{"id":1106,"date":"2007-08-17T14:57:11","date_gmt":"2007-08-17T14:57:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/?p=1106"},"modified":"2007-08-17T14:57:11","modified_gmt":"2007-08-17T14:57:11","slug":"my_first_cds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/2007\/08\/17\/my_first_cds\/","title":{"rendered":"My First CD(s)"},"content":{"rendered":"

As long as we’re talking music, here’s an interesting trivia note: the compact disc was introduced 25 years ago today. There’s a pretty detailed article about its development here<\/a>… although I notice it failed to mention that the preliminary work in converting analog music to a digital file was done by a grad student at my very own alma mater<\/a>, the University of Utah. Granted, the actual physical disc technology was developed later, by other people, but the ground work for the digital music revolution was done right here in my back yard.<\/p>\n


\nAnyhow, primitive tribal chest-thumping aside, my own experience with the CD has been pretty much like every other major new consumer technology that’s come down the pike in my adult life: I became vaguely aware of this new tech long after its introduction and resisted getting involved because what I was using — vinyl LPs and cassettes, in this case — were perfectly fine for my purposes and I saw no need to “upgrade.” The very suggestion that one would need<\/i> to upgrade, that your possessions are not eternal, offended my nature. Eventually, however, after these new gadgets were nearing universal acceptance, I finally weakened and decided to hop on the bandwagon (which was about a mile down the road by that point), but only to the extent of buying new<\/i> albums — I wasn’t going to be a damn fool and replace my whole existing collection with these new-fangled shiny silver platters because that would be simply… stupid<\/i>. And now, of course, with everybody buying an iPod and some people claiming that the CD is on its way out, I’m just getting around to picking up CD copies of ZZ Top’s Eliminator<\/i> and The Traveling Wilburys<\/a>‘ self-titled collection, two of the last cassettes from my old collection to be upgraded. Sigh… sometimes, I hate being so predictable…<\/p>\n

To answer the question<\/a> Scalzi posed earlier on his blog, my very first CD purchase was actually (and ironically, given all my talk today about rock and roll) a pair of soundtracks: Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade<\/i> and the New American Orchestra’s recording<\/a> of music from Blade Runner<\/i> (as opposed to the original recording<\/a> by Vangelis, which was unavailable at that time — 1989 — because of some legal snafu). I’d heard great things about what these CD thingamabobs could do for instrumental music, especially if if that music had been recorded digitally<\/i>, whatever that meant; Last Crusade<\/i> was one of those digital recordings, and Blade Runner<\/i> was… well, Blade Runner<\/i>, so I had to pick those two up. And I’ll admit, I was impressed. It was amazing, nay, miraculous<\/i>, to hear music reproduced so cleanly, without any scratches, pops, or background rumble caused by my el cheapo phonograph. It was like music had been invented all over again.
\nNow, 25 years down the road, that clarity is the default and we’re all debating over minutiae like whether the sound of cymbals gets clipped if you rip a track at too low a bit-rate — you know, that sentence may as well have been in Swahili back in ’89 — and, while some lament that we’re losing fidelity in the name of being able to carry our entire music library around in a shirt pocket, I find that I still miss the grubby, organic imperfections of vinyl. Never satisfied, are we?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As long as we’re talking music, here’s an interesting trivia note: the compact disc was introduced 25 years ago today. There’s a pretty detailed article about its development here… although I notice it failed to mention that the preliminary work in converting analog music to a digital file was done by a grad student at […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1106","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music-and-pop-culture"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1106","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1106"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1106\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1106"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1106"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1106"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}