chowkwan%priam.usc.edu@usc.edu (Raymond Chowkwanyun) (02/11/91)
Did you enjoy the Mercury releases on CD? Curious to know how they would sound on LP? Chad Kassem of Acoustic Sounds thinks Reference Recording will be releasing Mercury on LP's this summer. Don't count on it, though. LP's are getting very hard to make, so expect delays. e.g.: The Water Lily records Maihar and Lily of the Nile were delayed for months. I finally got mine and found there was a skip on track 1 of side 1 of Lily of the Nile. I took it back to Cardas who replaced it with a good one (after checking out several bad ones). Apparently they had a problem with some of the later pressings. If you got a defective Lily of the Nile - return it now. This was a limited edition pressing of 2000 units so there are only so many good ones left. Jim Boyk is also having trouble getting his latest LP done (a recording of Pictures at an Exhibition). In a previous posting, a long, long time ago, I mentioned that Sony and Phillips were working on a new CD standard. There was a tidal wave of mail from angry netters, indignant that I could drop such a rumor without supplying juicy details. (Well, OK, it was tidal wave of two - thanks Jacob and David for confirming my existence. "I receive email, therefore I am"). Jim Boyk was the original source of this rumor and he got it from a completely reliable, totally anonymous recording industry source. So as long as I had him on the phone, I quizzed him some more about the new CD standard. He said he had few details but Sony's been showing a 20 bit CD mastering system for at least a year. The sampling rate is at least double the current 44.1KHz and hopefully quite a bit higher. When will it appear? Jim's guess is two years at the outside. I think we'd all welcome a better digital standard (except perhaps those that rushed out and amassed a huge library of "perfect" sounds). My question is, "What is the economic incentive for Sony/Phillips to market such a system?". After all, current CD is a medium that's wildly popular and a huge financial success. Why jeapordize that with a new CD standard that would only confuse the mass market, alienate retailers (who now have to stock two types of CD's), and probably only appeal to the very small market of buyers who actually care about sound quality? The mass market has shown in its rejection of Beta and videodiscs that, beyond a certain point, quality doesn't sell. Phillips in particular has shown an unerring instinct for the lowest common denominator. These are the people who brought us the compact cassette and almost, the 14 bit CD. (Thankfully, Sony talked 'em out of it or we'd really have seen people running out of music rooms with hands over their ears). On the other hand a really bad CD system might have meant that vinyl would still be with us. Sigh, you just can't win. -- Frito