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Thursday, July 24, 2008
Vinyl Record Bowls
Posted by Lance
Walking through an small art fair recently we came across a booth selling vinyl records deformed into bowls. They proudly kept a long list of classic rock albums they had desecrated to create those bowls. What kind of world do we live in where one takes great music and turns it into a vessel to hold dog food?
I reacquired a phonograph player a couple of years ago but I admit I rarely use it. The problem is technical: You can only get at best 23 minutes of continuous play from a record, as opposed to 75 minutes from a CD or days from my iPod. Somehow I survived childhood changing the record every 20 minutes or so but I'm not sure how.
When my children first saw a vinyl record they just called it a large CD and they didn't know who I would fit it in a player. Their children will likely never know physical media for music at all. Let's see them make a bowl out of an MP3.
6:57 AM #
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Another cute hybrid of modern and "ancient" technology is the "no touch" (no needle) vinyl player. There are at least two technologies for playing 33 1/3 rpm (or 45) disks using lasers (no degradation of the surface by playing the record). One uses lasers to read the surface
http://www.elpj.com/about/
and costs about 10K US$. The other is a Library of Congress project that takes a photo of the grove, and computes the sound produced digitally.
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Their children will likely never know physical media for music at all.
CDs are physical media and MP3s always reside on physical media. Magnetic blips and laser-burned marks are both very physical things. (Maybe they aren't media you can make bowls of, though...)
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CDs are physical media and MP3s always reside on physical media. Magnetic blips and laser-burned marks are both very physical things.
That is a bit of sophistry. (Lance's point is that there won't be CDs.) Each piece of music no longer requires that you carry more stuff. The capacity of current devices for music is essentially infinite for most people. iPods now have video precisely in order to make storage a constraint (and therefore justify upgrades).
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