They’re about as rare as buggy whips, trolley bells, and fat whitewall tires.

There may not be today, but there are ways to do it. You can use the subcode space and build DRM chips into all new players, for example. The point is that analog audio (and to a lesser extent, video) are difficult to tamper with and track usage of.

14,
Of course it’s a gimmick. I used it to pose my question about vinyl. The Urban Outfitters in my area stock USB turntables, who’s buying them? Follow the links. Gimmick aside, the growth in vinyl use is more than a bunch of Nelson Pass fans or DJs playing their old records.

16,

See response to #14 above. Of course it’s stupid, it’s a promotional gimmick. But what about groups like Radiohead that not only released their music as a download, but also in CD and vinyl. is their use of analog a gimmick too?

Hey, good idea. It would be a hit with the Amish playboys.

At this point, I doubt there is anything the record industry can do to get me to buy music at the level I used to buy it. Due to the factors I mentioned at the beginning, and the fact that there are many other competing entertainment outlets besides music and I already have plenty of music, there is simply little they can do that would make me want to buy more music, and they have given me a number of reasons not to.

(me playing and analog recording)

Most effects processors use those or lower specs. Basically with every large live act the sound has made the conversion from analog to digital once, if not many times before it hits your ears, and the amplifiers are hardly audiophile grade tube systems. Digital recording technologies are at a point where its impossible to tell the difference.

The problem is consumer devices have not changed beyond moving to compressed (not dynamic range compression as in my earlier rant) music and have yet to actually take hold of the higher quality recordings that would theoretically be available (i’m not complaining, most of the stuff I listen to is jazz, and older jazz at that which is laden with all sorts of recording and storage anomolies).

Personally I’d rather have a copy of the 24 bit recording, but in the mean time while 128 kbps MP3′s leave much missing. 192 kbps is almost indistinguishable from cd on any system let alone one I am at the price I can afford.

Actually, the smartest thing the music industry could do would be to promote analog, and a new analog format, as the wave of the future.

Pure analog, on a good valve system sounds vastly better than digital. You cannot capture analog quality by recording it digitally – the sound simply looses it’s depth. If the recording industry promotes a new, high quality analog format and convinces consumers that it’s much better than digital, they’ll have a format with built-in DRM. Why? Because you can make a digital copy, but it won’t be “Analog(TM)”. And so, sheep that we are, we will all rush out to re-purchase our entire music collections for our new valve based pure analog systems on some new unbreakable micro analog format that we’ll convince ourselves is vastly superior in tonal depth and clarity to CDs… and probably will be. Yes, we’ll have lots of digital copies, but an analog collection of high quality music that we’ll collect and cherish.

At the moment, the pendulum has swung to lo-fi, over compression… but it’s going to swing back to hi-fi sooner or later, and someone’s going to make a lot of money when it does.

If we had 128KBps (not Kbps) per channel transcription and playback, I’ll bet it would be difficult if not impossible to tell the difference between analog and digital.

Back in the old days when we had to walk uphill in the snow both ways to school, a friend of mine and I modded a VHS recorder to make broadband analog recordings from vinyl, and the results were superb, better than 15 ips reel to reel. Incredible wow/flutter, freq. response, dynamic range, S/N ratio.

To think I bought an iPod with a bunch of compressed mp3s. I guess it’s better than nothing. At least it’s portable.