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Showing results for tags 'laserdisc'.
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Okay, before I get "booed off the stage", hear me out... I always kind of regret playing the records I own, even though I'm absolutely in love with them. I bought a few of the Björk DMM records and I love them to death. I was brought to tears, quite literally. I never play them. I own a few AFX records that I cherish, and love the format completely (he did amazing stuff on Analog Bubblebath 3 "paper-baggie issue") but I never play it. Even more recent stuff, Bee Mask's Elegy for Beach Friday, Ten Ragas to a Disco Beat, and the few Alva Notos I have I never play. Not to mention cassette tapes. They are warm and fuzzy, but they degrade far too fast. Not only that, but tape players (now pretty old) tend to eat tapes up, almost randomly. A friend gifted me his first tape ever which has since become a rarity, and my cassette player of doom destroyed it beyond repair. I've had tapes noticably degrade after only about 5 listens. I agree that's part of the 'charm' of analog, but I know people can do better. I don't want to worry about how old my stylus is every time I play a record in order to get that warmth. Which is where Laserdiscs come into play... Discovision and early Laserdiscs were written in exclusively analog audio. Later, the analog audio had been supplemented with other various digital formats, Dolby Digital, DTS, and PCM, but the analog track remained there through the entire span of Laserdisc un-glory. It's complicated and a circuitous thing to look up, but its fascinating. Most players have the ability to turn on multiple tracks, and even play audio through more than one output at a time. What this means is that content creators (musicians) could, in theory, create an analog audio track, a digital track, and analog video, in a format that doesn't degrade if mastered correctly. Creative folks could utilize all three and create compelling mixes of companion digital and analog tracks that stand alone or work together, and of course offer some sort of visual accompaniment. Each stands alone, a listener could watch it with one or both outputs active, or just listen to one. The format is amazing, but has some obvious downsides... The FM (how they pulled off analog audio) was never done properly, and needed signal noise reduction in the bottom end, which means if a musician cares a lot about the video aspect of the "album", they'd have to sacrifice some bass. Another obvious downside is that not a single manufacturer of Laserdiscs still makes them. The only thing available is something like a "laserdisc burner" which was sold for like $40,000 in the early '90s, but the media is expensive and rare, and the 'burned' audio is only PCM. Then... There's the idea that almost the exact same thing can be had with a DVD, except the analog, and had with a VHS cassette except without the "non-contact" bit. So completely unreasonable, but still got me thinking about format to release my stuff, being creative and whatnot. And got me thinking about a new analog format (which will never come out), the FM disc, read by laser. -J.J. See
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spread it like an STD please.
