Well, with the ever-increasing popularity of CDs, minidisks, digital audio tape, and other digital media, much of that article is outdated now.<P>There's nothing wrong with buying CDs from K-mart; CDs are digital media with no moving parts (well, the whole <I>thing</I> moves, but you get my point) and there's little that can go wrong with one. For that matter, there's nothing wrong with buying name-brand cassettes from K-mart.<P>The point of the article is, of course, that you should always use the best equipment and supplies you can afford <I>at the time</I>.<P>Thanks for the praise; I wish potential employers read this forum.<P>------------------<BR>=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=<BR>Jeffrey E. Salzberg, Lighting Designer<BR>Online portfolio:<BR><A HREF="http://www.suncoast.quik.com/salzberg" TARGET=_blank>http://www.suncoast.quik.com/salzberg</A> <P>"Compliments to Jeffrey E. Salzberg's subtle lighting effects. . . ."<P>

This is one of the sections I really need to revise; these days, I'm more likely to tape JAG.

<small>[ 08-10-2002, 16:59: Message edited by: salzberg ]</small>

so jeff are you saying that a CD is a CD - that the quality of the recording won't depend on where you bought it - i.e. factoring in that the cheaper stores will stock the cheaper products...? are there differences in the qualities of CD recordings? i suppose there must be....<P>i do usually buy my CD's from a specialist classical music store, but i have no understanding of any way to assess the quality of a recording i purchase, with future reproduction in mind. for me, so far, it rarely matters. but there are the rare times when it does.

At the risk of oversimplifying, yes -- up to a point.<P>Assuming that the product is not so poorly made as to have "dropouts" (physical areas of the disk that simply are unable to accept any signal at all), one CD is pretty much as good as another. This is one of the advantages of digital media -- the sound is reduced to a series of zeroes and ones, and as long as the character is readable at all, your music quality will be consistent.

Ooops. For some reason, I thought you were talking about recordable CDs -- CDRs and CDRWs. I realize now that you're talking about prerecorded CDs.<P>It's very possible that the audio quality of an obscure-label CD may be inferior to the product of a major label. This could be caused by inferior equipment or by the fact that many of these lesser labels (especially if we're talking about classical music) use very old, analog masters. The odds are that you won't notice (or won't object to) the difference. After all, when LPs were all we had, we didn't complain much about the audio quality.<P>If you're really concerned about quality, buy CDs that have been totally record digitally (These are marked "DDD", which means that they were recorded digitally, mastered digitally, and printed digitally; if it's marked "ADD", the original recording was analog), but remember that the recording with the highest <I>technical</I> quality might not be the one with the best <I>performance</I> quality -- any Stokowski recording, for example, will have been recorded in analog (because he died before the advent of digital technology) but I still prefer his <I>Carmina Burana</I> to most of the recordings that have been made more recently -- ditto the Stern/Perlman recording of the Bach Double Violin Concerto (<I>Concerto Barocco</I>).<P>(Azlan, this message has my URL.)<P>------------------<BR>=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=<BR>Jeffrey E. Salzberg, Lighting Designer<BR>Online portfolio:<BR><A HREF="http://www.suncoast.quik.com/salzberg" TARGET=_blank>http://www.suncoast.quik.com/salzberg</A> <P>"Compliments to Jeffrey E. Salzberg's subtle lighting effects. . . ."<P><p>[This message has been edited by salzberg (edited November 27, 2000).]

In passing jeff, the old 'cheap means nasty' for music CDs has been tuned on its head by Naxos. These high quality (to me) new digital recordings use excellent but unknown performers. In the early days these were mainly from Eastern Europe, but they come from all over now.<P>They retail at about a third of the price of the main labels and sometimes are the preferred recording at any price of the music mags. They have about 1500 titles now with hardly any duplication and shift more classical music units in the UK than any other label.<P>Do you see them in the US?

I think so, Stuart; I don't buy much music these days, but I often hear on the radio that such-and-such recording was on the Naxos label.<BR>

Last summer, I found The Complete Idiot's Guide to Acting.

I'm now looking for The Complete Idiot's Guide to Pointe.