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Octo-core Atom @ 233GHz (ES)
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| You've not convinced me that £10 isn't a fair price, though, as I said, I agree with most of your other arguments. £10 doesn't even buy you a curry and a drink in a restaurant, so I just can't see how the same money is poor value when it gets you a copy of a piece of work a group of people have spent a year or more making. A copy that will last a lifetime, too. I believe Radiohead have already said it's not something they'll be repeating, haven't they? Not sure what the reasoning was, though. And while it's true that big names can make money from concerts and merchandise, the same isn't true of less popular artists or those not in the mainstream. Touring often leaves such acts actually out of pocket. Royalities from music sales are probably their sole source of income. Not all modern music (in the charts and available at Tesco) is rubbish. I'm not sure what the Channel Islands have got to do with it (they're not part of the UK, by the way, though they are "British"). The same sort of arguments probably apply to the publsihing world, too. Did you know that the author of a book -- the person who has actually made the product and puts the money in everyone else's pockets -- receives on average only about 10% of the cover price from each sale? Perhaps there should be a shakeup there, too. The snag is that the Internet has made barely a dent in book sales, so publishers have largely escaped the problems now faced by the music industry.
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Pentium
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I'm not convinced that Radiohead proved anything really, except that it's still very easy for people who have no idea what they're doing to screw up an MP3 encoding. I deleted the 'In Rainbows' albums after the first listening because it hurt my ears too much to listen to it.
The overall production, mixing and mastering standards that led to the eventual master recording were appallingly bad, so even going and buying the album on CD at any price wouldn't have made it sound significantly better. Being encoded to MP3 properly would still have helped though, and the people who made the official MP3 for this album were supposed to know what they were doing, but clearly didn't. Who in their right mind encodes a rock album in CBR at 160Kbps?! They obviously have no understanding of how MP3 and its associated codecs work.
This brings me back to one of Mitch's comments from earlier regarding the acceptable standard of quality for lossy downloads. If it's in CBR MP3 at anything less than 320Kbps encoded with any codec, then it's wrong. If it's encoded in VBR MP3 with LAME at any settings other than -V0 through -V3 with no additional switches, then it's wrong. I can think of many a legal site that doesn't guarantee this level of quality.
I think the music industry is in absolute shambles nowadays, but I'll still go and pay £10 if I have to in order to give me an officially stamped backup of the best that's on offer in technical terms to Joe Public. 
Cheers, Slipstreem. 
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MP3 Encoding for Audiophiles
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Octo-core Atom @ 233GHz (ES)
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I deleted the 'In Rainbows' albums after the first listening because it hurt my ears too much to listen to it. I suspect the same thing would have applied even if it had been encoded properly.
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Pentium
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Nine Inch Nails did the same thing with their last album and made it available in various formats including lossless FLAC and LAME VBR MP3 at -V0. It sounded hideous in any format due to the original waveform of the uncompressed version still looking like a square-wave rather than anything meaningful. I'm talking about very, very bad clipping throughout most of the album!
It's a shame when the equipment now exists in all major recording studios to make totally transparent sounding recordings that quite literally "put you there" when you're listening and it's all going to waste due to incompetent techies being put in charge of them. There are plenty of highly conscientious recording engineers around who know how to operate a digital recording studio properly, but it seems as though very few of them are employed by any of the major studios. Why?
Cheers, Slipstreem.
System specs: "Phoenix" - Intel C2D E4500 overclocked to 3GHz with ACF7Pro HSF on Volt-modded ASRock 775Dual-VSTA mobo (modded BIOS rev 3.10A and VNB=1.65, Vagp=1.8), 2x1GB Crucial Ballistix DDR2-800 RAM (3.0,3,3,8,1T @546MHz), Sapphire ATI HD3870 512MB GDDR4 PCIe graphics card overclocked to 850MHz GPU & 2.4GHz RAM. Powered by Hiper Type-M 580W PSU. Guess who likes overclocking on a budget.
MP3 Encoding for Audiophiles
Fun MPEG-4 Encoding Race
MPEG-4 Playback Enhancement Using FFDShow
How good is the Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro HSF really?
Boosting ATI Framerates with CCC (X700 on)
Optimise ATI Image Quality And Framerates With ATT (X1XXX Series under WinXP)
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Pentium
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Hi (PM exceeded). Perhaps, like certain monitor makers who employ quality staff with impaired colour vision, recording studios are employing folk with impaired hearing ?
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Octo-core Atom @ 233GHz (ES)
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| No, this is a known issue with modern CDs. Bob Dylan alluded to it once and was shot down in flames by people who didn't understand what he was saying. Most modern music is mastered at far too high a volume, resulting in the clipping that Slippy mentioned. Apparently it's because of radio airply. If your song is quieter than someone else's, it won't be as noticed. That means that the dynamics of the sound go out of the window. It seems the only companies not guilty of this are the ones with artists who are unlikely to get mainstream airply in the first place. (My original comment was meant to suggest that Radiohead are such a rubbish outfit that even supreme audio quality wouldn't have lifted the material out of the mire.)
Classic PCs
Original IBM PC (4.77MHz 8088, 256KB RAM, monochrome) · Original IBM PC XT (4.77MHz 8088, 512KB, 10MB HDD, monochrome) · Original Compaq Deskpro (7.14MHz 8086, 640KB, 20MB HDD, CGA graphics)
Home Computers
Commodore VIC-20 · C64 original · C64 Terminator edition · C16 · Amiga 500 · Amiga 600 · Amiga 600 HD · Amiga 1200 Acorn Electron · A3010 (Archimedes) · A4000 (Archimedes) Others Sinclair ZX Spectrum 48K · Dragon 32
Consoles
Nintendo Wii · GameCube purple (x 2) · GameCube black · N64 black (x 2) · N64 clear blue · SNES (x 2) · NES (x 2) · DS silver (x 3) · GBA SP silver · GBA purple · GBA clear · Game Boy Color clear · Game Boy Sega Dreamcast x 3 · Saturn · Mega Drive II · Mega Drive · Master System Atari 10-in-1 · Jaguar (x 2) · 7800 · 2600 wood-grain Microsoft Xbox 360 · Xbox Others Mattel Intellivision · MB Vectrex · GoldStar 3DO · Sony PlayStation (original)
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286
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Jason (30/07/2008)
You've not convinced me that £10 isn't a fair price, though, as I said, I agree with most of your other arguments. £10 doesn't even buy you a curry and a drink in a restaurant, so I just can't see how the same money is poor value when it gets youa copy of a piece of work a group of people have spent a year or more making. A copy that will last a lifetime, too.
I believe Radiohead have already said it's not something they'll be repeating, haven't they? Not sure what the reasoning was, though. And while it's true that big names can make money from concerts and merchandise, the same isn't true of less popular artists or those not in the mainstream. Touring often leaves such acts actually out of pocket. Royalities from music sales are probably their sole source of income.
Not all modern music (in the charts and availableat Tesco) is rubbish.
I'm not sure what the Channel Islands have got to do with it (they're not part of the UK, by the way, though they are "British").
The same sort of arguments probably apply to the publsihing world, too. Did you know that the author of a book -- the person who has actually made the product and puts the money in everyone else's pockets -- receives on average only about 10% of the cover price from each sale? Perhaps there should be a shakeup there, too. The snag is that the Internet has made barely a dent in book sales, so publishers have largelyescaped the problems now faced by the music industry.
We could argue about the worth of an album forever, with umpteen different examples of why it is or isn't value for money. One could argue that for £50 you can get a legit copy of Windows. Now how much work has gone into that, by how many people, for how long? How much does MS spend on R&D for it's new products? Isn't £50 a bit cheap then? Anything is only worth what people will pay for it Jason, and if people are now walking away from CD's (which I don't know they are granted), is that convenience, cost or both? It's a tricky one I agree. Personally I offered Radiohead £0 for there new album, as I would have had a quick listen on my PC, then gone out and bought the album. But they refused to give it out for nothing, so I haven't got it. (Thankfully, by the sounds of it - according to Slippy) If it was a good album, I would have willing spent £10, £15 or £20. However, gone are the days that I am going out spending anything on an album until I know it is good, and the reason why - because I don't have too. This is what the music industry has to accept I think. People will now try before they buy, because they can. I have hundreds of crap CD's that I bought on recommendations but I don't have to do that anymore. The record companies should realise though, that most people are honest and because somebody may download something off P2P, it doesn't mean that they won't get there couple of dimes for it too.
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