> > Let's look at it one way: Philips and Sony managed to convince most
> > of us that the CD sounded better than cassettes or vinyl

And Sony was one of the big complainers about DAT and CD-R and wanted 
a digital format that was lossy so that pirating wouldn't affect 
their sales. MPEG was adopted to create MP3s so that the music 
business wouldn't lose money. They were thrilled with it. Now they 
complain constantly about how much money they are losing to MP3 
trading....  I'm sure the fact that Sony says something doesn't hold 
a lot of water with a lot of us.

>2) Particularly if you are approaching middle age (a target I already
>overshot) it is unlikely your ears could detect frequencies in the
>20KHz range even if they were properly sampled! It would be 
>interesting to run blind comparisons of the various formats and see 
>if anyone could correctly identify them...

I see, so because an archivist who couldn't hear the difference 
ignored it and went with the lower bit rate, my excellent hearing 
should suffer?  That's really poor logic.

There are a lot of valid arguments one way or the other for (or 
against) the higher bit depth and high sample rate in archiving. The 
hearing ability of the archivist should NOT be one of them. Don't 
work towards your lowest common denominator, work towards preserving 
all there is to preserve.

As for creating a CD with anything other than 44.1/16, that's 
obviously NOT an audio CD, but is instead a data CD with audio files 
stored on it. Of COURSE it's not going to be compatible with CD 
players. But again, does dropping DOWN to CD quality just to maintain 
compatibility with an audio player instead of taking advantage of a 
data storage medium's ability or capability make sense?  For 
listening? Sure!  For archiving? I don't think so!


-----------------
Diamond Productions
Preserving the past for the future.
Dave Bradley   President