Entertainment For Lively Minds
Now, where's that old 8-track machine?
Saw this in the paper at the weekend and thought 'Wow, this seems really early.' The reported death of the CD is surely just a reflection of the drop in sales, not of the domestic and/or in-car habits of a lot of people. Most people my age (55) that I know have no desire to play their music digitally and still hanker after the physical CD both in the car and at home. Amongst friends I am seen as some kind of techno freak because I have an ipod and an integrated connection in the car. I am not the norm (no change there, then?)but I would think that the 45-60 age group are a large part of the car-buying market. Obviously, the CD player will eventually disappear from cars when all of our portable and in-car entertainment comes from our phones but I am amazed that the big car manufacturers think we are there already.
What do you think, oh wise and considered Massive?
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I can plug my iPod
into my car and pick the songs through the stereo controls. It's ace and I have a couple of CD's in the car for emergency use only (i.e. I forgot to grab my iPod). I could have paid extra for a multichanger but that would have been madness.
I'm all for it - podcasts, music, playlists and audiobooks. What's not to love?
I'm with you
despite being in Niallb's agegroup. I just cant be bothered with all the clutter of CDs, especially in the car where they all seemed to end up in the wrong box anyway. At least 8 tracks were self contained units.
Although I must admit that I have stopped using shuffle and gone back to listening to albums in their natural sequence.
I'll not mourn the CD
and I don't want to re-purchase the collection, thank you very much, but it's fast becoming a legacy format. Hi-res downloads with wider bandwith and better quality than CD + a digital streamer for home playback + an iPod or such like for on-the-go: that's the way forward, please. Mind you, I am a lot younger than Niallb: I'm only 53.
Agreed,
in fact I agree with both of the above but I am sure there is a huge group of 50 plussers going 'I may not be buying as many CD's as I was but if you take the player out of my new car how am I going to play the 8,000 that I already own?' A mate in the car business told me 2 years ago that they couldn't wait to ditch the CD player because the integrated usb connection was so much cheaper to install and relatively trouble-free. I am very lucky to get a company car and I paid a lot of money to have the usb connection installed. When the car was delivered I couldn't get the thing to work so rang BMW who told me I needed their ipod lead. I shot round to the local dealer and had a huge row when he charged me £50 for it!!! (I am NOT looking for sympathy here. I know I am very lucky to get a company car etc, etc)
This is about cost for the car manufacturer. My friend actually said 'If the record companies hadn't dropped the ball so badly we'd probably be looking at another 5 to 10 years of CD players in cars." I just don't think a large number of the population are ready for it.
The other issue is (lack of) DAB tuners in cars,
which is what is effectively stopping the closure of FM in the UK. Replacing all the domestic sets is one issue but transitioning the car fleet to DAB.. that's some task!
Another thing...
...stopping the closure of FM is the complete uselessness of DAB.
On my bit of the south coast
DAB is far superior to FM. The FM signal is almost unusable in the house. Coverage in the car is better although patchy.
Fair enough,,,
...but I still get the bubbling mud sound on DAB, and I live 3 1/2 miles from one of the main transmitters, a mast that stands 544 feet high pumping out Lord knows how many kilowatts.
Hence my opinion that DAB is useless.
Not really a such a huge problem
If you want a DAB in a car then it's not really a big deal, these days it will cost more to get the aerial sorted than the head unit. You can get a Dab/Dab+ unit with an SD card slot, USB socket (for memory sticks) and an auxiliary socket (to plug in an ipod) for under £100 - it'll probably cost another £130 or so to get an aerial supplied and fitted. I wouldn't want to be without a DAB in the car but then I'm a 6Music listener.
CDs
My car doesn't feature iPod connectivity, nor does it have a cassette player, so I can't use my old cassette adapter either. Therefore my car is a mess of CDs.
CD ROMs
My car player plays them so I burn a new one every 2 days or so. About to invest in a mp3 transmitter thingy.
8 track was before my time
I know the cartridges were huge, and became useless if the tape snapped but did people go gaga at the time for the crackle free sound? Did their popularity have something to do with the advent of quadrophonic sound? Were 8 track players really common in cars? And why the name '8 track'?
Before my time too really,
but I believe the format was called 8-track because each cartridge contained an endless loop of tape with 8 tracks on it - four stereo pairs all running in the same direction. The album tracks had to be distributed across these 4 pairs - even trickier than cassette programming and, I'd imagine, downright impossible for a few albums.
Roughly speaking, if the play speeds were the same, the length of tape would be half the length of an equivalent cassette (which is 2 stereo pairs, running in reverse directions), but at least twice the width - hence some of the bulk.
That's about right...
there was an endless loop of tape which was powered only by a pinch roller (i.e. no drive spindles as on a cassette).
This tape was then divided into 8 tracks (4 stereo pairs) and the player detected the end of each track by means of an inch of metallic leader tape.
The player then physically shifted the playback heads to align with the next pair of tracks.
There were many disadvantages to this design - each track had to be the same length so there was a lot of editing/empty space to deal with; the carts couldn't be rewinded (rewound?) because of the pinch roller drive; accurate head alignment was non-existent due to the moving heads.
BUT, it was invented by a car manuafacturer and was the only workable system until the widespread adoption of the compact cassette.
Cheers!
I think all the advantages and disadvantages are obvious from that. And I didn't realise they pre-dated the compact cassette, although it makes sense when explained so well..
CDs for me, please
I want a music collection that doesn't disappear when the hard drive dies.
That's what backups are for ;-)
Everyone has their music collection backed up.
On a little portable hard drive device called an iPod.
Hardly ever...
...play CDs in the car now. I use an iPod/iPhone with an FM transmitter which works perfectly and a Pure Highway for digital radio, which also works fine. An impending motorcycle holiday means CDs are out of the question and haven't been feasible since I started doing long European motorcycle trips in 2003, when I had a first generation 5Gb iPod. And that mirrors my experience at home, too - never buy CDs now and all my library is ripped to the Mac. The last time I considered a new car and asked why the Audi didn't have an integrated connection for an iPod, the twelve-year old sales person claimed that MP3 players would never catch on and Audi were committed to CD players...I didn't buy one.
If I want to do a playlist for a friend or the FPO, I upload it to Dropbox and they download it to iTunes. And, I'm even older than niallb but I'll allow that most of my peer group aren't like me.
Audi
Audi hasn't changed much. Only last year we were going to buy an Audi on the condition that they deliverered it with a DAB compatible aerial. They wouldn't do it so we went elsewhere. Given the amount of money they spend getting people into showrooms, they seemed to be amazingly happy to let them go home agan empty handed. Fortunately we found another salesroom with a more flexible attitude.
I should note though we had the same response from the first Seat place we went to to buy another car*.
*We don't normally buy two new cars in a year!.
We discussed the demise of the CD
here quite recently.
http://www.wordmagazine.co.uk/content/the-end-is-very-nigh
and I argued the old shiny disc has got a few years in it yet certainly as a home listening medium and even a late thirtysomething like me still likes a hard copy and sleeve notes for things I really like. However...
I'm not a motorist, but as in-car entertainment I would have thought having a load of music on a SD card or your iPod or some such would be infinitely preferable to having a load of CDs rattling around in the glovebox, jewel cases clattering all over the floor, inlay cards curling up in the sun, or faffing around burning CD-Rs.
Mind you, I was in a cab the other day and the driver was playing tapes....
I only ever play CDs in the car.
I don't own an ipod, none of my music is stored on a computer anywhere and I use dropbox only to listen to work in progress mixes of some recordings I'm working on. I am 47.
Bluetooth
We have Bluetooth in the car, so I'm now playing music through the phone. Between the 16gb SD card and offline spotify playlists I can carry more than enough music around and don't bother with cds at all.
Radio
Only have a radio in the car, not even a CD player, so bought one of those plug into the lighter socket radio transmitters that I plug the Ipod into. Works wonderfully and only cost £20.
Went on a driving trip around the Scottish Highlands once and had a nice stack of CDs for the listening. Was hiring a car and got there to discover that it too only came with a radio. So all the lovely listening choices were left in the suitcase. Radio was fine and dandy until we actually started driving around the mountains and, yup no signal. None whatsoever. Driving around that beautiful desolate countryside without any tunes at all ended up enhancing the experience. But it was a particularly strange drive.