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And the interesting thing about that lossiness is that it
IS noticeable (to the eye and ear) and that hasn't stopped
it from being deployed because download times are far more
noticeable.
What is irritating is that they are becoming the 'preferred'
archival format (Why look, MA! I can put a thousand mp3s
on my $.40 disc now, instead of just 20 songs! My Lord!
Adam is podcasting and this thing fits on my hip!) Cheap
is done cheaply. Quality? The customer has to care.
We orbit the customer's Jones'. In the beginning was the single song
foil tube, which if turned slowly lasted a while but if turned quickly
tore rapidly but it was quickly replaced by the wax cylinder which
lived longer but scratched permanently which was replaced by
the two inch thick vinyl with a song on one side which begat
the vinyl disk with recordings on two sides. A vinyl disk album had
a lower fidelity when the long play (LP) was introduced over the
slower two song vinyls. Both were less than high speed tape.
High speed tape was less when it expanded from 2 or 3 to 16 tracks (thus
eliminating the rube goldberg early multi-track decks made of
multple decks). Then the High Fidelity disk was introduced only
to be outmarketed by the 45 singles which made a market for
more HP discs thrived alongside the high fidelity 8-tracks which
were replaced by the lower fidelity but recordable cassette decks
which died when the CD came along.
In the begattings, there is a really boring list of names but
a fascinating orbit among the attractors of size, speed, quality
reliability, and production cost.
Content? Every time the format changes, the content owners made
money moving the content to the new format. Ah, but today, no
one owns it because we keep copying it freely, and when a format
changes, only the fan who really really cares will keep that
content alive.
Pray for Sam Cooke, Louis Armstrong, and Ray Charles.
len
From: Rick Marshall [mailto:rjm@zenucom.com]
ps bad exmples, jpegs, mp3s. etc are highly compressed binary formats.
almost no redundant info at all. in fact as they are lossy compressions
they actually have less information than the originals.
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