DAT's Your Lot

About twenty five years ago greedy  record companies made a fortune turning people from tape and vinyl to CD on the pretext that the sound quality was excellent and CDs were indestructable and you could smear them with jam and they would still play. Well think of the logistics !!  What really sold CD to the masses was the MacDonalds like convenience of being able to program tracks , skip tracks you didnt like and repeat ones you did as well as random play.

These facilities were actually available on tape and vinyl players , but when a friend of mine demonstrated it on hi cassette player they was a lot of rewinding and fast forwarding .

Anyway , I digress , what has brought this post on on is the re issue by Rhino of Fleetwood Mac's excellent retrospective The Chain , which I bought in its original incarnation about twenty years back. I've been playing it today and very good it is too.

No , after the initial , virtual investment free windfall of CD (records already recorded and often not remastered, remasters were another wave of cash) , they began to circulate rumours of CD decay , and your everlasting CDs would in fact crumble to dust withing five years. To combat this you had to switch to DAT , expensive players , and back to tape with it's inherent fragility and at the the time blank DAT's were as expensive as a full price CD!! This time the public didnt fall for it, and where is DAT now ?

Twenty years on my copy of the Chain is in fine fettle , and CDs are still an excellent and portable storge medium and there are some excellent packages out there . I recently purchased a superb Emerson Lake and Palmer box for around £15 .

So CD is still as bouyant as ever , Vinyl has made and amazing recovery ,  Newcastle still has 3 or 4 real record shops plus HMV and That's Entertainment (The outlet for Music Magpie)  , and music is still brilliant.

Have a nice day!!

Musical Boxed

While a great deal of music and now books are downloaded and in e-format , I still like to have something I can hold in my hand. Also by getting a physical item it's probable that you have paid for it and the artist will get their rightful royalties . One of the issues I have withillegal downloading is that children are brought up believing they don't have to pay for music.

Anyway I'm getting sidetracked . The display above has loads of recent , box sets of CDs which are available for  under twenty pounds , in some cases under ten , meaning that the individual CDs working out around £2 each and you have a beautiful package as well . Leonard Cohen and The Kinks have had decent retrospective reissues out recently , and not forgetting Chris Rea's superb Santo Spirito Blues  3 CDs and 2DVDs for £15 !! In the display above are loads of great value boxes that should keep you occupied for a long time

These are the sort of reasons why I will always by music that has a physical presence. I'm not against downloads , and infact downloads are a great way of getting music out  to people , like Amazon Free MP3 section and iTune's single of the week. Included a video of Emerson Lake & Palmer's Hoedown , just noticed it when searching for something else , a brilliant deconstruction / reconstruction of a classical piece , wish every ELP song was as good as this!!