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Comment by bane | Hacker News Reader

"Kodak spent a century making the very best film it possibly could (for the professional lines, anyway) when it turns out the market is perfectly happy with a 4 MP digital with a mediocre lens and chromatic abberation out the arse if it cuts the feedback loop down from days to seconds."

Which is exactly the same phenomenon that occurred with music. The industry kept moving to better and better formats, only to be confounded that people didn't mind lower quality lossy compressed mp3s with swishy sounding hi-hats.

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> The industry kept moving to better and better formats

These formats were never made available outside "the industry". I've seen almost no artist (outside of Bandcamp which does it by default/for free) providing lossless downloads, let alone HQ tracks or 3+ channel tracks on normal albums. Reznor is the only one who comes to mind (he released multitracks and 24b/96KHz of Ghosts I-IV in the Deluxe editions)

I think they weren't strictly talking about digital formats. From vinyl to cassette to CD to 128kbps MP3 isn't a strictly increasing curve in terms of quality, though one could argue that in terms of convenience the formats did improve.

Off the top of my head, Peter Gabriel, The Beatles, OK Go, and Jonathan Coulton have all released lossless digital files before (and still do). Peter Gabriel and OK Go use Apple Lossless, JoCo uses FLAC, and The Beatles use FLAC (although not via download -- their USB Box Set was a flash drive and had 24/44.1 FLACs).

(Oh, and Reznor's released other lossless albums too -- The Slip [24/96] and the NINJA 2009 Tour Sampler.)

Super Audio CD and DVD Audio were both introduced around the turn of the century.

Exactly what I was thinking of, and they've been DOA. Before that DAC was fairly widely available, but there wasn't much content available on them and were usually used as a studio medium.

He might be referring to

  tape->phono->cd-!->mp3 (originally not well received)
                \-> mp3 if called iPod

To say the mp3 was not well received before the iPod is goofy. You remember Napster right?!

Before that- in the '80s- it failed. We had "perfect" reproduction. Who was going to settle for less than that? Oh, I see, people who don't really care about perfect reproduction and want to listen to 1200 songs at the gym.

But to answer your question, I never used Napster (but I know it was popular).

Perhaps worse is better.

Convenience is better.

Records, arguably, provide superior sound to an MP3 player, but can you bring a 2,000 record collection with you when travelling?

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