Old Does Not Mean Bad and Older is Not Always Worse
ABOUT a week ago I organised the home, especially the office, and along the way I tidied up my collection of CDs, which I had mostly accumulated back in the 90s (side story is, I won many of them for answering questions on the radio as a teenager).
I then decided to play my CDs again, not rip them to Ogg (as I had already done a decade and a half ago). My main laptop still contains a functional (but criminally underutilised) optical drive, so why the heck not? My Samsung stereo, which is about 30 years old, still works, but not the optical drive (it broke down after about 10 years of use). Thankfully I can spin the CDs on the laptop and then relay/feed the output via auxiliary to that old stereo system.
The quality of the sound is still the same as it was 30 years ago (non-lossy, no compression artefacts) and data integrity seems OK (it's robust to jitters because no aggressive encryption/compression is used). One might joke that DRM and similar schemes are eager - or passively happy - to see old media rendered unplayable, in the name of "tackling piracy"; this way people need to buy the same stuff over and over again (or re-license repeatedly), just to avoid running out of music (or films) to play.
Old technology is (yes!) old... but that does not mean it's bad. Today's DRM systems and streaming systems are in many ways worse, not to mention that today's music is objectively much worse, based on scientific studies*. Don't assume things will improve over time when the evolution of technology is dictated by greedy corporations who aren't really in the business of serving customers but oppressing them for more income. At the moment I've got spinning in the laptop some old "Rat Pack" collections. This 'experiment' will continue. Until morals of the "music industry" improve. █
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* Many press reports about this, e.g.:
Song lyrics getting simpler, more repetitive, angry and self-obsessed – study
Song Lyrics Really Are Getting Simpler and More Repetitive, Study Finds
Music Lyrics Have Gotten Simpler, Angrier And More Repetitive Since The 1980s, Study Finds
Study finds popular song melodies have become simpler over time
Vocal arrangements are much simpler than hits from decades past, researcher finds
