Monday, December 11, 2006
Music On a Steeek!
Wink: He is so ___ that it takes him an hour and a half to watch 60 minutes.
78s
Those of you that remember them, remember them well. The scratchy sound of music produced by a jumpy vibrating needle at the end of a huge arm, that somewhere usually had a dog associated with it. The music reduced to not much more than noisy static after about three plays or so. Drop one of those and it shattered into a zillion pieces.
Vinyl Records
33 1/3 and 45 rpm records held the stage for quite a few years. I often wondered who the dude was that selected thiry three and a third for a speed. Why not thirty three? Why not thirty four? Then there were the large hole single song forty fives. Grooves got smaller as time progressed and the sound still deteriorated after multiple plays, but the old joke stayed the same. "How many grooves on a 33 1/3 record?" Of course there is only one, that goes from the outside in, unlike a modern CD where they are read from the inside out.
Reel to reel tape
I had several of these. Hours of music on just one tape. Just don't try to find a song in the middle, the counter numbers were never accurate. And make sure you fast forward or rewind the tapes every year or the music disappears by itself. Sound quality was right up there with true studio sound, some say even exceeding todays high end CDs and DVDs, although it is hard to compete with today's THX and 7.1.
Cassette tape
"You will never get good sound out of one of those little things." I remember those conversations well. And in less than a couple of years Philips was well on their way to cornering the market. Now you could find songs in the middle if you had the right kind of deck to count the gaps. But all that fast forward rewind motion soon stretched the music notes from a B sharp to a D long.
CD
These little critters called Compact Disc slid in there so quickly that a generation didn't even know those above existed. The pressed commercial ones were almost indestructable unless you were a complete moron with fingers and scratches. First thing you know you could record them yourself using your PC. Pirate copies became rampant, then some worldly folks warned they are only good for 100 years. That was long enough for me. I would probably get tired of it by then anyway.
DVD
Well now we have music, video and numerous other stuff on the same size CD now called a DVD. The arguement as to whether the letters stood for digital versatile disc or digital video disc began and ended with DVD. They went from expensive to cheap, this colour lasts longer than that colour, single to dual layer, now you can burn your own lableless labels. Still to be around for a few more years, we now head to the solid state sound bin.
iPOD MP3 players, etc. (solid state music on a chip)
Now we are in a holding pattern with hours to hundreds of hours of music on little gigets (they are not big enough to be gadgets) of puny little solid state devices that make Dick Tracey's watch look big. What is next? Music on a pin? Maybe that story of your tooth making funny sounds is on its way to reality.
This work by NSCAVE is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License
78s
Those of you that remember them, remember them well. The scratchy sound of music produced by a jumpy vibrating needle at the end of a huge arm, that somewhere usually had a dog associated with it. The music reduced to not much more than noisy static after about three plays or so. Drop one of those and it shattered into a zillion pieces.
Vinyl Records
33 1/3 and 45 rpm records held the stage for quite a few years. I often wondered who the dude was that selected thiry three and a third for a speed. Why not thirty three? Why not thirty four? Then there were the large hole single song forty fives. Grooves got smaller as time progressed and the sound still deteriorated after multiple plays, but the old joke stayed the same. "How many grooves on a 33 1/3 record?" Of course there is only one, that goes from the outside in, unlike a modern CD where they are read from the inside out.
Reel to reel tape
I had several of these. Hours of music on just one tape. Just don't try to find a song in the middle, the counter numbers were never accurate. And make sure you fast forward or rewind the tapes every year or the music disappears by itself. Sound quality was right up there with true studio sound, some say even exceeding todays high end CDs and DVDs, although it is hard to compete with today's THX and 7.1.
Cassette tape
"You will never get good sound out of one of those little things." I remember those conversations well. And in less than a couple of years Philips was well on their way to cornering the market. Now you could find songs in the middle if you had the right kind of deck to count the gaps. But all that fast forward rewind motion soon stretched the music notes from a B sharp to a D long.
CD
These little critters called Compact Disc slid in there so quickly that a generation didn't even know those above existed. The pressed commercial ones were almost indestructable unless you were a complete moron with fingers and scratches. First thing you know you could record them yourself using your PC. Pirate copies became rampant, then some worldly folks warned they are only good for 100 years. That was long enough for me. I would probably get tired of it by then anyway.
DVD
Well now we have music, video and numerous other stuff on the same size CD now called a DVD. The arguement as to whether the letters stood for digital versatile disc or digital video disc began and ended with DVD. They went from expensive to cheap, this colour lasts longer than that colour, single to dual layer, now you can burn your own lableless labels. Still to be around for a few more years, we now head to the solid state sound bin.
iPOD MP3 players, etc. (solid state music on a chip)
Now we are in a holding pattern with hours to hundreds of hours of music on little gigets (they are not big enough to be gadgets) of puny little solid state devices that make Dick Tracey's watch look big. What is next? Music on a pin? Maybe that story of your tooth making funny sounds is on its way to reality.
This work by NSCAVE is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License
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