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Sony Closing 18M CD/Month Plant
coondoggie writes "Sony this week said it was shuttering one of its largest CD manufacturing plants — citing the impact of digital downloads and other economic issues. The plant, which has been in operation for some 50 years, first producing vinyl records, will close on March 31 and about 300 people will lose their jobs. The 500,000-square-foot warehouse began producing vinyl LPs in 1960 and moved to CD manufacturing in 1988. At its capacity, the plant was making 18 million CDs per month, according to its website."
That's a stunning amount of plastic waste and manufacturing process waste no longer being generated.
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If this plant were in Canada, the government would impose another tariff on blank CDs and give the cash to the CD manufacturers. Have to make up for the evil pirates somehow!
Trolling is a art,
I was in Walmart a month ago looking for two CD's that I wanted to purchase. Neither was particularly obscure, and both were recent (released within the last year). They had neither, and actually I couldn't believe how small their selection was compared to what it used to be. I understand the convenience of downloading via Walmart or Amazon, but what I can't understand is why people wouldn't actually want to have a bit-perfect digital copy on physical medium as a back up.
Don't be fooled. The summary says nothing of the sort.
It says it's "Shuttering" the plant - a clever mind game to make you think they mean "Shutting Down" but they are actually just installing new blinds for the windows. It says that on March 31 it will "Close" - they probably just mean locking up for the night. On April 1 they might "ReOpen". 300 people will lose their jobs? They didn't say who, when, or where, it was only implied at the plant, but its not really specific enough to be sure. They could mean just 300 people in general will lose their job. A very low-ball estimate, if you ask me.
So Sony is cutting costs. No prizes for guessing whether or not this reduction is reflected in the cost of their products.
"Sony Closing Plant 18M/CD/Month Plant"
Aside from two Plants...
18 Million Per Cd Per Month?
The bopycott is working!
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I think their department of redundancy department was siphoning funds...
... because nobody trusts Sony CDs?
Have gnu, will travel.
He's directly responsible for these job losses.
Just goes to show how much of cost scam CD are/were. When there is a glut of memory for example, the retail price drops. Now there is a glut of CD production and the cost stays... fixed. I guess their thug business practices are showing. All parts of the cost of production for music have gone down, and the last CD I bought was still the same cost as the CD I bought 5 years ago. Good job, music industry, you've killed your own market with your own greed!
300 people are responsible for making 18 million CDs/month. I saw another story about a sleeping bag factory cranking out 20 million bags a year with 500 empoloyees for the whole company. I read somewhere that American manufacturing capacity is the highest it's ever been. What are we going to do with all these people. I keep hearing 'Well, the world needs ditch diggers too'. No, no it doesn not... I guess we can let them starve to death in the streets.
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18 million per CD per month? those are quite expensive discs...
I had the aversion to non-physical media for quite a while..but like most I have found digital to be acceptable in quality (for me music is mostly for background noise and even with headphones a higher bit-rate sounds "good enough" for me). With a little redundancy in the home network the "collection" is assured to last. The biggest hurdle for me was will an MP3 be playable 20 years from now...but after thinking about it, the likelihood of being able to play a digital based format is probably much higher than being able to play a physical one, how many 8-track, turntable or cassette players do you see these days? I'm more willing to bet on the longevity of the digital copies. As for album artwork and liner notes...there really hasn't been much effort put in to those in years so the labels have managed to reduce the desire for those on their own. I still buy the occasional CD but the first thing I do is rip them and then put the original on a shelf to collect dust.
a CD manufacturing plant in a country with an actual working EPA is far, far better for the environment than the toxic waste dump that we are creating in China right now,where environmental activists get thrown in prison as 'enemies of the state'. . Thats what we do to make all of these iphones, ipads, iwhatever, which seem to get thrown out every 2 years for the 'new generation'. Close your eyes, stick your head in the sand, pretend that magic fairys give you printed circuit boards. also, where do you think the energy comes from to power the servers for downloads? it ain't some wind farm. i don't see any "renewable offset purchasing" logo on the apple istore. that 'clean tech' is powered by dirty, dirty coal dug out from the innards of a mountain and burned in a giant plant that pours smoke into the air
That's nothing. AOL mailed out at least 20 million per month.
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Maybe not exactly surprised, more dismayed. If something only has say 3 years "sales life" but the copyright on it lasts for some 90 years, that's dismaying.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Good riddance!
The most reliable storage media is still magnetic tape.
Incidentally my 10.5in reel mp3 player needs a new backpack...
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No more Sony dumping their byproducts into our ecosystem, its a win-win
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It's a staggering amount for a single factory - enough to supply AOL for about three days!
No sig today...
Let's cite the impact of producing less plastic items! I understand people worked there; still, people can be retrained (I suggest, to work in solar/wind manufacturing plants)... CD plastic, however, represents raped biodiversity; something we all rely on.
(government)
That's how it is, in a Post-2005-Rootkit World, the world will never be the same ever again.
(/government)
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
The plant which is closing is in Pitman, NJ. The article never bothered to mention which plant. Whatever happened to the basics of reporting - who/what/where/why/when?
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Well there will always be a small demand in the future for CD's. They still occasionally sell buggy whips, player pianos, and Model-T windshields too.
Hey Slashdot, why do you let these schills come here to make money from you?
Submitted by... Coondoggie. The blog this links to is run by Michael Cooney. Hmmmm.
Well Mr. Cooney, just as the comments on your ad-revenue blog say, you have failed to mention the location of the plant. Then instead of providing us with the link to your "source", you link us to your site to generate hits.
You sir, are a hack.
Here's the actual news story:
http://www.philly.com/inquirer/business/homepage/20110112_Sony_will_close_South_Jersey_CD_plant.html
I'm not sure this is the most effective use of condescending quote marks. Usually when you use those, it is to imply that the thing in quotes is false, not that the thing in quotes is true elsewhere also.
www.wavefront-av.com
This is part of the reason I switched to using a netbook for work and play. To prove that I don't need to take part in at least part of this cycle. Too many people upgrade simply to have the newest or most powerful thing they can have, rather than realising their 5 year old laptop or whatever is actually still a capable machine (especially if you get rid of Windows).
which is totally what she said
I predict that they will be sought after, much like vinyl records are today, and with much the same rationale. The difference is, this time they'll be right.
Don't get me wrong: I love vinyl records, but I like them for being vinyl records. I don't make any specious claim that they sound better.
I do, however claim that, with the exception of some FLAC downloads, CDs sound better than digital downloads. Of course, the real question is whether or not it matters, or if MP3 and other lossy codecs are "good enough". It's up to the end user to make that call.
www.wavefront-av.com
So, to prove you won't just buy another machine...you bought another machine. How's that again?
Is it possible to buy music online without lossy compression? On the basis of my admittedly limited search, on-line music all seems to be compressed using lossy algorithms. CDs (jazz, classical, fine recordings, etc.) provide such uncompressed/lossless source.
I'd like to have archival quality for the source music. Also, when playing discretely instrumented classical music on a good hi-fi, compression artifacts are sometimes noticeable.
So Sony promised us that when production ramps up prices on CDs would drop. Since this really didn't happen, now that production is ramping down will prices go down?
I'm only 22 and I prefer CDs at this point because they are Lossless and DRM-free. Though if digital distribution can provide me with lossless and DRM-free tracks I would not have a problem using that method.
Though I usually buy used CDs off places like Amazon for about $5 a disk so I also believe digital distribution needs to be cheaper as well as better quality if I am to start using it.
The plastic really is a waste seeing as I generally rip that CD to my server once and then never use the physical disk again.
CDs were said to lose quality as well. Especially from the classics recorded in analog, and digital mastering to make the sound clear. If you want the real bang, you could stick to Vinyl.
The CDs are at least a vast improvement on vinyl in this and various other regards.
I rip in FLAC instead of MP3 like memojuez - as it's hard to find non-lossy legal downloads for many things, this is at least a minor reason
A lot of my digital collection consists of CDs I borrowed from others; that combined with some downloads means that my aversion to non-physical media is decreasing somewhat.
Though I mostly listen to the digital collection, some of the physical discs get pulled out fairly often
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
That's fucking crazy. 18M per CD per month? I think you meant 18M CD/Month
I guess Sony root kits aren't selling as well these days.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Then you dont buy CD's as well. All CD's are compressed hard (audio compression, not data compression) so all the life is sucked out of it. When CD's first came out most were incredible as the engineers tried to make them fantastic. Companies like Mobile Fidelity sound Lab released albums that stunned people. I have several Ultradiscs of old analog recordings that blew away the best turntable setup I could find. I have a all digital mastering of Information Society's first album that was released as an MFSL Ultradisc that used the full dynamic range that CD had in it and it is incredible even on a cheap $99.00 CD player.
Today, ALL CD's are mastered to sound good on a $2.99 piece of crap car stereo. The Audio compression is cranked up to make it "louder" and all the soul is sucked out and discarded. I cant find a CD today that is sold by a major label that does not suck in sound quality.
Honestly, if you ever heard a very well done CD, you'd be pissed at the utter crap they are releasing on CD now.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Could always consider dropping the price to something resembling the cost of duplication + reasonable markup. But oh no, they would rather die.
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
Heh. No, it was more to prove I could be more mature and get by with a low power (in both senses of the words) machine. It wasn't primarily an environmental statement. The annoying fan whine that a lot of laptops have was also a factor, it's nice to have a silent machine.
I also wanted to test how feasible it would be for some of our staff to do their work on such a cheap and low spec machine, especially the offshore guys who often lose or damage their laptops and need a replacement. So it made sense overall.
which is totally what she said
Maybe AOL has decided to cut back.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
So is this the infamous Sony DADC plant that was a prime source of laserdiscs with Laser Rot problems?
If so, then good riddance.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
But, I bet I buy more CDs than most huge music fans. I have friends who brag about having not bought music in 5-10 years. Take the compensation out of the market and you end up with corporate factory musicians backed by accountants. Buy those CDs either at the concerts or in the stores and keep the music industry strong.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Kind of glad I didn't. I know a bunch of people who will be out of work now.
They failed to understand the mythical CD-Month. When will managers ever learn you can't just keep throwing more optical disks at a task and expect to get it done faster.
When I buy a CD, I rip it once and afterwards stow it away in a box. Then I listen to the music on my PC and my DAP anyway.
With or without CDs there will be new mobile gadgets and for some more time PCs even. But those old school PCs will be replaced sooner or later, too. Devices get smaller and they do get more environmental friendly, so why still produce CDs if no-one except some nostalgia freaks need them? You could ask the same thing about PCs once SoC-Devices become as poweful as full-blown dekstop PCs and still get the same answer: no-one needs them anymore.
I'm surprised no on has connected the dots yet, but ever since the downfall of AOL this plants ultimate demise has been as predictable as the tides.
That's actually awesome. 300 workers have been displaced to go send their resumés around and find a better job, making more money or taking a senior position in manufacturing or management with their decade of experience.
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5 year old laptop or whatever is actually still a capable machine (especially if you get rid of Windows).
He's a member of the Computer Obsolescence Prevention Society. Built to last, the future is the past.
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Isn't the CD a digital music format or has 16bit LPCM been reclassified as analogue?
More importantly, a CD is a token of ownership and is something that can be "excluded" or transfered by the end user.
Any other form of "ownership" is either a glorified rental or effectively unverifiable.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
...was that it must be an old RCA plant and it's annoying to see it go.
i drive through this plant everyday while going to work. their parking lot is always full. really feel bad for the people who worked there. but this is the life for people like us who are engineers and develop technology. the fact is "it get better and will ultimately replace the primitives".
Yah, that is so cool! I'm sure every one of them has credentials for senior positions. And with the current economy and competing with their fired coworkers I bet there are 300 great jobs just waiting for them.
"Hi, I operated a cd making machine for 10 years."
"Ummm, no one is making cds anymore. Next."
If they could make more many just switching by jobs don't you think they would have before this? When I got laid off it took a year to find a job after intense effort and then it was only with a substantial pay cut.
I'm not saying they should keep the plant open just to keep paying them but don't make it sound so pollyannaish, like it's a good thing.
All CD's are compressed hard (audio compression, not data compression) so all the life is sucked out of it.
This is a choice. CD's have a usable dynamic range of 93+dB and many bands (especially those who self-produce, -promote, and -sell) have gone back to having CDs that use 10-14dB of dynamic range (as opposed to 3-6dB for the "major"'s CDs). This is enough to allow the dynamics of the music to come through well while still having enough "loudness" to make them play above the noise floor of a car or other high-noise environment. They sound better on the radio, too. I agree that major commercial releases suck in this regard, but that doesn't necessarily mean that everything on CD sucks.
That is all.
Well, it all depends on how you consume music. Do you buy mainly from bands that you would be interested in hearing entire albums for or perhaps even an entire concert by or do you just go for one hit wonders.
Of course for one hit wonders and album sale makes absolutely zero sense.
OTOH, they have compilation albums to even handle the One Hit Wonder problem.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Yes, instead we've replaced it with the 6 month cycle of ever increasing CPU transistor count, more memory, "smart" phones, LCD TV, hard drives, etc that are required to play these "digital" downloads. (CDs are digital too).
So let me get this right, you replaced your 6 month old computer...hell, let's say you replaced your 5 YEAR old computer, solely because it wouldn't play the "new music"? I'm pretty sure that any Pentium 4 CPU is already many times the power needed to play music. (I played music on a 486 w/4mb ram, and had power to spare). Even allowing for decoding MP3s, any Pentium 4 would still be overkill for the purpose.
Maybe, just maybe, people are upgrading their computers for reasons other than solely to play music.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
Not exactly. I binned my Amiga. But I also know the gaming system I built 6-7 years ago is far more powerful than the netbook that does me fine from day to day.
which is totally what she said
I can appreciate the arguments that CDs may be wasteful to manufacture, however this is a real disappointment to me. Granted, the music industry often does a poor job recording music but it's still far superior to the crap we get with MP3s, ACC and other formats. I notice a difference even at 256 kbps; music just doesn't sound as crisp, like it's faintly muffled.
I'm convinced that people who claim they can't hear a difference simply aren't paying attention. I'd say the difference from 256kbps ACC to CD is greater than from CD to SACD or DVD audio. A study has shown that with either of those formats audio has to be uncomfortably loud for people to start noticing the difference. But with MP3s and whatnot all you need is to run the music through some decent speakers or headphones.
On the other hand, I can appreciate the convenience. I import my CDs into iTunes so that I have my music available in my car and at the office. But therein lies another major problem. With CDs I have the freedom to make as many copies as I like for any device I choose. With digital downloads I'm chained to wherever I purchased the music and I have far less flexibility with where I can enjoy that music.
For most people, however, this is certainly a situation where convenience has trumped quality.
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I wondered what studman69 was up to these days.
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My laptop is almost 10 years old (700 megahertz Pentium something). I recycled it from an ebayer. I've got you beat. ;-)
I will miss CDs. They have superior (lossless) quality over the digital downloads. After all these years of companies trying to move from lesser-to-better music technology (records, cassettes, CD, Surround Sound), it turns out what people really wanted was 10,000 songs to fit inside a small box, even if those songs are incomplete (lost sound). The average person didn't care about quality at all.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
As much as I hate Sony and the general music industry this actually just a CD factory.
I find it sad for the employees who took technical pride in making the CDs, regardless of their contents.
Oh stop. That's true if you're listening to Madonna or Lady Gompa or whatever. There are large numbers of modern (typically Classical) CDs that are mastered quite well.
However, if you're tastes run to Country / Western then not so much. But at that point, you're your own worst enemy.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
I played music on a 68000/7 Mhz and 512K RAM. Unfortunately it was only 8 bit sound (C= Amiga) but it was still music. Still enjoyable. And impressive for 1985.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Nothing to stop you from downloading lossless audio files, and such files could easily be made available which were far superior in quality to a standard CD.
But as you point out, once you reach "good enough" then convenience and/or cheapness will trump quality. Most people listen to their music on extremely lousy equipment anyway, so the difference between compressed and uncompressed is often irrelevant in many cases.
But the real reason for closing the plant is because sony want to sell the same music, at a lower quality, but for the same price (Despite the massively lower production costs - ie no need to run factories like this).
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My CD rips have been lossless since I got a 1TB drive.
I've been "working" hard at it for a year, and still have filled only a couple hundred gigs, most of *that* not even audio.
Some of the old rips in 128kbps I've even bothered to redo if I still have the disc handy.
(It seemed kind of ironic to have longterm-favorite classics in 128 and recently acquired modern stuff in FLAC)
I notice a fairly big difference going from 128 to 256. From 256 to 320 or lossless, it's not quite as pronounced.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
... at that plant (I used to live nearby) was in Quality Control. They would hire people to listen to the Golden Master CDs for defects before mass producing the CDs from the master. People would line up around the block when they had those openings. The pay wasn't great, but where else could you listen to unreleased music all day and get paid for it?
I never heard of that static-image "video" trick being used off of YouTube. :)
Anyway, can't FLAC be used for higher than 16-bit/44100? (I have one of my favorite modern albums in a 24-bit/44100 release by the artist, and I've heard of yet higher FLAC resolutions)
You make a point about the recording job - that's step 1 - a bad job can't be salvaged by a good format, and a good job is still very listenable even in a bad format.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
Wells Fargo has announced the closing of its horse buggy factory
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Even new, buying CDs on Amazon is very price-competitive, especially if you have Prime's free shipping.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
Manufacturing/distribution is an important component of the price of a CD, yes, but it's not the only cost.
For instance, the few bucks that the actual creatives (musicians, songwriters, producers, et cetera) actually get has to come from somewhere. :P
Record labels may well take too much of a cut, yes, but they ought to get something if the artist finds them useful.
(I wonder how the retailer cut compares for CD sellers versus legal-download sites.)
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
You might happen to like only a couple songs even if the artist's good; it's not entirely limited to the "good single + album filler" artists. There are several bands where I dig the greatest hits album but haven't gotten further.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
agreed - digital album downloads seem to be one of many cases, music and otherwise, where isn't worth the trouble to try and save a couple bucks.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
that argument will be valid for any digital source vs and analog source.. that is until you start encoding in single base particles (what ever the smallest sub atomic particle is)
'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
another ones bites the dust.. digital downloads are changing the scenario all togather for biggies like Sony and its time they change and start riding the wave.
Actually I was talking about the mastering process, not simple conversion. They had sound engineers "cleaning" the sound for a long time. That ruined some albuns
Thanks to AOL for requiring this humongous amount of CDs when they used to spam every single one of us in our snail mailbox with registration CDs.
...but couldn't they re-tool or something to produce CD-R's, or maybe DVD-R's? Maybe re-tool half of the plant, keeping half in production for the reduced volume of regular CD's?
Admittedly, I have no idea how much the processes differ, or whether it would even be possible, but it seems to me that this would be less wasteful than just tanking the entire setup... After all, as online sales go up, CD-R and DVD-R sales *should* rise as well if the current generation cares about backing up their media at all. They'd probably have to drop the 'Sony Tax' on their burnable media pricing to actually see a portion of that pie, however...
"I love animals! Some are cute, others are tasty, what's not to like?" - Betsy Schroeder, Jeopardy contestant
even the "mastering" process - all of it is a type of conversion - you are talking analog pressure waves that go into a mic or me waves in to a pickup and induce analog voltage and are attempting to record them for later reproduction.
'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
No, I was trying to point out that people using "digital" in the sense of DOWNLOADING are so stupid they don't even see that it can't be anything else BUT digital, and that CDs are digital too. Were there ever analog downloads? Does anyone ever say "Hey I wastch DIGITAL video now!" "Hey, I read DIGITAL text now" when they download books?
Basically if it has the name of Saunders on it you know that it is the crap of which you speak.
You're referring to Sauder Woodworking, correct?
Non-DRMed, but still lossy.
Here's a hint: Everything is lossy. CDs are lossy; they have only about 93 dB of SNR and lose all audio above 22 kHz. So I settle for the smallest representation of the recording where I can't tell the difference from the original. And in mobile listening environments, even 96 kbps Vorbis qualifies.
And prices are generally low enough that a lot of folks wouldn't even balk at re-purchasing something if they lost the file.
Unless the work has been taken out of print. The Walt Disney Company does this routinely.
Have you ABX-tested 256 kbit AAC against a plain uncompressed rip of a CD?
I had a job offer at the newly minted Sony CD plant in Eugene, OR right after college...something told me that I wouldn't have been there for the long haul, so I didn't take it. Got laid of from Symantec instead, but got rehired as soon as demand for anti-virus stuff spiked correlating with the release of Win95 ;-)
Worldwide, over 21.5 billion jobs have been lost due to piracy. PIracy is the reason that everyone in the world is homeless and starving.
>>>Nothing to stop you from downloading lossless audio files
From where? iTunes doesn't sell them and I'm not aware of anybody who does. Once CDs are dead, lossless files will be impossible to get.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Yes.
The CD has surround-sound encoding which the 256k AAC lacks.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Ouch, the curse of having good ears. To me, 112k mp3 sounds terrible but it quickly becomes transparent at higher bitrates.
For me, it's the eyes that are the problem: I'm thankful for the end of CRTs as computer monitors. No more 60hz refresh rates to explode my brain.
a CD making machine is 90% identical to a blu-ray making machine.
well, not single machines, but lines of different ones.
you'd be shocked at how lo-tech the principles of it are. it's just a matter of tighter tolerances on each denser generation of media, but it's all make the same way with tweaks.
But think of all the wear and tear people save on the volume knobs in their cars thanks to the auto-compressors.
very rarely you will see a download release that is better than the CD
Actually, it appears to be fairly common for the level compression on keysounded rhythm games (Beatmania, Amplitude, Guitar Hero, Rock Band) not to be as intense as that on Compact Disc Digital Audio and MP3 releases. See, for example, Guitar Hero: Metallica . This follows from the fact that the game consoles don't perform compression on the mixed output.
There is no longer a need for CDs. Check this absolutely remarkable device that Sony has created for this purpose!
I'm not sure how much of an analogy can be drawn between very different industries, but I'll expand upon the Coca-Cola example.
Looking at their investor documents, they spent about $3 billion on advertising , out of about $30 billion revenue, or out of about $20 billion after cost of goods sold.
http://www.thecoca-colacompany.com/investors/pdfs/10-K_2009/12_Coca-Cola_Item8.pdf
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
The only advantage digital music downloads have is in the ability to purchase single tracks
And that's the big one. When making a mix CD for my grandmother, I don't want to have to buy the whole album for each track that she requests.
There is a big difference between having a specified noise floor/frequency response and lossy compression.
Converting 96 kHz 24-bit PCM to 44.1 kHz 16-bit (Red Book spec) PCM is a data reduction method that preserves some perceivable components of the signal. Therefore, it counts as lossy compression, as I understand the lead of the Wikipedia article. From later in the article: "A general kind of lossy compression is to lower the resolution of an image, as in image scaling, particularly decimation." Conversion among sampling rates even introduces generation loss as the interpolated samples are requantized each time. But I do understand that conversion to Red Book spec is transparent to most listeners' ears (including mine) and is therefore OK.
The article you linked only mentions compression in the context of volume compression.
The second half is about level compression. The first half is about choice of sampling rate and depth, which fits the definition of lossy compression as I mention above. Is there a more widely used definition?
The plant, which has been in operation for some 50 years
^in Pitman NJ,
was that so hard?
Agreed.
But with Hurt, I might submit that the performance and recording of it was likely very spontaneous. Spontaneous music is often the best kind, but it also means that there's unlikely to be a skilled lackey to set levels to avoid clipping -- or, if there is a lackey present, he may never get a chance.
It'd be nice to ask Cash to play it again, just like that (only this time with the gear better-adjusted), but sometimes it's better to live with whatever you happen to be able to record. Sometimes, it's all you get, ever.
And so sometimes as a listener, you have to listen to the music instead of the technical details of the recording process. Sometimes, it's important to look past the distortion.
Sometimes, there just ain't no good recording available of a good performance.
I'm just sayin'.
Kid-proof tablet..
the tech industry is not green. it never has been green. if you want to make it green, you have to deal with reality.
If there was something better waiting in the wings then the closure of a CD plant would probably help its adoption, but mp3 ain't it. I wonder if they made SACDs there too? That would have kept someone busy for a day a month packing those into boxes ...
I'm a CD junkie, but knowing that alternatives like SACD exist but have been so badly marketed and distributed makes me very reluctant to pony up cash for 1970's technology. Why do I care whether my favourite New Order albums have been remastered with the latest technology when they are then munged back into 44.1khz/16bit?
One of my recent blog posts says it all really: 'It’s almost 2011 for fuck’s sake, so why is “CD Quality Sound” still used like it’s a good thing?'
There are plenty of recordings out there that do sound fantastic, including the odd commercial artist. I think there is a general trend to 'loundness' though, and unfortunately as pointed out by the parent this seems to be driven by the available of cheap, crappy music hardware (honestly, do we need a $10 CD player? Just because it can be done is not a reason to do it. Surely the purchaser could ferret around in the couch a find another $5 bucks to get something better?).
The poster's 'sound quality' argument was qualified by the use of 'major labels' though. Plenty of indie musicians do give a damn about their sound quality.
As always, vote with your wallet, however hard that can be sometimes.
Patrick
But stupid record labels are killing the media using ancient business models and really bad business skills.
Most labels sit on a valuable back catalog, and surprisingly many just let it sit there. No re-issues. So, if you discover a new band, chances are that you might be able to find the latest release in your local record store, maybe one more title as well. Sometimes an online store might sit on an additional title. The rest? - Well, you're out of luck. That is... until you Google for it. Pirated copies are usually available on the net of every title ever released. So people end up downloading illegally - because they have no choice. They simply have no way of paying for it.
There's also the issue of geo-discrimination, i.e. releasing stuff in one territory only. The issue is less of a bother with physical media because you can buy it over the net and have it shipped. But electronic-only releases? - You're out of luck. For instance, I wanted a certain EP that was released electronic-only and only in the US. I can see it in iTunes but cannot buy it because I'm in the wrong country. It's been two years now but it's still not out anywhere else. It's a Christmas thing so every year in November or December (2008 and 2009) I searched for it unsuccessfully, but this year (2010) I found it pirated and grabbed it. The artist is on twitter so I asked her how I could compensate her and instead of me sending her a dollar (about twice what she'd get from a sale) she suggested sending the money to 'her' charity which I did. I actually sent ten dollars because one dollar is rather pathetic. So the biggest loser is... the label. They didn't want the sale and so they didn't get it. Kinda stupid business practice, huh?
But new titles also often end up being pirated, here mostly due to the stupid practice of 'boosting' through prereleasing new titles weeks or months in advance to radio stations and reviewers. The idea is to create a 'feeding frenzy' leading up to the general release so that it'll sell massively in the first few days, sending it to the top of the sales charts, something that often leads to even more sales. It used to work but today people won't wait. The hits quickly gets recorded or copied and put online, and people don't have to wait for the general release. They can just grab it (illegally) off the net and that's what they do. Then they listen to the track again and again until they tire of it. Some time later, the song gets released officially and nobody buys it because they've all 'been there, done that'. Then the label cry "piracy kills the business!" and shut down CD plants. But it's the prerelease concept that's killing the business. Piracy just fills the void where the labels fail.
But give me a CD any day. I love the physical media. But I usually already have the music when I buy the CD - because I've also downloaded it days/weeks prior to the general release, usually to test it, but also because I grow tired of waiting.
Oh, and listening posts at the record shops are also going out of fashion; the only way to 'test' an album before buying is to either listen to super-crappy worse-than-a-bad-phone-connection 30-second samples of unrepresentative parts of the songs online, or to download a full pirated copy from the net. Guess what most people choose to do? - Right. There's really no choice. Again the labels have an epic fail because most people don't bother buying it afterwards (I do though but it's because I'm conscious about it).
"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." -- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) --
Said 20$ per 20 or so musics is not going to go off the price of said musics, though - it's just going to add a bit of extra lining to some already fat pockets.
What a depressingly stupid machine.
At 18 million months per CD, I am not surprised that they needed to shut it down.
But then, I don't expect much in ways of actual submission quality by someone spamming slashdot with his personal blog so he can make money: http://slashdot.org/~coondoggie/submissions
When CD's first came out most were incredible as the engineers tried to make them fantastic. Companies like Mobile Fidelity sound Lab released albums that stunned people. I have several Ultradiscs of old analog recordings that blew away the best turntable setup I could find.
You have me interested, kind sir. Do you happen to have any specific titles as examples of what you were referring to, where the CDs were mastered so well that the sound was stunning? I'm interested in trying to see if I can find one now and compare to the sound of current CDs. I'm also familiar with the fact that they're making discs louder while sacrificing quality, and it would be interesting to hear a disc that was made to utilize the full range of the sound to compare the differences.
My most recent upgrade (from a Sempron 3000 with an ATI 9600Pro) was to be able to play 1080p h.264 encoded music videos without stuttering. Funny enough, that computer came about because a K6-2 just wasn't good enough to handle DVD quality Xvid/DivX music video files. And the K6-2 came about because the 6x86 I had before it sucked at playing MP3's (terrible FPU on those chips).
Now I'm waiting to see what a Phenom II X4 can't handle.