CD

CD / Studio vs. Live Recordings / Concerts

A lot could be said about the pros and cons of concerts or live recordings vs. listening to CDs / studio recordings. I remember endless discussions many years ago with friends, around the quality of audio reproduction, stereo equipment, etc. — and I remember one friend who would typically kill any such discussion with the argument “You know, for me, nothing beats a live concert experience!”, at which point it made no sense to carry the discussion any further. However,…

Radio vs. Digital vs. «Real» Music

(…) In my direct comparison I was amazed to hear how much the channel separation, as well as the dynamic range, suffered in the radio broadcast: Channel separation: my impression was that there is about as much difference between “CD stereo” and “radio stereo” as there is between the latter and a mono recording: the spatial width and resolution were clearly reduced on the radio. Also the dynamic range was clearly more limited…

From Local Music into the Cloud?

(…) Sure, the signs can be read off the wall everywhere: there is a trend towards computing and storage in the cloud — and frankly, it makes a lot of sense to me! Why should humanity store Exabytes (or have we already surpassed Zettabytes?) of information on thousands of millions of computers, including a zillion duplicates…

My Digital Music Collection

(…) In the title I used “digital music collection” — this is a more accurate description, for two reasons: not all this music was bought in the form of CDs — some of these were MP3 or equivalent purchases, plus, the CDs for me are more of an archival medium — the active part of the collection is in my computer…