Hi Resolution Music Players on the Horizon

[Bob Olhsson]

Originally Posted by YYR123

But it has to be affordable or the masses won't go for it

This is a fallacy. Less than 10% of "the masses" in the United States bought the biggest selling album of all time. Recordings have always been a luxury and never a commodity. The way you sell a luxury is by increasing perceived value and price is always part of perceived value. The test of a recording is "would it make a great birthday present?" The industry has mostly been failing that test since the LP went away.

[Seafoam_Green]

The legal eagles stuffed it up for everyone many years ago when sony first tried to introduce the mini disc (ie; before CDs came out)

..., in the year or two that it got held up in lengthy court battles due to "those against" claiming "potential copyrite breaches by mini disc users" (because MD is a read and write player) CDs came out during the mini disc was still held up in court battles and obliterated the market .

If it wasnt for the court holdups , CDs would never have existed as we know them now , and 22 bit Mini disc would have been the standard issue format.

[YYR123]

Originally Posted by Bob Olhsson

This is a fallacy. Less than 10% of "the masses" in the United States bought the biggest selling album of all time. Recordings have always been a luxury and never a commodity. The way you sell a luxury is by increasing perceived value and price is always part of perceived value.

Pure hardware is what I mean - 2k for a home stereo ? This is where my comment was directed
After all wasn't beta max better than VHS? And yeah I know two music groups that are still rock'n mini disk's and swear by them

Think about this if a iPod was $2,000.00 you wouldn't see them everywhere would we? And apple wouldn't have over a billion downloads. It's kind of like the principle of what Sam Walton's used as his business model.

So I'm not saying it wouldn't be better I'm saying @2k your severely cutting off a lion share of the market (so pose the question would the business model succeed)

Biggest selling album of all time - w/o me googling it I would have to say Mr Jackson's thriller?

[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by Seafoam_Green

The legal eagles stuffed it up for everyone many years ago when sony first tried to introduce the mini disc (ie; before CDs came out)



..., in the year or two that it got held up in lengthy court battles due to "those against" claiming "potential copyrite breaches by mini disc users" (because MD is a read and write player) CDs came out during the mini disc was still held up in court battles and obliterated the market .



If it wasnt for the court holdups , CDs would never have existed as we know them now , and 22 bit Mini disc would have been the standard issue format.

I don't think that had anything to do with the decline of the music industry or wide spread use of less than "HD" audio etc. Don't weigh too much into 22bit vs 16 bit, the practical implementations of the minidisc were not great ATRAC artifacted and overcompressed music, not much better than bad MP3s, and largely deployed on low end consumer portable players. The cheap earbud crowd listening on cheap players listening to over compressed noise ain't the market for audiophile music. True if minidisc had got out earlier we might had seen more fixed/home audio units before CD was able to saturate that market, but the short play times would have been an issue. And the sudden availability and cheap cost of CD-R just drove incredible demand for the format. The mass market is not driven by audio quality anyhow, it's market reach, convenience, availability, total cost etc, etc. and a physical format like minidisc has to reach bulk popularity to survive. Luckily relatively open digital distribution formats do not need to, so vendors like HDTracks can exist and hopefully thrive, and I can load their music on my Mac, stream at 96kHz/20+bit to my high end DAC and listen on my 'audiophile' home audio system. And so can anybody else today who really cares about high end audio quality. It all exists now, if it was going to be a big market I expect it would already be one, it's not. I suspect it's mostly us same folks who have been buying 96kHz DVD-A and SACD discs for the last decade or so.

Sony has an incredible history of developing interesting technology, often trying to lock users into it, some times succeeding, often failing. CD big win. DAT was originally intended to be a consumer play, Minidisc, Betamax and all it's variants, SACD/DSD, Memory Stick, and so on, they did manage to be on the winning side of the Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD battle but by then streaming video made the whole argument a lot less interesting. Now we have 4K video coming, forget having any physical distribution media there.

[dave911]

Originally Posted by Bob Olhsson

This is a fallacy. Less than 10% of "the masses" in the United States bought the biggest selling album of all time. Recordings have always been a luxury and never a commodity. The way you sell a luxury is by increasing perceived value and price is always part of perceived value. The test of a recording is "would it make a great birthday present?" The industry has mostly been failing that test since the LP went away.

+1 The cheap packaging for CD's took away any potential for creative presentation.
When I bought "Big Bambu" way back it came with world's largest rolling paper, that's marketing!

[DonaldM]

Originally Posted by YYR123

But it has to be affordable or the masses won't go for it

Well, the article said as much.

Still, the new website alone is unlikely to convince people to buy, acknowledged John Newton, founder and president of Soundmirror, a recording studio with over 80 Grammy nominations.
“We’re fooling ourselves if we think that the person who has an iPod plugged into a desktop device while they’re cooking or cleaning is ever going to experience or care about high-res sound. They want that in the background. And that’s a different market than the people that listen more seriously to music.”
The weight of a consumer electronics giant might make a difference. Sony recently threw its weight (again) behind high resolution audio, with a new line of consumer electronics such as the HAP-Z1ES, a music player that can handle DSD files and won an innovation award at this year’s CES show.
“With a giant multinational company getting behind this and exposing it to people, we’re going to see if people take to it,” Chesky said. “The masses are now going to have an opportunity to be exposed to high res.”
And like a longtime McDonald’s eater who finally tastes foie gras, ears may be permanently changed, Chesky said.
“We’re in the fine food and fine wine business.”

So the question is, once the masses are exposed to hi res...will they ever be satisfied going back? Or, how do you keep them on the farm, once they've been to Paris? Like all technologies, the hi res consumer devices will eventually come down in price an be affordable. Sony is a giant and a leader...others will follow and the law of competition will take over.

[Darryl Ramm]

I think the experiment has been done before, the masses had CD and they went for over compressed crappy MP3.

[Bob Olhsson]

No, MP3s went for "free." That's the elephant in the room.

A physical product could be made well worth buying to a fan. It also needs to be made well worth selling to retail stores which means at least a $25 price tag. Something lots of people don't realize is that most people wouldn't even cross a mall to save a buck on a CD. If they wanted it, they bought it. If they didn't, they left it. All of this overpriced music mythology comes from consumer electronics industry press releases.

[Darryl Ramm]

And when the free run died down Apple took over, and then the streaming guys came along. Market reach, convenience and price.... Now most young folks I know predominantly listen to music via streaming services like Spotify or Pandora. Etc. The playlist has replaced the Album format--unfortunately, I was hoping that Apple would have done better with their enhanced Albums but that died quickly/was mishandled. Us (mostly older) folks who want to buy HD digital, or premium high end vinyl, etc. can already do so. But they are niche markets. To some extent new players can fight between themselves for customers in that niche and maybe they can expand it a bit but the genie is out of the bottle and you can't put it back in.

[nst7]

Also, the Betamax vs. VHS thing was a little more complicated. I believe VHS had a longer record time (more convenience), and also, the developers of VHS (JVC and maybe Panasonic) decided to license the technology to other manufacturers (giving more choices/lower cost) whereas Sony didn't.

After that, I think Sony learned their lesson, and from then on licensed their technology (CD's, Blurays, etc.).