| Re: Purpose of Music Formats? [message #66805 is a reply to message #66803] |
Thu, 31 March 2011 08:12   |
Adveser
Messages: 434
Registered: July 2009
Location: USA
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Illuminati (1st Degree) |
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| GoodVibrations wrote on Wed, 30 March 2011 20:54 | Ok, I just don't get the reasoning for so many different music file formats. Is it because each music device, when first created, made up their own format to try to horde sales? Kind of like the VHS and ???? (BetaMax?) different format for tapes? In the end, the best sound and convenience win out anyway.
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It is more the case that industry(s) never like to appear to be technologically behind the times. Someone will invent a new and cost-effective method of playing content and the "industry" will have meeting to see what they will endorse. Disagreements result in format wars.
To make a long story short, when everyone in the music industry knows about and uses something superior to the consumer format, changes get made because they must. CD's were born out of the decision that around 1980 that digitally mixing an album was superior for most bands and it slowly took over. In order to preserve the quality of their superior masters a new format had to happen. To this day there is no reasonable upgrade to CD audio. SACD, DVDA, BR, ad HDCD provide additional resolution that while it makes the source material more accurate, can not be utilized in commercial radio or TV for technical reasons and can not work as a download when hi-res take about 2gigs for an album, making portability all but impossible because of the expectations and shrewd marketing of apple. CD is remarkably close to the result if mastered in hi-res in most cases.
Over the years it has been a matter of going with a newly developed format knowing that logically it will be replaced less than a decade later. You can't live in the future though. They didn't like downloading because they lost control. They wouldn't endorse something no matter how good, or how terrible but convenient if they can't apply a business model to it.
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