Interesting and timely thread....cause just lately
Ive come to my own personal conclusion that:

IPOD IS THE GREATEST ELECTRONICS INVENTION OF THE 21ST CENTURY (so far).


Ive been in the process of capturing all of my CD collection
to digital. Playing them on the IPOD in Shuffle MODE so I never
miss the "deep album cuts"...its just AWESOME what the IPOD
comes up with sometimes.

Shuffle can take me from Van Morrison - Joe Sample - Nick Drake -
ACDC - Vladimir Horowitz - Dave Grusin - Chris Issak - Led Zeppelin - Stevie Wonder and back to Van Halen....

And you know what....? It doesnt matter cause its all good...
and its all music.

Sound Quality??

Well...as Nostatic mentioned... CDs are compressed as well...
Starting in the Studio when the songs are cut, there are many
devices in the recording chain...starting with the microphone, to
the preamps, board, processing, compression, to digital recording...etc. ALL of which affect the sound quality and if the
engineer sucks (as many of them do these days) and if the producer does not have "ears"...the sound quality will suffer...

Hell... lets be honest: Digital does not sound nearly as good, nearly as punchy, nearly as honest and nearly as "musical" as
recording to tape used to.

Q) "Is it Live or is it Memorex"?

A) Its Neither.

And don't even get me started on CD mastering.
Most pop or rock CDs are compressed to Hell and back, in order
to try and get them to sound "louder" for broadcast and TV and
digital streaming etc.

That + not many "mastering engineers" are worth a crap these
days anyway... for example...that Jackal who
is responsible for personally Ruining the MoTown Catalog with his
incredibly inept "digital re-mastering"... I hold him responsible for
the digital sound-crime that became the remasters of "Whats Going On" and "Songs in the Key of Life"...

But I digress...
None of this matters because the IPOD does not Care.

It just plays.

I prefer to track to good ol' analog 2", then bounce to digi for editing (especially if Im out of razor blades ;).

In particular, this is the best way to cut bass and drums, imo.

I buy CDs, then rip them into iTunes. Maximun quality = AAc encoder, 320kbps, 48.000Khz. I never listen to the CD, its just a back-up in case I lose my library. I listen to the music via Sounds Stick with iSub (4 1" drivers per channel, 10w; 6" subwoofer, 20w. Frequency Range 44Hz-20kHz).

+1 Crappy and uninspired music has ruined music.

+1 IPOD IS THE GREATEST ELECTRONICS INVENTION OF THE 21ST
CENTURY

+1 Metallica....what a shame those guys morphed into a bunch of nancies!

+1 the music cartel is ruining music.

Maybe I'm going out on a limb here, but I think the CD ruined music. Bear with me. When CD's started coming out, record companies had to convince buyers to replace all of their albums, cassettes, etc, with the CD format. That brought along a whole wave of "greatest hits," "bonus tracks," and "two records in one (with at least a third of the songs omitted)" compilations.

Example: My G/F likes the Replacements, as do I. So she'll put in a Replacements CD, and it will start out with the first couple of songs from Hootenanny, or Tim, or whatever. Then it will switch to a different album. Sorry, but when I put on a record, I like to hear every song on that record, as it was arranged by the original artist.

Back to the IPOD/MP3 thing: I work with a kid (20), and the radio is always on at work. If a song comes on that I like, I'll ask, "hey do you know this band?" If he does, he always responds with, "yeah, I've got one of their songs." I doubt he owns more than 10 full CDs, and I think he is missing out on a bunch of good music.

BTW, our crappy band is putting out a 10-inch on vinyl, just so we'll have something recorded that nobody will ever have a chance to hear. :D

/end rant

Steely Dan recorded their last album 24-track analog in the studio, then took it into ProTools for overdubs and mixing. I still like tape (and have my 1/4" splice block sitting above my computer just to remind me of "real" editing), but some of the plugins are so good these days that I don't miss it as much.

No doubt.
What Nostatic and I were referring to was the latter
part of in the 2nd sentence. If we have 24 tracks in
Pro Tools that gets mastered to CD...the
good possibility for sample rate conversion as well
as bit rate conversion (most artists are not recording
natively at 16 / 44.1 all the way through the chain these
days)...

The point being that compression and conversion is happening
at some point in the audio chain (albeit done with much
better equipment and algorithms than the typical mp3 creation)
but it is happening, and the Golden Ears crowd can hear it.
Thankfully Im not one of them. :)

However, if we really want to split hairs about sound...then
we have to start talking A/D converters and D/A converters...
and further back from that Digital Clock and how it affects
the sampling of the Analog signal and the resulting sonic
qualities.

These guys will master to CD for $99 a song, 4 song min:

http://www.sonymusicsim.com/

Thanks, I see what you're saying, and I was thinking about the compression aspect that Wayne posted about. Although I don't record live shows much anymore, I (and almost everyone) would record at a sampling rate of 44.1khz/16 bit since we were going to master to cd. This was using DATs (which only went to 48khz anyways), so it was a neglible difference. And I wholeheartedly agree with you...there is an audible difference when something is say 96khz/24 bit...and vinyl (analog) has them all beat :)!

i just take the 2Gig nano, nothing bigger
this way i don't have my full collection with me, and i avoid getting tired of songs or albums....

audio quality is not something that bothers me , at 196kb/sec i find the quality good enough for my ears...

It's all about the Sony PSP. It does EVERYTHING! The only selling point anyone with an Ipod can ever come up with is "Yeah but I can put 10,000 songs on my Ipod." I don't collect music, I listen to what I like. I keep all my songs on a PC and transfer them when I feel like it. On the PSP I have pictures, video, music, wireless internet, RSS feeds, and (wireless online multiplayer) video games. In Japan they have a camera and GPS reciever. (coming to USA soon.) No Ipod for me.

BTW if you want to get a whole album you can get entire albums for about $2 here: www.allofmp3.com

might as well copy it illegally , because allofmp3 does not pay any artists...

Never used the site. I usually just down load one song at a time from I-tunes. I can't think of an artist that has ever put together an album worth owning. I down load the song, burn it on a CDRW as a CDA, then rip it back to the PC as an MP3, Then erase the CDRW.

I suppose it comes down to semantics. While red book is an uncompressed format, the reality is that every bit of commercial music is subjected to audio compression before seeing the disc, and the lionshare is downsampled before it is mastered and pressed. So the music you are listening to has been compressed and has shed data through the process. For all intents and purposes, CD is essentially a compressed format now. Didn't used to be that way.

I agree...