As if the entertainment industry, more recently the video and music industry, couldn’t be more behind the times, completely lost of their true demographic, and utterly clueless and incompetent when it comes to anything digital, they all come out swinging to surprise us over and over. The latest and most ridiculous attempt at world dominance comes in the form of CMX, a new file format that various sectors of the entertainment industry are putting their weight behind. Apparently this decision took several years of brainstorming between many high up exec’s to get to this point. Have they have forgotten about MP3, you know, the universal standard even if it is a bit dated? Even still, there are plenty of others such as AAC, Ogg, and FLAC just to name a few. So why bring out another new file format in a world that is literally drowning in them?
I would consider myself an audiophile. I love music, all kinds spanning across many genres and many languages. Whenever I hear someone blare a song that is of horrible quality, it makes me wince and I find myself noting every flaw that I can hear. When possible I try to get at least 256kbps mp3 or even better…AAC for my music downloads that go on my portable devices. For desktop use I use flac as I have several terabytes of storage so I have more than enough room for the large file sizes. However, I am apparently of a dying breed. According to an article on Oreilly, the younger generation that is leading the digital music revolution could more or less care less about audio quality as they think mp3′s sound perfect. Now granted, if you have a 320kbs mp3 file, I even have a hard time discerning it from a lossless file many times. But it’s sad and shocking a the same time. How can they think that a low quality mp3 file is good? It’s nothing to lose sleep over really as long as when the music industry eventually moves to a more digital only method in the year 3011 that they don’t forget the loyal and vocal audiophile group out there. But the article brings up an interesting point; do the “audiophiles” of a particular time period gravitate towards the method of transmission that was available at the time? For the golden oldies it is vinyl and large file sizes. For the new generation it is either flac, aac, or mp3 with an mp3 player of some sort. Clearly very different formats each having their pros and cons. What are your thoughts. Do you think audiophiles are a bunch of quacks? Or do their arguments have some merit? What are you? I highly encourage you to stop by Oreilly as the article is a very good read that will make you sit back and ponder about all things digital.
Source: Tech Dirt
