since Alan Davey has been brought up

[Jonathan Smith]

I agree with you. I will buy digital if I can. Mp3s are fine
on portable players but not as good as you really want.

I gave up LPs two decades ago. They probably sound better  than CDs if you
have a good  enough system and don't  scratch  them but I am not at all
convinced they are better than SACD/ 24-96/192 quality.


On 27 August 2013 21:13, Carl Edlund Anderson <cea at carlaz.com> wrote:

> On 27 Aug 2013, at 07:55 , Jonathan Smith <smithjm77x7 at GMAIL.COM> wrote:
> >
> > That means 320 bps usually-- well well below CD quality. Surely FLAC does
> > not take that much bandwidth. He must have recordings in at least CD
> > quality.
>
> Yeah, but I'm not sure that he is as familiar with the digital music
> market as he might be.  Sure, lots of people just want a random compressed
> file that they can download and play directly in their phone or whatever.
>  I mean, a well-made AAC or MP3 at 256-320kbps sounds pretty decent in many
> circumstances. (And better than a 5th-generation cassette copy of something
> that came of a low-quality record player or commercial radio -- which is
> the kind of sound quality with which I grew up! ;)  But fans especially
> (and who is gonna be buying Alan's stuff other than fans?) will want HQ
> stuff -- otherwise places like Bandcamp and CDBaby wouldn't go to the
> trouble of providing lossless downloads.
>
> I mean: I don't think of digital downloads as a convenient accompaniment
> to something that I own principally on physical media; I think of physical
> media as ways of distributing audio recordings before there were
> better/faster ways of doing it. :)
>
> Sure, it's not the same "experience" as going to a record shop and buying
> gatefold vinyl. But having a pizza delivered isn't the same experience as
> hunting a mammoth either. Times change. :)
>
> Cheers,
> Carl
>
> --
> Carl Edlund Anderson
> http://www.carlaz.com/
>