Linkage:
- Telecoms play both sides
"For regional phone companies like Verizon, Qwest, SBC and BellSouth, privacy services like Caller ID and Security Screen are a growing revenue source.
(Via Slashdot.)But the phone companies aren't just trying to thwart sales calls. They're also helping telemarketers make them."
- Unspooled
"Ones and zeroes sound better than oxide-coated polyester or vinyl. Everyone accepts this, driven to fits of pleasure by iPods, and wonders why a few of us can't: the kid in Best Buy who shrugs when you ask if there are any Sony Walkman cassette players left besides the two models on display; the car salesman who is pretty sure you can't get a cassette deck as standard equipment in any of the models on the lot; and the record industry, which saw the cassette format slip to below 4 percent of total music sales last year (from a mid-1980s high of 66 percent) and has decided to let it quietly hiss into history."
(Via Metafilter.)
I own relatively few pre-recorded cassettes compared to vinyl LPs (and 45s) and CDs. I stuck with vinyl as long as possible and jumped to buying CDs. (My AIWA bookshelf stereo, with its single CD tray, was hella cool when I bought it more than a decade ago, but is now showing its age.)
But blank cassettes, used to capture segements of Brave New Waves or Night Lines from CBC-Stereo, and to make mixed tapes to suit every mood and occasion, I had plenty of. Ah, the joy of making tapes....
Sure, I now have a CD burner, and wouldn't go back to recording cassettes, but there's a lack of spontaneity, a lack of involvement, in making your own CDs. Much of the process is automated (ripping other CDs to WAV or MP3 files), and you don't get to hear the CD in progress while it burns. Even recording something off the radio no longer requires hair-trigger reflexes on the "Pause" button; just open up the sound file in a WAV editing program after the fact, and you can trim it far more precisely than you would have dreamed possible.
Funny thing is, today I just bought a CD to replace a piece of music I had on cassette (must, must learn to stay out of Sonic Boom on Bloor St.). There was a track I recorded off Night Lines from a group called Electronic Dream Factory back in the early 90s, a jaunty little piece of synthpop called "Johnny and May Ling". Whereas the song might have faded from memory had I not captured it on tape, I've been able to listen to it again and again over the years.
The CD sounds crisp and clean and I can play it as loud as I dare to. However, the taped incarnation has a brilliant lead-in, in the form of M+M's "Several Styles of Blonde Girls Dancing" (requested by yours truly via the Night Lines request line), that won't be duplicated -- unless I digitize it myself, of course. Which one will I listen to more? Hard to choose....