The best camcorder is the one you have with you

There’s a common idea amongst serious photographers that it’s a good idea to always have a camera on you, because you never know when you’ll see the stuff of a great picture. Seeing as how it’s often impractical to always have an SLR or other larger camera with you, many photogs adopted smaller point-and-shoot cameras they could easily toss into a bag or even keep in a pocket. In the digital age these are often called “serious compacts,” because they offer enough control for the experienced photographer without being enormous.

In fact, many photographers over the years have argued that the moment a great photo happens is far more important than the gear you use to shoot it. That’s why many will contend that your camera doesn’t matter or that the best camera is the one you have with you.

While these ideas seem to be quite common in still photography I don’t often hear them repeated in video circles. It could be that photos and video often are thought of differently, or perhaps serious videographers look upon video shot in the moment to be too much like bad home videos to be taken seriously. Or maybe it’s because it’s a very recent occurrence that there are video cameras that are as small as compact still cameras.

Home video camcorders are about thirty years old now, but for the first ten years of their existence they were big shoulder-mounted affairs. In the 1990s the birth of 8mm, VHS-C and then miniDV led to so-called “palmcorders.” Yet, they were still a little bigger than most film SLR cameras. That is to say, one might take it on vacation to record special moments, but only a dedicated few would take one on a walk through the park or to a party.

In the early 2000s there were several miniDV camcorders shrunk down to about the size of a couple of paperback books. While this seems to have encouraged more folks to carry camcorders with them, the relative delicacy of their complex tape mechanisms and the need to carry blank tapes still served as discouragement from keeping one in your bag all the time.

By 2005 the ability to record video crept into most point-and-shoot digital cameras. At this point I think a lot of average folks started to take more video, primarily because it was simple and built into the camera they were hauling around anyway. But the quality of the video still was lacking compared to a decent dedicated camcorder, often with much poorer sound. So while many more videographers played around with their digicam’s video function, it doesn’t seem like they were taken too seriously.

Now we’re finally at the point where there are good camcorders that will fit in your pocket. Whether it’s a Flip cam, a Sanyo Xacti like I use, a point-and-shoot digital camera with HD video or even an iPhone 4 it’s possible to shoot quite credible video using a device only slightly bigger than a miniDV videocassette. Thus begins the era wherein serious videographers can indulge in taking “video notes” of daily life and events in the way still photographers have been doing for decades.

I’ve realized that’s the real value to small camcorders, having the ability to easily shoot video without a lot of planning and schlepping. As a result I think I’ve shot more video with my Xacti VPC-CG10 in the last year than I shot with my miniDV camcorders over the previous nine years. The miniDV camcorders, as relatively small and easy to use as they were, still required more forethought and planning, along with carrying an extra bag for the camera and tapes.

What I’ve really enjoyed is shooting short “slice-of-life” videos that last no more than a few minutes once edited down. Not coincidentally, this is the perfect length to share on the web. So I also think that having the ability now to share HD quality video so easily on the web contributes to the value of the pocket-sized camcorder, where before the venues to share such video widely were quite a bit more limited.

I’ve got quite a bit of video in the queue waiting to be edited. Luckily, sometimes I end up with a solid 3 minutes that requires minimal editing. As an aside, while I still lament the lack of a proper microphone input jack in most small camcorders, I continue to be amazed at the quality of the sound recording in my Xacti VPC-CG10. It truly rivals the quality of dedicated digital audio recorders like the Zoom H2. The Xacti doesn’t quite measure up at the low-end, and emphasizes the midrange a little more than I’d like. But a little equalization cleans that up pretty easily. I now notice that the new Sanyo VPC-PD2 that I wrote about yesterday sports some fairly serious looking microphones that I am curious to hear.

Here’s a short video I shot of the classic post-punk band Mission of Burma at the Wicker Park Fest street fair here in Chicago a couple of weeks ago. This was shot hand-held from the crowd in the street. There was no room for a tripod or monopod. The only reason I was able to grab the video was because I had the camera in my bag and could easily grab it. I’m able to hold the Xacti much more still than a Flip style camcorder because of it’s pistol-grip design and flip out screen which makes for a more stable two-handed grip.

The sun was starting to go down so I switched the CG10 into black and white mode which I think works better in low light. I accidentally underexposed it a little, as I’ve learned that the LCD screen isn’t the most accurate way to judge exposure, so I had to boost the gamma in post. This makes the video a little more contrasty in a way that I like and is more film-like, but it may not be everyone’s cup of tea.

Audio, Audiophiles and the Aesthetic Experience of Medium

Back in December I bragged about predicting the onset of the cassette revival, and five months into 2010 it looks like that revival is in full swing. Articles about the renewed interest in the lowly compact cassette have appeared in as wide variety of sites as the Chicago Tribune, UK Guardian and Pitchfork. Much of the press interest seems to be driven by the wave of cassette-only releases and cassette-based labels, combined with the novelty of renewed interest in a medium many believed to be wholly abandoned and discredited.

This past week my Radio Survivor colleague Jennifer Waits posted about a recent piece at PopMatters by Jay Somerset titled “The Day the (AM) Music Died.” In it Somerset makes the case that the particular sonic dynamics of AM radio–mid-range heavy without low bass or high treble–dictated the production quality for records that hoped to be Top 40 hits:

To sound good on mono AM, you needed a dense, reverberant, everything-at-once sound rather than a dynamic, stereo recording that only sounded good on FM, which the majority of people never even listened to.

Somerset brings his argument into the future by noting how lo-fi production techniques that harken back to that AM radio sound have become popular again amongst indie rock artists. This modern take on it creates,

the sort of sound that reminds you of something, but is inherently different. In other words, while it conjures the past, it’s only retro in its top-coat sheen and could never be mistaken for a song from another era, nor charged with being mere nostalgia art.

Nevertheless Somerset’s analysis resonated with me because I’d been thinking quite a bit lately about the aesthetics of medium. On the one hand, I am a bit of a (cheapskate) audiophile. I enjoy well recorded and reproduced sound. On the other hand, I’ve been a media producer long enough to know that the pursuit of some kind of absolute fidelity is asymptotic, if not Quixotic. Every choice made by a recording engineer, electrical engineer and equipment designer has some kind of impact on the sound. That result of that impact may be more or less pleasing to some people. But any impact means that the sound reproduced by your speaker varies in any number of ways from the original sounds created before the microphone (and that doesn’t even take into account strictly synthetic sounds that were never recorded by a microphone).

Here in the second decade of the 21st century we are well into the second century of recorded sound. In this short history we’ve seen five different fundamental analog recording media: wax cylinder, shellac records, vinyl records, wire and magnetic tape. Vinyl and magnetic tape have themselves seen several forms, like 78 rpm records, 45 rpm singles, reel-to-reel tape, 8 track tape and the cassette tape. The move to digital in the last thirty years has also seen several different media: digital audio tape, compact disc, hard disk and flash memory. With digital the medium is often less important than the format of the data, whether it’s 44.1 khz of 16 bit samples on a CD or 128kbps of compressed MP3. Whether analog or digital, what remains true is that the medium is operative and important.

For listeners, the delivery medium is the variable we have the closest relationship to, and the most control over. We can choose to listen to a CD or an MP3. Twenty years ago people often made the choice between cassette or vinyl. While the choice was often dictated by economics or convenience–vinyl doesn’t play so well in a moving vehicle–the quality of sound was and is often an important consideration. At this point I want to refine the use of the word “quality” with regard to sound. Often we think of sound quality as meaning having greater fidelity, or more closely resembling the original sound recorded in the studio. However, quality also means the nature and dimension of something; a leaf may have the quality of being “green.” Similarly, a reproduced sound may have the quality of being quiet, bass-heavy or sibilant. When speaking of playback medium, then, the notion of sound quality in this respect is important.

Audiophiles primarily argue about the relative fidelity of a playback medium and therefore its ability to reproduce what is believed to be the full simulacrum of the original performance or recording. Of course, the question is never that simple, since everything in the playback chain, from the player itself to amplifiers, speakers and the cables that connect them have some role to play as well. Yet, it’s generally believed that the source medium dictates the fundamental potential for fidelity and the nature of the sound quality heard over speakers or headphones.

Amongst commonly available formats, in the audiophile world CDs and vinyl records are generally held to have the greatest potential for fidelity and sound quality which is relatively uncolored and unmodified from the original recording. Each medium has its adherents who present good arguments for their superiority, or potential superiority. By comparison, cassettes and MP3s have garnered cautious acceptance as inherently compromised media that might be coxed to provide adequate fidelity in exchange for convenience and other lesser reasons.

What seems to mystify many audiophiles is why anyone would prefer cassettes (or MP3s) for recording or playback if things like mobile playback and other logistical practicalities were factored out. I contend that’s because of principle concern of audiophile pursuits is this quest for perfection, for fidelity, overall. If a medium introduces some degree of coloration or change in the sound on hears that’s a deviation from fidelity, it’s inherently a distortion of the original intent of the artist, producer or engineer.

Nearly three decades into the CD era audiophiles generally recognize that even the best vinyl or CD playback systems introduce this deviation from fidelity. Yet, they still nakedly pursue that elusive fidelity all the more fervently the more minute–and costly–each improvement becomes.

At this point in time the average adult music lover has likely personally experienced at least three distinct playback media. Someone who’s eighteen probably has heard cassettes, CDs and MP3s. Someone who’s thirty probably had vinyl as a child, and might have used 8-tracks, too. And now, years after LPs and cassettes were supposed to be dead and replaced by digital audio playback, they’re still with us.

Instead of a Darwinian evolution of playback medium towards something–like CDs–which is inherently superior to those that came before, today we have a menu of playback media before us. It’s as if Cro-Magnon and Neanderthal men were browsing next to us Homo Sapien Sapiens at the supermarket and making themselves available on Match.com.

With the vinyl revival in full swing, the music fan in a good indie record shop again has the choice of whether to buy an album on CD or vinyl. She also can choose to hit up the iTunes music store for an AAC music file or browse to Amazon for an MP3. Heck, she might luck out with an MP3 download code coming for free along with that vinyl purchase. And with the cassette revival just starting to heat up she might be able to find a few more limited releases on cassette, too.

So what dictates the choice amongst these media? Obviously, practicality is the biggest factor — if you don’t have a turntable or cassette player then a record or cassette isn’t likely to be your first choice. The next factor is probably whether or not the release is available on other formats. If you’re coveting a vinyl-only, cassette-only or MP3-only release, then your choice is made for you.

After pragmatics, the biggest choice is aesthetics. If you can get an album or CD or vinyl, why choose vinyl when CD is presumably the fittest medium? I say for myself that I like and enjoy the particular aesthetic peculiarities of vinyl records. From the physical dimensions of the cover and the record itself, to its sonic quality when played back on a decent turntable, I like whatever changes or distortions that vinyl records introduce into the sound playback experience.

It may be that vinyl records have more fidelity, that CDs represent more of an aberration. Or it may be that vinyl’s tonal curve more closely matches the human ear’s sensitivity. It might just be some potent combination of nostalgia, age-related hearing loss and psychology. In the end, it kinda doesn’t matter, as long as I like and enjoy the sound and experience.

Back to cassettes, I have both fond and not-so-fond memories of them. Rocking a favorite mix tape in the car stereo is a favorite memory, while fishing out a string of disembowled tape from a broken deck is not. But I can also distinctly remember buying an album on CD that I’d only ever heard on cassette and being profoundly disappointed. The apparent clarity and revealing quality of the CD seemed to ruin the experience I’d always had with the tape.

We live in an era of aesthetic choice. Other artistic media are experiencing the effects of this array of choices, too. Photographic film, even Polaroids, are seeing a revival a decade into mainstream digital photography. Visual artists are embracing letter press and other supposedly antiquated printing methods. High definition video still hasn’t displaced 35mm motion picture film, while 8mm movies are seeing a small underground resurgence. Not too many people are making the arguments that these older forms are better than the newer. Instead, they’re just different, and sometimes more interesting or pleasing.

For most of the short history of recorded sound the goal of fidelity has ruled the roost. But with the cycle of obsolescence for playback media becoming ever shorter, there’s also a growing weariness with being forced to abandon a particular medium just because something else is purported to be better.

Those of us who never dumped our vinyl records knew that they still sounded good, even if different from CDs. Why upgrade something that works?

In 1992 that seemed like an almost farcical, luddite attitude. Today, when people feel like they’re being asked to abandon their CDs and DVDs that replaced their VHS tapes and cassettes, it starts sounding more logical. Beyond mere economics, we’re left to consider what we liked about these media to begin with.

Vinyl sounds different than CDs just like watercolor looks different than oil paints. If fidelity was the ultimate consideration, then why didn’t photography obliterate portraiture?

The music lover now faces a richer world where she can choose how she hears her music, and the musician can choose how its delivered. Those choices have both meaning and quality. The choices give both more control over the experience.

What’s wrong with that?

Turntables at CES: Still Mostly Cheap Plastic

The annual Consumer Electronics Show has come and gone, with the usual array of new gadgets ranging from the cool to useless, to vaporware. Over at RadioSurvivor I covered some of the news relating to radio. Along with radio and a metric ton of iPod/iPhone accessories, there were some new vinyl playback devices at CES, too.

Stereophile magazine covered the high-end arena of $4500 phono cartridges and $11,000 turntables, otherwise ignored by the rest of the mainstream electronic press. What caught the typical reporter’s eye was a bevy of new cheap plastic turntables studded with USB connectors and memory card slots.

The LA Times’ music blog notes the models offered up by retro-plastic purveyor Crosley and space-age plastic pusher Ion. As I’ve noted before, the actual record-playing parts of these “new” turntables are tried-and-true knockoffs of the flimsy plastic turntables previously seen on your mid-80s compact stereo.

Bloggers seemed particularly excited by the Crosley Revolution turntable, which, as Retro-Thing points out, is a knock-off of the 1980s Audio-Technica AT-727 Sound Burger record player. Although R-T’s James Graheme recalls that it has “an almost mythic reputation for high-quality sound,” my own recollection is that they were fiddly and mediocre at best. Sony had its own versions of the platter-less record player in the 80s, too, the PS-F5 and PS-F9. Because their unusual design both have also achieve a near-mythic status. But mythic does not necessarily mean good.

Again, I must argue that the “innovations” of linear-tracking and platter-less turntables in the 1980s contributed to the widely-held perception that vinyl provided low quality sound. I’m not so certain that these approaches were inherently wrong-headed. Rather, I’m inclined to blame their application in increasingly light-weight plastic components. That’s why none of these technologies have been seen again since the 1980s… until now, that is.

CNet’s audio blogger Donald Bell demonstrates his understanding of this in his post on the new Audio-Technica USB turntable that is a knock-off of a much more proven design:

Compared with most of the flimsy, plastic, belt-driven, disposable toys that get passed off as turntables these days, my 1200 is a 20-pound metal beast that will probably outlive my grandchildren. …

the Audio Technica AT-LP120-USB ($429 list, $299 street) offers a shining ray of hope. Clearly built as an homage to the classic Technics SL-1200MK2, the AT-LP120-USB seemingly offers old-schoolers a way to straddle the analog and digital music realms in style.

Unfortunately Bell is one of few voices of reason outside the high fidelity press.

It’s a bit of shame that the simple, no-frills but high-quality designs like those from Pro-ject and Music Hall aren’t more widely available or covered. Myself, I rock a five-year-old Pro-Ject that shows no signs of fading. If one of the mass-merchandise manufacturers were to knock-off one of these, rather than a discredited 80′s plastic wonder, it would do a wonder for the nation’s ears and the long-term viability of vinyl.

Frankly, I’m a little amazed that the vinyl renaissance seems to be thriving as long as it has, especially given how many of the new turntables out there are a bad 80s flashback. Some might argue that the prevalence of MP3s has numbed the country’s ears to true fidelity. I don’t quite buy that argument. MP3s can actually sound pretty good on decent equipment, and the dominance of digital audio has trained us to be less tolerant of added noise.

My best guess is that the continuing vinyl resurgence is really based on sound quality, in as much as vinyl sounds simply different than CDs or MP3s, and can sound better on good equipment. I also think it’s due to the inherent physicality of the LP. It’s bigger size makes the whole album package somewhat more aesthetically pleasing than the CD jewel case. But the starker contrast stands out when compared to the intangible nature of MP3 files.

As someone who is enjoying the increased availability of new vinyl records, I guess I shouldn’t complain too loudly about the plastic turntables, since they appear to be sparking demand. I just hope that at least a few enthusiasts newly awakened to vinyl’s allure will listen past their entry-level IONs or Crosleys and consider a nice used or new turntable that will really let the music shine through (and will also last decades longer, I bet).

Environmental Encroachment on the mediageek radioshow – sound, pictures and video

In a change of pace from the otherwise talk-dominated radioshow, my guests this week were the magic circus band Environmental Encroachment. They played several songs in WNUR‘s multi-use studio number 105, in addition to our interview. The show is now available for listening and download at the radioshow site.

Because the EE marching band is also a visual presence I took some photos and video [YouTube Vimeo] of the performance to give you a sense of what it’s like when the band plays out.

Big thanks go to my old friend and EE trombonist Dan Merlo for suggesting the idea, along with everyone in Environmental Encroachment for coming out to the show. Also, big thanks go to WNUR Airplay team members Lori Crasnic–for making all the arrangements to have the band in–and Lucas Seagall–for engineering the music portion of the show.

Happy 5th Birthday to Podcasting!

With the word “podcasting” firmly entrenched in the English language it’s a bit hard to believe that the medium is only five years old. Wired’s This Day in Tech marked yesterday, Aug. 13 as the fifth anniversary of the start of Adam Curry’s Daily Source Code, the first widely popular podcast.

This Day in Tech dutifully notes that the first actual podcast came one day earlier in the form of RSS pioneer Dave Winer’s Morning Coffee Notes, but that it was Curry’s podcast that quickly popularized the idea.

And what was that idea in the first place? The notion of having a regular radio program online was not remotely new by 2004. It was no problem listening to popular public radio programs like This American Life online. Even my little old radioshow was posted for download before Curry and Winer coined the term “podcast.”

The key innovation of podcasting was to make it easy to subscribe to a feed so that the programs would be downloaded to your computer automatically. No more checking a site over and over to see if a new show was posted. Simple, but effective.

The interesting thing about podcasting is that this little bit of tech has become so ingrained in our culture already that “podcast” has become pretty much synonymous with “online radio program.” When podcasting became a hot trend in educational media, ’round about 2005 and 2006, I presented several workshops on the topic. My first order of business was always to point out the simplicity of the concept and also clarify the fact that a podcast, by definition, refers to a series of audio programs that one can subscribe to, not just an audio program posted online.

The reason I felt the need to clarify so strongly is that as an educational media producer I started having many clients come asking for us to podcast a lecture. I would always ask if they were planning to have a series of lectures or other programs. And more than half the time, the answer was “no, we’re just having this one.” My response would be, “so what you really want is to record this lecture and make it available on a webpage?” And the typical answer would be, “Yes, that’s right, we want a podcast.”

Ugh.

Of course, it was no problem to record the lecture and post the MP3 online (nevermind the clients who didn’t want their “podcast” to be downloaded–just streamed). But there was no reason anyone would subscribe to this “podcast” since there would never be episode #2. It was also a little frustrating because clients would act as if it had never been possible to post audio programs online before, despite the fact that my department had been offering it as a service for at least five years by that point.

Eventually I gave up on explaining the difference because it became obvious that nobody cared, and the difference didn’t really cause any problems.

The very positive legacy of podcasting is that the idea greatly revitalized and popularized online radio, spawning thousands, if not millions, of new audio programs created by amateurs, professionals and creative people of all types. But make no mistake, radio producers had been posting their audio online since the invention of the web. In fact, one the pioneering archives of online community radio content, the A-Info Radio Project, started in 1996–eight years before podcasting–and continues to go strong today.

So, Happy Birthday to the podcast, and may a million more be born and syndicated.

Cassettes Are a Weird Way to Distribute Music?

My, oh my, where has the time gone. Sure, cassettes might be nearly obsolete and decidedly retro. But weird?

Wired’s Epicenter blog recently compiled “10 Weird Ways to Distribute Music.” But, really, the list might be more accurately characterized as “10 Unique Ways,” rather than weird. Seems that some popular indie bands like Dirty Projectors are now releasing some albums on cassette again, making the format #8 on Wired’s list. At least blogger Eliot Van Buskirk had the good taste of linking to my somewhat tongue-in-cheek 2007 post titled, “Next Big Retro Thing: The Cassette Revival.”

Of course, distributing new music on cassettes stands out only because the format’s been largely abandoned by the mainstream. I emphasize new music because I’ve certainly seen cheap cassette compilations of country classics and oldies still turn up at truck stops and dollar stores. Cassette-only labels were an underground music fixture in the 80s and 90s due to both the low cost of doing limited edition releases and the relative ubiquity of cassette players.

While mostly overtaken by CD-Rs and downloadable MP3s, cassette labels have survived. Plustapes is a Chicago-based label putting out new independent music on cassette each in limited editions of a hundred or so. Earlier this year the music blog Expressway to My Skull compiled a list of active cassette-only labels and places to find them.

Perhaps the greatest advantage of releasing music on cassette is that it’s possible to record and duplicate albums entirely in the analog domain easily and cheaply without a computer. If you want to get fancy you can find a cassette four-track at a thrift or pawn shop so you have more recording and editing flexibility. Then get a dubbing deck and you’re set. It doesn’t have to be about analog fetishism — it can simply be about being cheap.

Perhaps the enduring charm of the cassette has to do with its fundamental nature as a recording medium that is very accessible, but imposes real practical limits on its duplication. It’s easy for nearly anyone to duplicate several dozen cassettes using inexpensive dubbing decks, but quantities of much more than that require commercial duplicating services. Like ‘zines, cassettes can be a near-mass medium, where you can reach hundreds with a work that the creator still fashioned and touched with her own hands.

Now that we can take for granted the ability to reach a nearly unlimited audience with a perfectly-duplicable MP3 file, there’s something to be said for a sound medium that can’t be had by anyone with a ‘net connection, that didn’t roll off an assembly line. It doesn’t have to be a case of internet vs. cassette; I think there’s room for both to coexist, even in symbiosis.

On This Week’s Radioshow: German Experimental Radio

I’m excited this week to have as my guest Daniel Gilfillan, an associate professor of German studies and information literacy at Arizona State University, and author of the new book Pieces of Sound: German Experimental Radio. What’s interesting about this topic is how early German radio enthusiasts, scholars and producers sought to make that medium something more than a means for broadcasting light entertainment and, eventually, propaganda. In his book Gilfillan makes crucial connections between these early experiments and our contemporary multi-media world where we still stand in that disputed territory between producer and receiver.

This interview airs live on the mediageek radioshow this Thursday, May 21, at 9 PM Central Time on WNUR 89.FM in Chicago. You can tune in live online at wnur.org.

Before and during the program please send me your questions and comments via email (mediageek(at)gmail.com) or via Twitter, and I’ll read them on air.

Cheapskate Audiophile

As a geek videophile audiophile there’s the tendency for that interest to be conflict with my critical side that questions our modern consumerist capitalist economy. I believe that balance can be found, as long as one accepts that it’s nearly impossible to be entirely non-comsumerist without checking out of modern technological society altogether. Yet, it is possible to temper the consumerist side while still having enthusiasm for good audio and video and the aesthetics of sound and vision.

In particular, I think I’ve always been an audiophile. I’ve been obsessed with sound and music since I was a child, and I’ve always been interested in finding better, more pleasing, more realistic sound reproduction. While in high school in the mid-80s I bought my first component cassette deck, amplifier, CD player and turntable. All of this gear was decidedly “mid-fi” by audiophile standards, but still whet my appetite for sound that was significantly better than the boomboxes and discount-store compact stereos used by most of my peers.

While I’ve been willing to spend some amount of disposable income on audio gear, I’ve also been hestitant to lay down the kind of cash required to buy in to what is considered the “high-end” of audio gear. This is the world of $1000 CD players, $5000 turntables and $10,000 speakers. Certainly, the kind of craftsmanship and design excellence that goes into many of these products has real value. At the same time I think much of it is the audio equivalent of Ferraris and Lamborghinis — semi-impractical exotica meant to give the affluent something to spend their money on, while giving the less-affluent something to aspire to.

My experience in slogging around in the low-end of the high-end has proven to me that good sound does not have to be an exotic rare commodity only for the rich and golden-eared. In fact, very pleasing and accurate sound can be had for as the same or less money than it costs to buy a home-theater in a box system at Wal-Mart or Best Buy.

There are multiple paths to being a cheapskate audiophile, many of them DIY. The more industrious or crafty amongst us build some of their own gear, either from kits or from scratch. Others perform minor modifications on mass-market gear that results in sonic gains.

Possessing neither the skill nor patience to take these routes I instead keep my eyes and ears open for the bargains — gear that achieves unusually good results at an unusually low price-point. The ‘net is a real boon for all of us cheapskate audiophiles by giving us easy access to this sort of info that otherwise would come by word-of-mouth, technical books or low-circulation specialty magazines and newsletters.

To demonstrate I’ll show off my current cheapskate system which I use in my home office for music listening and audio production. The core cheapskate item in the system is the Sonic Impact T-Amp, which I’ve written about before. It’s a cheap, plastic $25 stereo amplifier based on a new digital amplifier design that rocked the audio world three years ago by producing sound more like an amp some 20x its price. The T-Amp is rated to produce 15 watts of power, and I think that’s probably stretching it. More likely, it delivers around 8 watts into most speakers. But they are still an incredibly clean, transparent 8 watts.
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Spinning Indie, a College Radio Blog

Once in a while I get comments here on the mediageek blog, and it’s especially great when they aren’t grammatically disastrous ads for v1agrA. So imagine how glad I was to receive a comment on my post about college radio from Jennifer Waits, who writes the Spinning Indie blog which is all about college radio.

Jennifer is on a mission to visit or do virtual visits and interviews with college stations in all 50 states, and it makes for great reading. Apparently she made an in-person visit to my backyard at WNUR last month, interviewing the general manager, Taylor Dearr. I’m sorry I wasn’t around for her visit.

Thanks to Jennifer’s virtual tours I’m learning about lots of stations I’d really never heard of that are bringing great radio to places like Fargo, Fairbanks and Stony Brook. It’s helpful to be reminded of the common challenges that college and noncommercial stations face, whether it’s managing music libraries or the vagaries of streaming, and possibly picking up some new approaches.

I hope Jennifer keeps up the posting.

Don’t Be Spooked by Threats of Obsolesence

One of the unfortunate effects of our capitalist economy is the constant drive for new and better. Well, really it’s mostly new and novel, with better being a secondary consideration. That means obsolescence is something that constantly looms over industrial products, especially tech products. But obsolete does not equate with useless or worthless–not remotely.

With the rising popularity of digitally downloaded music, whether through file sharing or an online store, the imminent death of the physical compact disc continues to be predicted. The cries have become louder in the last few weeks as Atlantic Records announced that its digital download sales (which includes ringtones) surpassed its sales of physical CDs.

I’ll admit that these days I probably listen to more MP3s than CDs, especially on the go. Yet, I still have a collection of over 1000 CDs, most of which I have not ripped to MP3–my MP3 collection is comprised mostly of purchased music and stuff I’ve traded with friends. I do still listen to CDs, especially when I want to listen critically. I realize that absolute fidelity is only one factor in how we choose to listen to music, it’s still important to me and many other people. While MP3s and other compressed files can sound quite good, they are no match for the uncompressed source.

That’s why I’m not surprised to read a Wired Gadget Lab post directing me to this story from the UK’s Telegraph reporting that the sales of portable CD players there are up 50 percent over last year. Amongst the reasons they cite are price ( I’ve seen units here sell for $15 or less) and the fact that many people find using a computer to download to an MP3 player to be difficult.

One very obvious reason I want to add to the list is that maybe a whole lot of people aren’t interested in giving up their CDs in the first place. If you aren’t interested in dealing with the iTunes music store (especially if you don’t want to pay the iPod price premium) or any other online music store, and you don’t relish the task of having to rip and compress your CDs yourself I can see how the supposed convenience offered by MP3 players and digital files can look pretty darn inconvenient.

Folks over 30 can probably remember when they got their first CD player, moving over from listening primarily to vinyl LPs or cassettes. I knew a lot of people who all but dumped their analog music collections for CDs in the early 90s, lured in by the promises of better sound quality and convenience. By and large those promises were fulfilled, compared to the lo- to mid-fi sound experiences most people were accustomed to getting from inexpensive cassette and record players. But it was also a pretty big cash outlay for a lot of people, many of whom replaced their music collections with the same titles on CD as the popular press sounded the funeral march for the soon-to-be-obsolete vinyl LP.

Now twenty-six years after the introduction of the CD we have none other than the New York Times writing about the resurgent interest in vinyl records, sales of which are up 36% this year. Weren’t these fragile, scratchable, pop-and-click-filled analog dinosaurs supposed to be a curious historical artifact by now?

Myself, I never abandoned my record collection. When I bought my first CD player in 1987 I also bought my first decent turntable. From 1988 through the mid-90s I really cleaned up buying used vinyl for a song as other music lovers dumped their obsolete analog archives. I still buy both used and new vinyl, though since the big purge of the early-90s the good stuff isn’t quite as cheap anymore.

I’m sure a fair majority of the folks who dumped their vinyl for CDs have never looked back. But I’ve talked to and read about plenty more people who are buying new turntables to play their last remaining albums that never turned up on CD, or who are even going out and rebuying LPs they got rid of because their CDs just don’t cut it.

So keep this in mind when you hear bloggers and the press declaring the end of the CD and all physical media. It makes complete sense to me that sales of portable CD players are up because I can believe there are plenty of people who just want something will play all the music they’ve acquired without all the hassle of ripping and storing MP3s. Why “upgrade” to MP3s and iPods if CDs still work just fine and you’ve already got an investment in music on CD?

Of course, I do think the trend towards digital files and mass storage is real and underway — I do have a couple hundred gigs of MP3s on a server at home. But these technologies tend to live side-by-side for far longer than the technorati recognize. The cassette didn’t kill the LP, the DVD still hasn’t killed VHS, and the iPod won’t kill the CD. Even formats often joked about as comparative failures lived almost as long as the CD has–from laserdiscs (in production 1978-1999) to 8-tracks (1964 – 1988)–and still have their fans using them everyday.

The newest and shiniest technology can be very seductive, but utility is what wins the day. For a lot of formats there eventually does come a day when finding a working player becomes harder and harder. But for something as ubiquitous as the LP, cassette or CD that moment is a long way away.

The folks snapping up CD players this holiday season aren’t technophobes or luddites, they’re just reasonable folks who maybe don’t want to foolishly abandon the shiny little discs they spent good money for.