MP3 players

That's Joe Gastwirt. What about Bob Ludwig and all the rest of the big timers? I distinctly remember him and several others mentioning the 2 inch tape in an article in Mix. I'll look for it sometime............I know it's better to edit on a DAW, that has nothing to do with what's available on the internet in MP3. I also know that pop music is big on compressor/limiters and panning a flat 2 dimensional stereo "image"...and short on concerns of "fidelity to the original", especially if there was no original to begin with. They like to make it "translatable" to car audio with the top down at 80 mph!................The DAW world is great for musicians that want to get their music composed and into the market place. But nearly all audiophiles like minimalist recordings done in a real acoustic space with no compression/limiting, no digital sound space processing, etc. IMHO, the best recordings ever made were done in the golden age of stereo, with 3 omni mics spaced only a little bit apart, and direct to tape (more or less). Once you've heard one of these, you'll know what I mean. Not that I don't like modern music, but it certainly is fatigueing to listen to, even on the best/most musical systems.

You must not be aware of all the lawsuits against Napster and MP3.com. There is simply no way you'll have a higher than (or equal to) CD quality recording you can download off the internet for FREE. "From the original master tapes"...Just isn't going to happen. It may be that people stop buying aluminum CD's, and instead pay for downloading their own (in the next 10 years), but I wouldn't bet on that either. CD as it exists now will be around for quite a while longer, and if you shop hard enough, you can find many for cheap. If you like classical, many of the Naxos titles sound excellent, and they are only $5 a piece.

I'm fully aware of how many "modern" pop recordings are made, the varying fidelity notwithstanding. I also know that all the big time mastering engineers still archive on 2 inch analog tape. My assertion was that you'll not see it appear for free on the internet en masse. What you have is taken from a CD (sometimes an SACD perhaps), and not any sort of "master" that was used upstream of the process to make the the PCM redbook CD, or the SACD. That's what I meant. Don't get so defensive already...

I have both "Into the Labyrinth" and "Planet Drum". They're good percussion discs, but sound "processed/mixed", and are. Look, I know full well that 2 inch reel tape is not 2 channel tape, but I guess I need to look that article up. They were likely referring to archiving pre "mixed down" 16 or 24 channel master tapes, obviously. The point was that they didn't feel that any digital format was sufficient for archiving. That will probably change in the next year or two, though; who knows? Anyway, I'm not as uninformed as you might think. And Gateway does a few things wrong, I didn't mean to pronounce them as "almighty".

Yes, that is interesting. Also interesting that you might know Mr. Ludwig personally. I've not found the article yet, but if I remember correctly, it was a mastering engineer on the west coast (I forget who, but I'll certainly post this word for word when I find it) who said something to the effect of: "when we can get a digital machine to do 24 bit/400 kHz, it'll be more likely that we'll archive to a digital format". I think that idea has an underlying meaning, concerning analog-to-digital converters that could perform such conversion in a linear PCM (or similar) format. It might be a while before that occurs, from what I can tell. I could be wrong.