I confess. I am a diehard vinyl fan. What the almost three decades old compact disc gave us in terms of convenience came at the cost of a loss in fidelity (as well as artwork). The CD was also marketed as scratch free which, based upon the drum machine-like skipping sound I’ve experienced many times, is a dubious feature. I have yet to A-B a CD to a vinyl recording of the same music and where the vinyl didn’t come closer to the original warmth and true sound of the instruments and vocals. Sure, there are the occasional ticks and pops but I’ll take those along with the superior sound.
I never threw out a vinyl record jacket, poster or liner notes. They were the tangible value-adds to my purchase of the music itself. Sure, CD’s are smaller and more can be stored than vinyls in the same space. But, it’s heartbreaking to see how many jewel cases and the mini art in them are tossed after the CD has been burned and put into a multiple CD storage binder. Then MP3’s trumped even CD’s and music quality went even further down the tubes. CD’s were replaced by free downloads. The iPod and iTunes sealed the CD’s fate. Now, fans could cherry pick only the songs they wanted to hear and the musical portfolio of artists became ignored. Fans became consumers and were no longer connoisseurs.
And, now, MusicDNA is being heralded as the next step “up” in this evolution of listener formats. As far as sound quality goes, claiming an improvement over MP3’s does not start my engine. And, centralizing upsells like artwork, liner notes, lyrics, tour info, blogs and videos which are available elsewhere if you search the Net, is, like CD’s-to-vinyl, just hyping convenience all over again. It might help the record industry at large by allowing these additional purchases to be made only on top of the original purchase thereby eliminating piracy, still leaves the sound quality of the music itself no farther along.
Tags: artwork, CD, free downloads, iPod, iTunes, liner notes, MP3, musicDNA, poster, vinyl