Should Sound Quality of Computer Audio be improved

PettyOfficer, there is no such thing as format competition, nor is there any such thing as a format monopoly. The "CD monopoly" didn't edge out 8 track tapes, nor did the "DVD monopoly" edge out Laserdisc. 8 track and Laserdisc were simply inferior formats that fewer and fewer people bought. The smaller the market, the more companies would need to charge to continue printing media in these formats. Eventually, bicycles with two equal-sized wheels edged out bicycles with huge rear wheels -- this was not a equal-sized-wheel bicycle monopoly, just a market shift.

Here's another analogy. In the robber baron age, Carnegie steel and a number of other competing companies merged to form U.S. Steel -- a true monopoly. They were a monopoly because, if you wanted steel, you had to buy from them. They were basically no other companies selling steel, and new companies could not start because the competition from U.S. steel was overwhelming. The steel itself was the commodity, however, and that's what was monopolized. Today, music is the commodity, not CDs (or SACDs, or DVD-Audio, or HDCD). Hundreds of companies sell you music, and they compete against each other. They sell through different websites, different services, etc.

I see that you want other options, but those options will, some day, disappear. This is not due to some conspiracy, or some conscious marketing ploy to replace CD with downloads, but because companies make less and less money on sales of physical media, and so they stop printing them. In the end, the competition is not over formats, but over music. These companies' competition comes from other companies' music, not other companies' formats.

Do you disagree?

That is good of him :)

PettyOfficer, you make a fair point above:

Why does everyone here complain more (numerically) than I do, if you already have what you want? Why aren't you happy? Why waste your time here?

Why, indeed?

My enjoyment of music certainly has little to do with yours, PettyOfficer, though as a friend I would love to see you have more of what you like.

The only reason I'm weighing in here is for the benefit of posterity, and for the hearts and minds of other posters. This is what I do, and it's not meant as a slight to you, or an incitement to you to change your ways. I just don't want future generations to look back at us arguing about formats and misunderstand any perspective.

So, to that end, I have two more points I'd like to bring up. You continually mention cassettes and solar flares, and I think a fuller understanding of the issue would bring clarity to the discussion.

1) Magnets have a measurable strength, as anyone who's ever tried to push two together with their polarity opposed will tell you. Some are more powerful than others. The strength of a magnet's "Magnetizing Field" is measured in Oersted (or Oe) units.

Any storage medium for magnetic information, including cassette tapes, reel-to-reel, and platter Hard Disc Drives (NOT Solid State Drives) also use magnets, and due to the unique principles of magnetism it will resist having its field altered or realigned, to a certain point. This property is called "coercivity", and it's what protects your data. In a very simple sense, a weaker magnet cannot influence a stronger one. One cassette tape cannot erase another, nor can a weaker magnet erase a hard drive.

The Earth itself has a magnetic field of 3-5 Oe. The magnetic field generated by a cassette tape is between 25-50 Oe. Modern hard drives, which write data in a perpendicular fashion, have an Oersted rating of 4000-5000 Oe.

By contrast, the magnetic read head of an MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) machine in a hospital has a rating of about 60,000 Oe. Not to worry, though: a magnetic field degrades exponentially over distance. As long as your hard drive is more than 1 meter away from the MRI read head (i.e. not in the MRI machine itself) the field will not be strong enough to effect your drive.

I hope that puts to rest the question of whether "giant" magnets will erase your drive, and the comparisons between cassettes and Hard drives. Hard drives are literally upwards of 100 times more powerful than cassettes, and the strongest magnet most of us are likely to encounter in our lives won't erase them unless we're trying. Nothing to worry about.

2) Solar Flares. I'm not sure where this concern comes from, but it's not warranted. Solar Flares wreak all kinds of damage on our lives, degrading satellite orbits, ionizing our outer atmosphere, corrupting radio communications, and numerous other detrimental effects. One thing they don't do is effect the Earth's magnetic field. If they did, you would routinely have bits of metal around your house flying into the air.

The single most magnetically disastrous entity in the known Universe is a magnetar. This is a superdense neuron star, so dense that a thimblefull of magnetar would weigh upwards of 100 million tons. It's the strongest magnet in the universe by a country mile, and it will literally rip the water out of your body at 1000 km. It's magnetic field is hundreds of billions of times more powerful than the sun.

However, it couldn't even erase credit card strips until it's about half the distance from the moon away from Earth. By that point, the gamma radiation it emits will have destroyed our entire civilization.

None of the problems from solar flares are magnetic. They will never erase nor corrupt your hard drive.

Plenty of things can erase or corrupt the data on a hard drive, but magnetism and solar flares are not among them. You're far more likely to lose data to a power failure, read error, or any other of 100 things than you are to magnets, and you can easily protect against those things.

So be concerned about choice and about quality, but don't worry about magnets or solar flares. This data will outlive us all.

I admire you, PettyOfficer, even if I do not agree with you.

I can picture your father, twenty years ago, decrying the "death" of the LP. "I'll buy your silver discs when they weigh 180 grams", he would say. "Where will you be when this "laser" dies on you? I'll take a good MC cartridge THANK YOU". "Perfect sound forever? How about good sound right now!"

Of course, the CD did not kill music, nor has the Internet. For every CD that goes "out of print", two more spring up. Plus, you can buy the old ones on eBay!

I don't see it happening the way you do. I don't see this lack of choice, and I don't see a slippery slope to expensive garbage. I am definitely no more afraid of magnets or solar flares than you should be of bit rot.

I see a wonderful future where enthusiasts record classical music and Patricia Barber with equal care and meticulous microphones, and where you can get those recordings the next day. Also, at the same time, Latvian rappers can make a demo riding the bus to their dishwashing job and I can have that too. I appreciate diversity of formats and diversity of mastering interpretations those formats make possible, but more than anything I appreciate diversity of MUSIC.

I honestly do not think that the death of XRCD will result in any fewer choices, lower quality, greater risk or higher prices. It is the result of people moving to a better format. Down with silver discs, lets listen to music directly!

No one has even challenged my premiss of Hard Drives being the equivalent of "Cassette Tapes on Disks with magnetic particles of 1's and 0's". Does this mean that you all agree with it? If so, the same threats to magnetic flux based Cassette Tape still remain the same threats to Hard Drives.

Your concern about magnets and hard drives is misplaced, PettyOfficer, for two reasons. I'm happy to discuss them here.

1) Digital files can be stored on any medium you choose, PettyOfficer. A number of digital storage mediums are impervious to being Degaussed and suffering data loss. USB drives and solid state disks are both common formats which would survive your theoretical "gigantic magnet" test.

2) Hard Drive degaussing requires prolonged exposure to electromagnets that weigh more than you can carry and require a connection to an electrical socket. Those magnets are not only *incredibly* powerful, but they are designed to produce a very specialized field for the sole purpose of erasing a hard drives. Normal magnets, even "gigantic" magnets, won't do the trick without really prolonged exposure, upwards of 30 minutes. Unless you simply leave your hard drives lying around next to your computer case, this is unlikely enough a situation as to be practically impossible.

Hard drives are not cassette tapes. Not all magnets (or magnetic storage devices) are created equal.

Really, any scenario where my drives are exposed to a giant magnet powerful enough to erase them is no more likely than my disks being exposed to an open fire capable of melting them. Everything physical can be destroyed.

For comparison, I work for the Department of State. My office routinely deals in information classified at a TS/SCI level, which is literally as crucial as data could possibly be. That data is safely stored on magnetic hard drives.

Still, no one will even try to answer why there is no replacement guarantee on Music Files if anything should happen to them. Give me the logic and reason behind that!

Also not so. I am happy to relieve you of this fear as well. iTunes (for example) will allow you to download any of your purchases numerous times. Amazon does the same, as does BandCamp, 7digital, and countless others.

More to the point, though, who is providing you with a guarantee on your CDs? We've already established that Hard Disks are as safe as CDs for storing data, but should my hard drive be destroyed by, say, a natural disaster, I could retrieve all my data from a cloud backup or re-download it from the store where I bought it. Could you take your story and a hand-written list of albums you lost to a Tower Records and expect the same?

If you can provide any evidence that hard disks are susceptible to magnetic erasure (degaussing) that I didn't find, do so here. Otherwise, you're making an assertion you now know to be untrue.

I can add you know. You just prey on the poor S.O.B's who can't- for shame!

I don't feel any shame in bringing numbers and analysis to the discussion, rather than more "common sense" oversimplifications. Einstein said that common sense was the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen. Was there anything out there to play a .Wav file when you were 18, PettyOfficer?

So long as my employer continues to store TS-SCI information -- national security secrets -- on magnetic drives, I'm comfortable storing my DSD discs and 24/192 vinyl rips there.