Rock: well recorded bass...60s/70s

Hi The goldenear,
I would agree that the medium for music will change. Who can be bothered with manufacturing CDs, transporting them etc.

I am not sure you can say "It’s strange they never tried to improve analog like they do digital I guess the room for improvement wasn’t there as compared to digital."

They tried to improve tape many times. All sorts of noise reduction and compounds for the tape itself. Lets not forget multihead tape machines,dolby A/B/C/SR/DBX . As for the humble TT they are still fooling around with arms and motors.

Digital is still reasonably young in its development. I think it has come a long way in 25 years or so. Terrible to very good, and probably better than analogue.

Best to leave the audiophile world with all its fog of misinformation and inexperienced opinions and look at cameras or computers to see the level of obvious change. The decoding of the 0s and 1s has become an art. Some people swear by importing an original CD into their computer and then reburn it for better sound on their Hifi.

Every year digital equipment gets more and more refined and cheaper. While CD is in its final throws, listen to a top of the range player from 6 or 7 years ago and compare it to a new more modest priced player (using good equipment!). night and day.

Chadeffect what about 8track, yes talking about "tape" agreed YES many different "upgrades" were tried. the biggest bonus I believe was that you could record and tapes take up less space, gee kinda like digital.

Lindisfarne/Jaybo,

How about tossing in Stackridge "Pinafore Days" and "Extravaganza".

Also Camel "Moonmadness", Caravan "Waterloo Lily", and McCartney "Band On the Run".

Also "Bridge Of Sighs" Robin Trower and a lot of early Savoy Brown and Ten Years After.

12-04-08: Pdn writes:

I'm done buying any older recorded CDs (i.e. 60's, 70's, even 80's) unless they're in HDCD or SACD format or they've been digitally remastered to 24 bit.

I'm exactly the opposite. I've been buying the original releases of CDs (typically made in Japan or West Germany) of a number of artists that I have all the remasters of (Roxy Music, Eno, Dire Straits, Springsteen, Steely Dan, post-ABKO Stones) and I much prefer the sound on those "first pressings".

After the initial releases there were a lot of poor versions either badly made or badly mastered, and those are not what I collect - those are often easily beaten by a "modern remaster".

But most remasters compress the signal and crank up the volume (louder is better, right?) and the originals are much sweeter and have more dynamics. The CD players of today are significantly better than machines of 20 years ago, but the discs aren't.

Regards,

The goldenear,

I had forgotten about the humble 8 track. I have not even seen a tape in a very long time let alone an 8 track.

A friend of mine told me the other day that his 8 year old son went to see his brother and came back and said "wow uncle richard has these amazing big black CDs"!

I suddenly felt old...