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Answerman - Is It Safe To Replace My Discs With Streaming?

One of the great ironies of modern technology, IMHO, is that while video quality has gotten much better over the years with newer tech like DVD and BD, audio has had the opposite problem. With few exceptions, everything since the invention of reel-to-reel tape has been a step down in quality in exchange for convenience.

Call me old-fashioned, but I cannot understand how people are okay with not actually owning the things that they buy. I will only say yes if services provide DRM-free direct downloads and the ability to watch whatever I want, whenever I want without the threat of losing anything.

Oh, yes. REGION BLOCKING.

Modern DAWs and audio interfaces are a micro invisible step down down for like a billion steps up in processing possibilities and sonic creativity on top of another trillion steps up in convenience. We're almost 40 years past like early 80s digital audio tech that legit sounded bad.

With each step of reel-to-reel to LP, LP to cassette, cassette to CD, etc, we've given up quality for convenience.

Shiflan wrote:

With each step of reel-to-reel to LP, LP to cassette, cassette to CD, etc, we've given up quality for convenience.

Sorry, but at some point to B.S. becomes too deep to remain silent. I thought at one point even the most die-hard analogphile wouldn't make a claim that ridiculous, but I see I was wrong.

I'm old enough to have lived through all of those transitions (except reel-to-reel to LP, as the LP first came out in 1948), so I tend to have a different perspective than many who are younger and have a fascination with formats that are more rare these days.

Even in Japan very few Japanese ever buy a DVD or a BD.
Only hardcore otaku collectors will spend money on them. Before streaming age, they would rent the anime if they want to see it again. and now streaming are taking the place of those renting stores. After all, the space on Japanese homes are not as big as the west and physical media is very low on the list of things to have at home.

Unless is for a matter of collectors (i, myself are one of those hardcore collectors), renting and streaming will take care of anime needs.
Of course there are the risk of license endings and streaming sites going down. But lets hope a streaming company will take the place of the other, and rescue the licenses.

That said, it is a fact that the compact cassette is capable of better fidelity than a CD. Of course a lot of stars have to come into alignment to make that happen: it needed to be a relatively modern casette recorded with "Digalog", the tape needed to be undamaged, and you needed a tape deck which had not only the correct type of heads but also the tape type sensor to determine which to use (most lacked those features). Most cassettes are not of that quality, but the point is that the format is capable of it. If you want to learn more about it, "Techmoan" on YouTube has some excellent videos on the subject. I have no affiliation with that channel; I just found it very eductional. I had assumed, incorrectly, that cassettes had worse fidelity than a CD. It turns out that for many cassettes the opposite is true.

Even if I bought into that assertion (and I don't), the real key is "Of course a lot of stars have to come into alignment to make that happen". In the real world, that simply doesn't happen with any consistency. Also, analog media wears in normal use, and gets worse with time.

The simple fact is that even if one could have a cassette system that gave better fidelity than CD, CD isn't the pinnacle of digital audio.

A lossless 24-bit 96 KHz recording from the same master would blow away any analog recording medium.

As for "processing possibilities" and "sonic creativity": those are both fancy buzzwords for distortion. We don't need either. They are nothing more than lipstick on a pig.

Shiflan wrote:

As for "processing possibilities" and "sonic creativity": those are both fancy buzzwords for distortion. We don't need either. They are nothing more than lipstick on a pig.

You have to explain this because it sounds like you're saying all digital effects are nothing but distortion and lipstick on a pig. That's such a fringe opinion that you never hear uttered from audio professionals: that all VST and VSTi and every digital effect or digital plugin in their DAW is nothing more than "distortion" and "lipstick on a pig"

I listen to podcasts with people who have won Grammys and Oscars for audio engineering and have been a part of billion dollar grossing movies... like none of them say this. They all work in DAWs. They all use plugins. That's just such a wild opinion. Please clarify. I must have misinterpreted it.

If every tape deck was a Nakamichi, and if every audio cassette was a Type IV Metal manufactured like a high end TDK tape...

Alas in the real world, we had studios running off pre-recorded cassettes on Type I Ferric, of decent quality it must be said as they were perfectly fine for listening on a Walkman on the way to school. They were also fine to listen to on cheap to mid-range hi-fi equipment, although once you shelled out for a tape deck with Dolby, and the ability to switch tape types, they didn't sound as good. The problem was that they'd use the lowest bidder to manufacture them, with cheap, lightweight, bonded shells, and low quality mechanisms.

But if you have an old pre-recorded VHS anime that never got a DVD/BD release, you might want to make sure it's archived digitally. If necessary do a tape transplant, swapping the reels from the pre-recorded shell to a quality blank tape shell before backing up, lest one day you find that your Manga Video release of Junk Boy doesn't play any more.

As for CDs, they were the perfect audio format for the average consumer until the nineties, when the 'Volume Wars' started, and all that dynamic range and fidelity was just wasted on who could make their CD the loudest. There's a reason why collectors try to find the original release of an album over the later re-releases.

Absoloutely yes. That's the whole point of my frustration. Why aren't formats like that being used for consumer audio more often? Instead we get formats which are both lower bitrate AND are affected by lossy compression. We're certainly not getting 96 khz 24 bit uncompressed when we stream audio online, listen to our Mp3 players or smartphone playlists, etc.

Those formats are out there, but they are niche (just as vinyl now is). When you take into account where most people are listening to their music, higher quality music would be mostly wasted. Even in a luxury vehicle, the noise floor is going to be considerably higher than a quiet listening room, much less in a crowded subway car. That's also one reason why so much music has its dynamic range compressed. People can't hear the quiet parts in their typical listening environments, and don't want far louder passes blasting their eardrums because they've already increased the volume to overcome background noise.

At least Blu-ray discs have the option of high resolution lossless audio.