Man and his formats

I sometimes it funny to think of the format arguments we create for ourselves in this (largely-) digital age, in the sense of there being an A versus B argument between one platform and another, and the semi-ethical, semi-philosophical positions that we take up as a result of an affinity with a particular technology.

The first obvious example of this is the modern desktop computer. Most people know of my very deep, almost obsessive interest in all things Apple-related. I guess you could say I'm a zealot for the Mac, but this started out from a time when the Mac was simply vastly superior to the competing technologies vying for space on our desks. The obvious point of comparison is to Windows, which took a very long time to catch up with some of the basic DTP functionality (What You See Is What You Get, anyone?) that the Mac has offered from day 1, and Windows still leaves a lot to be desired on so many levels that I don't have the patience to go into it now. I'm getting frustrated - do you see - because, from my own reasonably extensive experience, I know that there is a better alternative than what most people use, because most people, for largely historical reasons, have chosen an alternative technology. Actually, the reasons for the Mac's qualitative superiority were also largely historical, and quite beautifully accidental. If you read 'iCon', the Steve Jobs biography, you'll find out all sorts of wierd little details, like the fact that the onscreen fonts were made to correspond to their printed equivalents at the insistence of Jobs, as he'd earlier worked at a typesetting company. Had this obsessive character not been behind the Macintosh (and luckily for us Mac users, still is), the end result would probably have been quite different for users of all desktop computers today. Now there's a legacy.

But back to my point - the first computer I owned was a Commodore Amiga 500. It was a good machine for gaming, but the sense of it being a real computer where you would store files and generally get things done was held back by the market price the machine was being pitched at. Without a hard disk, the Amiga was never going to catch on in any sort of serious office environment (apart from on Neighbours, where, strangely, Paul Robinson seemed to run his office with one for many years after Commodore had effectively folded). Twenty or so years later, you could say that Microsoft has won the war on the desktop. Nevertheless, to the day I die, I will still be a Mac user. Do you see what I'm saying about this almost irrational attachment to a device once you realise that despite the market it offers something that you would not be able to enjoy form a competing product.

Now, you may be wondering where I'm going with this. You may think I'm going to talk about Betamax. Well, only briefly - I actually had to buy a Beta player for my uncle a year or two ago so that he could play back some Beta tapes of a television broadcast featuring the cathedral choir (that I sang in, and my Dad conducts) from teh early eighties. I'm pleased to say that those tapes were still perfectly intact, and thanks to eBay we were able to find a perfectly servicable player to play them back. It may have cost a fair bit - you're going to see this happen more in the future, as formats move faster and recorded (visual, audio, textual) outputs look in danger of being left behind by the march of technology - but it was well worth buying and worked perfectly well, despite the absence of SCART and so on.

Where I'm actually going with this is to CDs, DVDs and their successors and predecessors. After purchasing a few cassette singles in my earliest years, the main audio format of my lifetime has been the CD. Children of the Walkman generation like me rarely bought records, but the CD offered us a compelling new format, full of sound and convenience improvements. It's interesting that they didn't complete the really high-res format they had set out to achieve (settling instead on Red Book because they were rushing to complete a superior product that would suck the bottom out of home-taping and the differential between 16-bit digital sound and the 24-bit holy grail probably wasn't economically expedient. We've seen some higher quality formats appear since then, like SACD, but they haven't made much of a dent outside of the classical market.

What's most fascinating to me is where we've now arrived in terms of music formats. As well as the CD, the most popular retail music format, most of us also have sizeable collections of mp3s/AACs. The advantage of portability has been enough to persuade most people to give up the highest resolution digital format (CD) in favour of a good approximation of CD. And of course the mp3 has liberated music distribution from physical media altogether, if you ignore the fact that you will probably need to clone your data to a new hard disk every five years or so to secure its integrity. I buy albums from iTunes when it's the best option - for example, in the past year I've bought iTunes albums by Faraquet, Cursive, The Appleseed Cast, Les Savy Fav, and even Nine Inch Nails. Sometimes there are albums that are out of print or relatively hard to find (like '3/5' by Les Savy Fav) which you can still get on iTunes, and that's incredibly valuable. Being as we have no independent record shop in Winchester, it's also handy being able to get albums like the Faraquet one, and to get them without having to wait to receive them through the mail. There's not a hugely discernable loss in quality from the CD version with well-encoded AACs like these (even if the bitrate could probably do with being a bit higher) of these kinds of bands, but I wouldn't go buying a lot of classical music this way (because of the frequency variation, which is where mp3/AAC makes some of its space savings), nor would I buy something of the musical/production complexity of an album by The Mars Volta, which I think you'd need to listen to on vinyl or CD to properly appreciate. In fact, I'm hoping to buy 'Amputechture' on vinyl, once I can find it at an affordable price.

So, now I come to the point of this post (in a way). Records are having a bit of a renaissance in my life, since I put on a This Aint Vegas single that I have had lying around for a couple of years but not been able to play due to not having a record player. Listening to this vinyl single, taken from an album that I also have on CD, made me remember just how different vinyl sounds to the digital formats. Beyond the obvious technical differences between an analogue and a digital carrier format, there're are a whole lot of subjective differences, and even putting my relatively inexpensive new Pro-Ject Debut III through my old modest all-in-one hi-fi, I've found myself falling in love with home listening all over again. There's particularly something about how a drum kit sits in the mix of a typical rock band recording that just sounds much more convincing and faithful to how things really sound when you hear them live. And all of this is just looking at vinyl as a playback medium - there's a whole separate, interesting argument as to the preservation of analogue recording methods for archival and sonic reasons (see Steve Albini lecture).

I think I'll leave it there for now, but I hope this post makes you reconsider any skepticism or prejudice you may hold for either old or new formats for enjoying entertainment. Truth be told, there's a some kind of advantageous property in most of them (apart from using Windows over the Macintosh - I still scratch my head in bafflement over that one).

If you're interested in reading any more about the vinyl side of things, I highly recommend you head over to read The Vinyl Anachronist. What that site lacks in graphical flair, it more than makes up for with good, opinionated content.

Edit - I also found this rather amusing site with listing frivolous and over-expensive products for the audiophile market today. Well worth a look.