Are you *really* serious? I don't buy that at all. You must not have had a very good CD player or summin. I have a *large* collection of LP's, 45's, and CD's, and most of my library I listen to is on my iPod now. I've spent enormous amounts of time comparing the AAC version of what I've recorded to the original. Can't tell a difference.
What I have found is that CD's tend to unmask the weakness of the original recording, making it a little less pleasurable to listen to. An extreme example is Journey "Lovin' Touchin' Squeezin". If you listen to it on a cheap radio over FM it's not too bad. Listen to it on LP it sounds better. Listen to it on a CD with high-end equipment (I have Mackie studio monitors) and it sounds absolutely friggin horrible. It's not the mastering of the CD or the quality of the A/D conversion, it's the original recording. Now go and listen to James Taylor "Everyday" - the remastered version - downloaded from iTunes. That's probably some of the best quality audio you'll ever hear.
Oh, and IAASE (I am a studio engineer)
I don't know how else to put it. It seems like Microsoft is coming straight out the gate on the apologetic. What sort of impression is this going to send to people considering investing in the platform? They haven't expressed any clear strategy for a possible addition of Windows Mobile apps in the future, which seems equally stupid.
Do what Apple does- sometimes you just have to lie to make yourself sound impressive!
Let's take a lesson from Apple here: they've been pawning off old technology in Mac OS X as impressive new features for years. Apple knows what the fuck they're doing. The Zune marketing presentation, on the other hand, seems hyper aware of its shortcomings and the marketing response is a hurried explanation for why they aren't competing. "Sorry guys... we'll write a twitter app by the end of the year"...
END OF THE YEAR?! That's like a student project for beginning .NET development. How about they start spitting out some apps fast, and if not, just release a goddamn SDK. You are MICROSOFT, you have Visual Studio, XNA, etc. What the hell are you doing releasing a closed platform? They are competing with the iPod Touch, not the original iPod!
Do you want to know how bad of a release this is? I was going to buy one of these things until today. I assumed they had some clever card up their sleeve they were waiting to unveil at launch... nope... they were avoiding showing the App store because it has like 5 applications.
Do you want to know what I saw when I opened up the Zune software to check the app offerings this morning? ... a fucking calculator.
Really? Maybe they can distribute a Hello World app to go with that. This thing makes me want to buy an iPod Touch... and I totally hate Apple.
How many slashdotters were going to buy a Zune anyway? It is a dead-end product, regardless of whether or not they offer an app store. How many third party developers are ready, willing, and able to develop apps for Zune? Seems like most of them are too busy supporting iPod to even support Android, let alone Zune. Given a choice, and taking into consideration Microsoft's long history of screwing third party developers, which platform would you target?
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Zune users must be some real tards if they think a device having a radio, HD or otherwise is a real marketing hook. Radios are soooo last century.
My karma is not a Chameleon.
Out of the sleeve there are no pops or scratches, and if you take care of them (keep your fingers off, don't drop them and keep them in the sleeve) they'll be very minimal. When an LP is scratched (or dirty) to the point where you'd notice at all, a CD wouldn't even play.
And I wasn't just referring to recorded live performances, which ironically seldom sounded live but sounded like a recording of a live performance because you get the acoustic effects of the hall plus the acoustic affects of your living room, but well engineered studio albums.
Case in point -- Van Halen's first album. I bought it when it first came out, and we moved to a new place. The neighbors saw us carrying in musical instruments, and when we were done we opened a bottle of tequila and got noisy, blasting that Van Halen album almost all the way up through my very good speakers - each enclosure had a fifteen inch woofer, two squawkers (midrange speaker, you kids would call them woofers), two tweeters and a super tweeter (super tweeters response was from 15kHz to over 30 kHz).
The next day we met the neighbors. "Man", they said, "your band kicks ass!" That same album on CD does NOT sound anywhere near as good, and nobody would ever confuse it with a live performance.
I'd had the album for a couple of weeks and had played the hell out of it. I have a lot of CDs that I originally sampled from LP and burned, people are amazed when I tell them that they were sampled from vinyl, because you DON'T hear pops and scratches unless the record was badly mistreated.
Now, when you take an LP or cassette and sample it and convert the samples to MP3, all the artifacts are magnified tremendously, although without the compression those artifacts are as unnoticable as on the original media.
Free Martian Whores!
Just got a Zune HD and the built-in support for 3rd party apps is pretty slow, it takes several seconds to load each of the handful of apps they have in the Zune app store.
Have you ever heard a CD that you would confuse with a live performance? Me either.
In fairness, that is more a fault of the way most CD's are mastered today, rather than an inherent problem with the CD format. It is possible to produce CDs with a decent amount of dynamic range that do have the "feel" or dynamics of a live performance.
It's too bad that none of the 24-bit music formats have really caught on. That increased bit depth gives even more opportunity to incorporate real dynamics. With a CD (16-bit) you only have 65,535 possible amplitude levels. With a 24-bit format you get 16,777,216 possible levels. It's like the difference between 16-bit and 24-bit color on your desktop - they may look similar at first, but once you know what to look (listen) for, the difference is obvious and you never want to go back to 16-bit.
The HD in HD Radio refers to the fact that the sound quality is far better than standard radio. Go take your vinyl high horse and shove it cause it has nothing to do with this argument. And for the record, vinyl is terrible from an archival standpoint. The amount of work that you have to put into your records to keep them in top shape is insane compared to a CD, even if the sound quality is better. It's a trade off, not a better or worse scenario.
Its confusing, but HD radio is secondary radio streams (low bit rate I'm told), that is broadcast by existing radio stations. Its confusing because it sounds like High Def, or High Definition (The zune supposedly does 720p).
Not many people have the radios (I don't) so people are confused. They're trying to get them into cars. Its fm's answer to satellite radio.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HD_Radio
There aren't many people who aren't MS fans who think a slab /multi touch / one button PMP isn't just another me too device. It might be good, but its not original.
Have you ever heard a CD that you would confuse with a live performance? Me either. I have heard LPs played on high end equipment that you would confuse with a live performance.
Maybe you need to buy one of these Intelligent Chips?
The HD in "HD Radio" doesn't stand for high definition. It's a bs market confusing effort to push proprietary digital radio broadcasting, and it's US only. That's also why the Zune HD isn't being sold overseas, because it doesn't work with open digital radio in Europe.
From OLED to Tegra: Five Myths of the Zune HD
"As steve jobs himself stated in their recent iPod announcement, the iPod touch is a portable games console."
Yes, unlike other game consoles you can move it from one TV to another in your pocket! Awesome!
Disk Image burning is actually a feature they included in Windows 7, its not too fully featured but it gets the job done.
You make some excellent points, although I would take issue with the quality/"fidelity" issue.
Hybrid Digital radio *can* have better clarity than analog FM, however, like Digital TV, it depends on how many sub-channels the operator tries to cram into their allotted bandwidth, and how much compression they use to do it.
There are other drawbacks (for the consumer), such as the fact that Hybrid Digital is a proprietary format, and that it could be used for DRM control in the future. The effective range of all currently broadcast Hybrid Digital channels is smaller than their Analog counterparts, and more vulnerable to catastrophic interference (interference which prevents reception altogether). This is somewhat countered by the fact that the receiver will "seamlessly" fall back to the analog transmission, but that brings us to the next point:
The only way the Hybrid Digital transmission can match (or exceed) the coverage area of the analog transmission is if its power is boosted while reducing the analog. This won't happen unless and until the uptake of Hybrid Digital is high, which may be a Catch-22 unless they can convince manufacturers to include it by default, as they have apparently done with MS.
There are also issues with bandwidth and station overlap. From the Wikipedia: "HD Radio does not fit within the FCC spectral mask. North American FM channels are spaced 200 kHz apart. An HD Radio station will not generally cause interference to any analog station within its 1 mV/m service contour, the limit above which the FCC protects most stations. However, the IBOC signal resides within the analog signal of the first-adjacent station. With the proposed power increase of 10dB, the potential exists to cause the degradation of analog signals within its 1 mV/m service contour. Ironically, the National Association of Broadcasters claims this is not a problem, while at the same time using it as justification to keep LPFM stations (except its own members' translator stations) off the air."
Posting anonymous to preserve moderation...
I have grown up with vinyl records. My first one was Magic Fly by Space (still love that album). Pops come from dust and are pretty much inevitable and a scratch that makes the CD barf for half a second would make the record repeat the same round ever and ever again.
I was talking about real live performances. Most bands suck live. Notable exception - Loreena McKennitt. She often sounds even better live than on a recording. But such cases are very, very rare.
So basically you want to say that through the walls and the noise you made your neighbours could possibly hear the difference between a vinyl and a CD recording?
Dude, I am a musician myself, don't try to bullshit me. They just saw your instruments and assumed that you practised a little. Same thing happened to me also once but I've played some Pink Floyd MP3s after a jam session.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
Just when Zune fans think it might dominate, an iPod ships with radio capability - along with the ability to timeshift radio. Can the Zune even do that? And it's so much larger than the Nano.
And instead of an App Store, it gets a few games thrown on it that are iPhone ports from developers whose just couldn't resist the piles of cash thrown at them. Yet those are all the games you'll get with the device...
Honestly until the app store question is resolved you'd have to be mad to get a Zune. Touches are better if you care about video or apps. The nano is better if you want to capture video, use radio or have a super portable player. Sansas are better if you simply want a no-frills player (although it's annoying they don't support unprotected AAC like the Zune and other players do).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Yes, I understand a lot of people who enjoy AstroTurf have been flocking to Slashdot. It's a lot more convenient than traveling to Houston.
Wow. If you want to get people to buy your product, nothing could exude less confidence than,
"Those capabilities will determine whether [...] Microsoft decides to keep selling its own music player."
Wow! Where can I buy a $100+ tech gadget that the manufacturer may wash its hands of real soon? I must have one!
Just like short people, the Zune has got no reason to live.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Fair enough, I agree with that, but it's not a suicide move either, or a sign of non-commitment, as some suggested.
At this point something like the Zune HD, built to compete primarily against the Touch, is a suicide move without an App Store answer. A handful of included 3rd-party apps, is not that answer. The Touch has Need For Speed and Assassins Creed, for crying out loud!
Yes some individual parts seem cool - primarily the OLED screen. But I think at that size it's going to be a pretty marginal improvement over the screens the Touch has today, and it's just not enough to woo away most consumers anymore.
The sign of non-commitment is the lack of will to knock heads together at Microsoft to build that App Store answer today (really, yesterday). In my mind if they were serious about the Zune it would be the flagship for a Microsoft App Store, which would then expand to support the totally redesigned Windows Mobile next year. It's certainly a sexier leader than Windows Mobile.
The problem is the Zune guys have no pull, and Windows Mobile people insist everything begins and ends with them. Since Microsoft has had good success with the 360 it's amazing to me they don't give the consumer products divisions like the Zune more say in the direction things take.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I suspect the difference isn't in the hardware - it lies in the recording process. Modern music has greater 'production values' than historic recordings did.
Note - I use the phrase 'production values' in a completely value-neutral sense. Some would argue that today's music is over-engineered. Others might say that this is the difference between camcorders and IMAX recordings. Either way, no one is going to confuse highly-engineered video as being from a camcorder unless they take drastic steps to make it look that way. I'd say the same is true for music.
Also, the production goals are different in the two eras. In the 60's-early 80's (yes, I know there's a ton of exceptions....) the aim was more to give you the feeling of being there. Today, the aim is to give you an immersive experience (for lack of a more value-neutral term), and much has been written about the differences in the frequency balance between these eras. And that alone would mean that modern digitally recorded music wouldn't sound live played on speakers.
I'd love to see the control experiment where a pure analog recording (i.e. from soundboard to recorder) was done with a digital shunt (i.e. both get the same board settings, dB's vs frequency, etc.) for an acoustic set. My prediction is your upstairs neighbor wouldn't know the difference between analog and digital in this scenario, since my view is that the biggest difference is an era-dependent outlook on how the recording system is set up.
Be careful of your thoughts; they could become words at any minute...
According to TFA, it's called the 'HD' because it has a built-in HD Radio (whatever that is!?!? Anything like DAB?) and also outputs video at 720p.
720p? That's not HD - 1080p is HD ffs.
I'm sure the most worrying thing for a lot of people is whether or not MS are going to be supporting this device in 12 months time if this is their attitude towards it's launch. If they can't buy apps from anybody else and MS are a bit flaky about what apps they'll release and when, it's not going to convince many people to take the plunge. Let's not forget the absolute panning Apple took when they first said that third party apps for their devices wouldn't be allowed - have MS got such short-term memories or are they perhaps doing what Apple seemed to do and testing the water to gauge public response?
The HD is very, extremely real and even tangible. It's a ruby aura of beauty and contentment that is soft to the touch and fills your heart with joy (available only in select models-while synced with W7 in the presence of Steve Balmer-and God).
This is what he was refering to. Do some research before you blaspheme the most glorious product God gave MS the divine wisdom to create... geez.
Because they are finally powerful enough to replace laptops for many uses.
I just came back from Europe, on the way over I was flying next to someone who bought a Touch just so she could have email and web support while there, but without the weight of a laptop (she was going on a long biking trip). But she was also using a few applications like language tutorials and so on...
And of course, she could also have music while biking.
You device is fine for you, but it's nice to have devices that can do enough to make laptops a truly optional choice.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Heh...it's been proven that the PVC polymer chains that comprise LPs don't offer as much resolution, even on the molecular level, as 44.1 KHz sampled audio.
Back in the early seventies they introduced a recording technology called "quadrophonic" -- four channel sound. How they did they ger four channels out of a single groove? Well, monophonic records' up and down motion of the stylus was used for the signal. When stereo was introduced, they wanted them to be backward compatible, so the up and down motion encompassed both channels, while the left and right motion was a single channel. Whan that signal was added to the signal from the up and down motion, the signal from the sideways motion cancelled out leaving the other channel.
For the rear channels of quadrophonic they modulated the signals with a 44kHz tone, which was demodulated in the player. A CD's top frequency is 22kHz. If what you say had any validity, quadrophonic would have been impossible.
The infinite resolution thing is a myth.
Of course the resolution isn't infinite, nothing but infinity is infinite. But it's far better than CD.
Furthermore, LPs max out at maybe 70-80 dBa of dynamic range, while 16-bit CDs offer 96
Yes, CDs have superior dynamic range. Too bad nobody ever uses that dynamic range, and in fact modern engineers screw up old recordings. There is no technical reason why the dynamics of Boston's first album are less on the CD than the LP, it's just that the remastering was crap.
That being said, many early CDs were poorly mastered.
So are way too many modern CDs. A lot of old analog LPs were badly mastered, too. The tape hiss on Aerosmith's first album is clearly audible in the LP, but they did a far better job on the second album; no audible noise.
Free Martian Whores!
Perhaps you'd like to share your own calculation or point to somebody else's. Of course I've never heard of audio quality being described in Mbit/s, so perhaps you could explain how it applies.
It was supposed to be a joke but it was based on a faulty premise (i.e. only TV-connected video game machines are called "consoles".)
Pops come from dust and are pretty much inevitable
Actually, no. There were record cleaning kits that worked well at removing dust, and even cleaning them with dish soap and a soft cloth worked well. A lot of pops, especially with cheap turntables, came from the stylus hitting the record. If you noticed, most of the pops were before or right at the beginning of the first song. Later turntables had hydraulics to lower the stylus, minimalizing this.
a scratch that makes the CD barf for half a second would make the record repeat the same round ever and ever again.
A scratch big enough to make an LP skip (either forward or backward) would completely disable a CD.
Most bands suck live
Any band that sucks live doesn't deserve to record. I heard a blues band last Saturday that would make Stevie Ray Vaughn and Eric Clapton jealous of their talent, and these were local guys (the first band did indeed suck, though).
So basically you want to say that through the walls
Through the open windows.
Same thing happened to me also once but I've played some Pink Floyd MP3s after a jam session.
No way you'll convince me that anyone not wearing a hearing aid would confuse any MP3 with live.
Free Martian Whores!
The iPhone initially show was in January right after the first Zune came out. I thought "Wow, that's what the Zune SHOULD HAVE BEEN". The Zune might be finally getting there, but now its too late.
Don't get me wrong. The Zune HD is finally turning out to be what it should have been all along. But, it's really not anything different than the iPod Touch and the iPod Touch has a gazillion applications. Well, you say, the original iPhone didn't have an app store, but neither did anyone else. The thing Microsoft must realize is that the Zune has to compete against THIS YEARS iPod Touch.
In marketing, you have something called the "delta". This is the thing that your product has that your competitors don't. When the iPhone came out, the delta was a true to life web browser and easy syncing with your computer. It was the music player/phone/browser that everyone wanted. Since then, everyone has a music player/browser/phone combo. Now, the delta is the app store.
What's the Zune HD's "delta" that will get me to throw out my iPod Touch and line up to buy a Zune? HD Radio? It's hasn't really caught on. OLCD screen? That's a nice touch, but is it that much better than the iPod's screen? The Zune is $10 cheaper? Naw.
Here's what the Zune should have had:
* Compatibility with the XBox. Hey, you got a zillion XBox games, why not make it so they can easily be ported to the Zune?
* Camera that's integrated with Twitter/Facebook/Flickr. It should have spot metering and auto focus. Optical Zoom would be a big plus.
* Multiple platforms. Hey, the Mac now represents 15% of the consumer market. Maybe even more. Why are you immediately dropping that big a chunk of the market? Heck, the songs in iTunes aren't DRMd any more, and there's an API for perusing the catalog, so you don't even have to pull a Palm Pre. Show that you're willing to compete against Apple's home turf. And, don't leave Linux out.
* Work out a deal w/ Sprint a la Kindle for networking. Not necessarily a phone service, but use the Sprint network for your network. And, of course, WiFi.
All of this would have made the Zune something to consider despite having sand kicked into its face and its lunch money taken for the last few years. Now, it's just an also ran iPod look alike. If I want an iPod look alike, I might as well by the real thing.
I believe you can output HD to a TV, not to the built in display.
hi, this is your local isp calling. me and my friends battery life, mobile infrastructure, and fidelity want to have a chat why streaming from your phone is a horrible idea.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
Also, when you mix analog and digital, you get the worst of both worlds with the advantages of neither. An LP from the analog age will be better than its CD counterpart, while an LP that was digitally mastered will be inferior to its digital counterpart. That's one reason why most people think CDs sound better -- they started using digital masters before CDs came out, so that CD would sound better than the LP, having none of analog's drawbacks, while the LP would have the drawbacks of both.
As to "the feeling of being there", you never heard Pink Floyd? Try Atom heart Mother some time. Or how about Led Zeppelin's Whole Lotta Love (among others). A lot of Beatles stuff, too, especially on the White Album.
Free Martian Whores!
So, there really are only two main features that the Zune HD has that my original, first-generation Zune does not: HD video and HD radio.
Why should I care about HD video? I only use my media player for music, and even if I did use it for video, 32GB would run out pretty quick if I wanted to store HD movies on it.
HD radio is far inferior to satellite radio, such as Sirius. Sure, you get a high-quality digital signal, but it's only in one area, just like an analog radio signal. If I move too far from the broadcasting tower, I can't pick up the station. But with satellite radio, I can drive all over the country and still get my awesome CD-quality digital audio.
Sorry, Microsoft, I love my Zune (especially with the "Zune Pass"), but I'm not going to shell out $300 just for a touch screen. I've got my iPhone for that, and it has cool applications to boot.
I have a bad feeling about this...
For the record, every time I grab an iPod I feel like I'm prying it from Steve Jobs cold undead hands.
Fixed that for you...
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
What does that even mean; "HD"? Clearly to create confusion with the customer since the only HD item is the radio. Confuse consumers with "HD meaning it must be good if it's HD". Well, TV's called HD are better then regular TVs; so a HD Zune must be better then every other MP3/Mini-computer/thingy out there not called HD.
Marginally good marketing name, unimpressive product.
6.8SPC TR of 550, l xwind at 6, drift rt at 26" drops 77". AT has 503 ft-lbs at 1403 fps. FT 0.86
I like to listen to analog cassette tape of live performances myself. Occasionally, in the middle of the performance the roller will slip and the tape will be eaten alive. It's just like if the lead singer threw a tantrum and walked off stage! Now that is realism!
Actually, what has apple done that's so terrible? It strikes me that every single story I hear about the iPhone/iPod is blown massively out of proportion. Both M$ and Apple pushed DRM, but apple gets the shit for it because iTunes is more popular. Apple sometimes bans apps in a seemingly arbitrary manner, but AFAIK M$ doesn't offer any ability to run 3rd party software yet. Which is worse? Well, Apple, because some people actually love Apple and it's funny to make them cry. Otherwise I'd say they were as bad as eachother.
That's coming from someone who uses a mix of Mac, Linux, Windows, and OpenSolaris.
mysql> SELECT * FROM `places` WHERE `place` LIKE 'home`; Empty set (0.00 sec)
It will come with some unique features, though, like an HD radio tuner, and with software that has been well-received by users.
Yeah, all three of them.
Seriously, besides the iPod Touch, the players to beat in the coming year are likely going to be the Android-based MIDs. Zune? I don't think it matters much anymore.
The HD comes via the TV to Zune HD dock which allows the Zune to output 720p video, it is not related to the OLED touchscreen on the device itself.
HD radio requires a fraction of the power of analog.
I'm going to have to ask you where you got your information on this. As of right now there's, what, 2 HD radio handhelds? Maybe the power-efficient chipsets will follow, but you're competing against what's basically a band-pass filter and an amplifier. I don't see how you can win, let alone achieve "a fraction of the power".
I was unclear (my bad):
HD radio requires a fraction of the power of analog... to broadcast.
Update: A bit more is revealed in a Seattle Times Q&A with Brian Seitz, Microsoft's Zune marketing manager. At the moment, the strategy is to keep all the apps and games free and developed in-house or in close collaboration with third parties -- no third-party SDK for devs to freely crank out apps just yet. Seitz is clear that games will be the primary focus of the "sometimes-connected" Zune HD and the Windows Marketplace is Microsoft's priority for handheld app development:
Man, Windows Mobile 7 and the rumored OneApp app store can't get here soon enough.
Most of the demo's are done in dark rooms because the OLED screen sucks in bright light. LED screens can be read partially by reflected light, but the OLED screen must produce all of the light to overcome bright sunshine shining on it. The OLED screen also sucks more power for bright pictures, since each individual picture element is producing light. The result is a screen that won't work well in daylight, and won't live up to its stated potential for battery savings.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
It isn't so simple. LCD screens have a reflective element. That is, even without a backlight they are readable, if not always very well. OLED screens do not have a reflective element to the image...they must produce all of the light to overcome reflections from ambient light. Not to mention that OLED screens will probably show significant degradation in performance over relatively short periods. And they will draw more energy for brighter pictures.
I freely admit that I haven't actually handled a "Zune HD", but I doubt the parent poster has either. I don't think it bodes well for this device that most of the demos I have seen have been done in dark rooms. The proof will be in the pudding, but I strongly suspect that this device's display will look horrible in conditions where there is significant ambient light.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
I've handled it, and the person who modded me down as flamebait is a troll. My comments are all based on experience.
Viable Slashdot alternatives: https://pipedot.org/ and http://soylentnews.org/
and sold across the mall hallway from the apple store, which will have customers.
He's not trolling. Who ever modded him a troll is an asshole. And I am not trolling , either - just stating facts. He was polite, and well spoken. Just because you disagree with him doesn't make him a troll.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
I use these:
Jennifer Warnes - Famous Blue Raincoat, remastered. (specifically, the title track and Joan of Arc)
Dave Brubeck - Take Five (hissy from the old tape, but a WONDERFUL recording)
Espers - The Weed Tree (stunningly well recorded. They sound like they are in your room. amazing.)
the Band - The Band (but only one track: #17 the out-take of Whispering Pines. Amazing recording quality. Performance is awesome, but flawed in a few minor places. The released version is a great performance, but sucks ass in sound quality.)
Genesis - Selling England By The Pound (the latest rev - not the first CD release. And only the first three minutes of the first song. After that the mellotron comes in and the mix turns to shit.)
There are others that I use, but those area few of my base recordings for testing.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
After reading how Gates and Ballmer will not let their children or spouses use Apple iPhones or iPods and that latest bit about a Microsoft employee taking Ballmers picture with an iPhone at an MS group hug...well you just have to know where the first few thousands in sales will come from now don't you. They probably have an old-Zune recycling/crushing machine so people who actually want a Zune can't get a low cost used one. That is how they work right? he he
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
You're a fool and if you believe any of it I have a bunch of electric cables to sell you, 3.000$ the metre, it will make your recordings sound warm and like you were on stage with the musicians.
Heh...it's been proven that the PVC polymer chains that comprise LPs don't offer as much resolution, even on the molecular level, as 44.1 KHz sampled audio.
For the rear channels of quadrophonic they modulated the signals with a 44kHz tone, which was demodulated in the player. A CD's top frequency is 22kHz. If what you say had any validity, quadrophonic would have been impossible.
I'm not saying you're wrong, but the ability of an analog medium to reproduce a given tone doesn't really say anything about the breadth of tones it can reproduce, which depends on the granularity.
I have been to clubs, churches, etc. and they always differ from any listening room, "high end" or not and the difference is trivial to notice. Two point source is just not the same.
A mathematical fact: three samples per crest is more than enough for sine wave.
For any band limited media, including LP, the situation is same: you cannot distinguish sine wave from square wave near cut off frequency. No matter how good your detection equipment is - there is just no information there to make the distinction.
CD has sharp cut of at ~20kHz, LP starts its around 15kHz going up to a bit over 30kHz.
Which one is better (or higher fidelity)?
If you insist that the frequency response is everything then LP can be considered to be, but then you'd have to "forget" LP's frequency response is more than 10dB down at 20kHz, the noise is up at least 30dB and stereo separation is pretty much negligible.
If you take any other variable into consideration LP loses, big time. Probably the worst are the various mastering tricks LP needs (or you might "kill" the master cutter) especially at the end of the LP.
Microsoft should just close off Windows like all these other 'platforms'. Make people pay license fees to develop for it. Etc. If people are against this idea, how can they be for company-run app stores, developer license fees for consoles(or closed consoles for that matter), and all of the other rediculous acts going on in the tech world? It IS a very black and white issue. p.s. hardware profitablilty should not factor in.
...
There is HD AM Radio and HD FM Radio. When making claims, you should specify which you're talking about. They're very different due to differing bandwidth constraints and different types of signal interferrence at the frequencies used.
Certainly "HD" doesn't mean High Definition or even CD-quality in either case.
It is misleading marketing to even call it HD since most people will not realize what they're actually getting.
HD radio requires a fraction of the bandwidth of analog.
That's certainly not true for HD AM, and no FM spectrum is released for other licensees or services.
For practical purposes a U.S. A.M. broadcast channel is 20 kHz bandwidth, and F.M. channel 200 kHz.
Obviously more is possible on an FM channel. HD Radio can't even manage stereo (2 channels) or extended frequency-response on AM, and the bandwidth used is wide enough that HD Radio must operate at well below the licensed analog power level because of excessive interference to any second-adjacent analog station (two channels sway in either direction)
While HD FM does allow more programming per transmitter, each station still has the same licensed channel bandwidth/spacing so no frequencies are freed up. HD radio won't help people hoping for a free channel to license in a congested area. (The digital tv transition didn't reduce bandwidth per license/transmitter either, they just decided to take away a group of channels for other uses)
HD radio is capable of CD-quality sound.
Even if some people agree that HD-FM can sound good, it's lossy compression. At its' best it'll never reach CD quality. CD's don't use data compression. A few years ago the website of the company behind this had the nerve to post simulated audio clips comparing AM/FM analog and digital.
They were NOT actual recordings of functioning broadcast equipment!
Beyond that, I find the radio quality issue to be something of a bad joke. Nowdays the bulk of music broadcast by radio stations does not come directly from CD. It's generally stored in a computers using lossy compression. Additionally, stations use complex audio processing equipment that among other things maximizes loudness while controlling waveform peaks to meet requirements of the transmission system. This greatly increases distortion and reduces dynamics. Try feeding an FM tuner into a tape deck... the VU meters will practically sit still at one level. If one hears artifacts on analog FM radio that sound like a poor quality MP3 (or MP2), it's NOT the fault of the transmitting system. Of course considering the amount of advertising many stations carry, it's a wonder that anyone can tolerate commercial radio for music at all.
Radio has far worse problems than the limitations of wideband FM.
Most radio listeners would appreciate is broadcasters that acted like they really cared about quality. With huge corporate out-of-town owners, like Clear Channel, operation best suited for the local communities is very unlike. We should pressure the F.C.C. to tighten ownership requirements, limiting the number of stations owned and requiring many more local owners with ties to the community served.
U.S. ATSC "HD" TV uses A/52 a.k.a. Dolby AC3 audio compression (codec efficient like AAC, but with multichannel support). All main and subchannel DTV broadcasts I've seen used sampling at 48 kHz at a 384 kbps data rate.
You claim CD-quality, just what are the sampling and data rates for "HD" radio???
HD radio requires a fraction of the power of analog.
Consumers are supposed to buy new equipment to save the broadcasters energy? Although the transmitter digital power levels are lower than the analog, the transmitters handling hybrid digital and analog run far less efficiently and consume MORE POWER. I don't see ANYONE saving power.
Another thing... Digital service can ideally function at a signal level closer to the noise floor without degrading. But because the digital signal may drop out completely during a fad
There is no need for my calculation, you can do it yourself. See the approximations in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shannon%E2%80%93Hartley_theorem#Approximations.
The "C" tells nothing about the quality, especially not that of latest Britney Spears album. It does not say an LP is worse or better (or of higher fidelity) or anything like that.
The "C" is a mathematical value telling the maximum information there can be in a channel (or media). It can be expressed in bits/second. The definition of "information" is such that it is impossible to have an equipment which can detect beyond the "C".
Summarum: the usual claim "LP is analog and therefore has more nyances[1]" is, frankly, bullshit.
[1] or better reproduction of square wave or more than 16bit quantisation levels or ...
Does anyone actually plan to buy one of these pieces of crap? I have a PC because I need one. I don't have an iPod, iPhone or any other iCrap. My Windows copy is XP cause it's paid for (just to use LabVIEW for work, taxes and Netflix movies). I may not be cool enough for Apple but I'm not stupid enough to buy this garbage.
bob@Osprey:~>
While HD FM does allow more programming per transmitter, each station still has the same licensed channel bandwidth/spacing so no frequencies are freed up.
The stations can divide up the frequency among a number of ways. As defined by iBiquity these channels could be sub-divided into CD-quality (100 kbit/s), FM-quality (25-50 kbit/s), AM-quality (12 kbit/s), or Talk-quality (5 kbit/s) channels. Alternatively, they could broadcast one single channel at 300 kbit/s.
Even if some people agree that HD-FM can sound good, it's lossy compression. At its' best it'll never reach CD quality. CD's don't use data compression.
To be fair, the lowest quality I generally listen to is about 200Kbit/s, and I'd call it "CD quality" to the point that the differences in matering on the source material are far more signifigant than the bitrate differences.
300Kbit/s, I would challenge most anyone to identify in blind tests... though I readily admit that would be mono on HD-Radio.
You claim CD-quality, just what are the sampling and data rates for "HD" radio??? Max data rate for a single FM station broadcasting HD under the current spec is 300Kbit/s, which is higher than Amazon's MP3 downloads.
Consumers are supposed to buy new equipment to save the broadcasters energy?
I suppose I *could* make an argument to that effect, but I've certainly not said so. It is an advantage, though perhaps not directly to the consumers.
The digital advantage for operation at lower power levels frequently doesn't work in practice. Just look at all the people having trouble getting DTV reception in areas that supposedly have usable signal levels.
As someone getting better DTV than analog signals, mileage apparently varies.
As Wikipedia has me understand, the current power output is 1% of analog? If there's a signal problem, perhaps 10% would solve it (speculating).
I'm not advocating HD, nor reproaching it. I'm merely correcting incorrect or unfair comments regarding it.
What gets me is that they are eroding storage space...and the Classic, which will probably go away in a year or so
That's what everyone said about the Classic last year. And in fact, the Classic has *gained* storage space in the recent update (updated to 160GB from 120GB). How is that erosion?
The classic will be around just long enough for flash devices to support similar storage and then, it might go away. But it's clear Classic level storage is going to stick around, there are plenty of other people with large libraries of music.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
HD radio is better overall, but I've found that the compression artifacts you get when you're in an area with marginal reception are terrible. Listening to NPR I can switch to non-HD standard FM stereo and get a very fine although a little crackly signal, but when I switch to HD in the same bad coverage area, I get terrible compression artifacts, like listening to a VoIP phone when someone is using BitTorrent...
"When the president does it, that means it's not illegal." - Richard M. Nixon
You link doesn't really explain how this would relate to an LP. I'm not sure if Shannon's theorem is applicable to non-symbol based information.
It will come with some unique features, though, like an HD radio tuner
Hey, I know the pictures are better on Radio, but HD? Wow!
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
Microsoft, apart from the xbox and zune, aren't really into hardware. Mostly, it's Windows, Office and a few other things. One of the first iterations of the .Net framework stated in the license that you could not use it to write a competitor to MS Office.
And that's just one example. Microsoft is the worst of them all, given how long it's been doing this kind of thing. Apple would be as bad as Microsoft if they had the marketshare which they do in the iPod and iPhone space, but not in the Mac space.
Shannon's theorem is applicable to any band-limited communication channel, therefore it is applicable to LP.
I do not understand what you mean information which is not "symbol based": if there is some information you can give a symbol to it.
If you refer to sampling of the signal or like that, then Nyquist has proved quite enough for the band-limited case.
A mathematical fact: three samples per crest is more than enough for sine wave
Explain to me how you can differentiate between a sine, square, or sawtooth wave with three samples?
Free Martian Whores!
To put it simply: recording an LP doesn't involve sampling or encoding so I don't see how raw bit rates or symbol rates apply.
You can't... but do you care if you can't hear the difference? A square wave is square because it has higher order harmonics--a square wave with a fundamental frequency of 20kHz will have a harmonic at 60kHz with 1/3rd of the amplitude of the fundamental, a 100kHz harmonic with 1/5th of the amplitude of the fundamental, etc... The idea behind discrete-time sampling is that in the ideal mathematical world, you can exactly reconstruct the original waveform as long as it doesn't contain any frequencies higher than half the sampling rate. The designers of the CD decided that it's not important to keep the frequencies above 22kHz, since almost nobody can hear above that frequency. An audio CD is designed to store audio for people to listen to, so it's not important to differentiate between 20kHz sine, square, and sawtooth waves--nobody can tell the difference when they listen to them.
If you have an application where it is important to differentiate between those, then obviously audio CDs are not the right medium to use.
To put it very simply: the theory does not give a shit whether sampling or encoding happens or not.
According to your own link:
"In information theory, the Shannon-Hartley theorem is an application of the noisy channel coding theorem to the archetypal case of a continuous-time analog communications channel subject to Gaussian noise."
Where's the coding in analog recording? I'm at a disadvantage in this discussion because I'm not an expert, but I suspect you don't know as much about it as you think you do.
You cannot (third harmonic is outside the bandwidth). Sorry if I have made you understand otherwise.
But neither can you with any analog media (with same bandwidth) and THIS is my point.
Upon rereading my post seems a bit harsh. I don't want to insult you, I just don't see how the theorem applies.
To have information you must somehow code it. LP does have a coding in this sense: amplitude change is coded as displacement in the groove.
The theory states that no matter how you code you cannot put more information than what the "C" gives. It does not tell how to do it so e.g. getting digital data close to "C" has been very, very hard mathematical problem.
The Shannon's theorem can be extended to non-Gaussian noise (LP is definitely non-Gaussian and even non-linear) but then the calculations get outside my capability. Using Gaussian should give fairly good approximation as LP tries to be linear and Gaussian.
It has been two decades since I studied these matters so cannot consider expert myself either - but thankfully you did not think that.
"To have information you must somehow code it. LP does have a coding in this sense: amplitude change is coded as displacement in the groove."
I think you've identified the crux of the matter. Does the kind of coding you describe for an LP really qualify as coding as far as Shannon's theory is concerned? You say yes and I'm a bit skeptical but I have no means to debate you further so I'll stop.
http://www.stanford.edu/class/ee104/shannonpaper.pdf
"The Transmitter: This operates on the message in some way and produces a signal suitable for transmission to the receiving point over the channel. In telephony, this operation consists of merely changing sound pressure into a proportional electrical current."
Won't change your stance that LP is inherently better than CD, but that is your problem. Just remember that almost[1] all mathematics is against that belief.
[1] High quality LP can have somewhat better frequency response.
Hi Dick!
When I had a Palm pilot and a cheap nokia, I had two devices in my pocket.
Some people will take a jack of all trades; others want a master of one and a master of another. For example, say I want a handheld computer, and I want a phone. If all available phones fail to meet my requirements, then I will buy a separate handheld computer and phone. For me, the requirements of a low monthly fee and the ability to run free software happen to outweigh the requirement of fewer things in my pocket, which is why I'm waiting for a Pandora PDA.
First, I'm not streaming *FROM* my phone. I'm streaming *TO* my phone and it only takes about 128k to stream good quality audio to a mobile device.
It may be a few more years before everyone is doing it, but it makes more sense to stream the data to mobile devices rather than having to carry around gigabytes of data.
Actually, MS has tried to implement some Trusted Computing pieces that would do exactly that - restrict what will run so any DRM-broken content can't possibly be played.
Perhaps we could amend your sentence to: "never SUCCESSFULLY locked down..." - because they can't manage to have backward compatibility with all the terrible niche Windows apps and also do things like that.
Looking for freelance Actionscript (Flash/Flex) or ColdFusion work and/or freelance developers. Email me, put Slashdot