Actually, in the astute audio world, it's well known you can invest in a much cheaper analogue rig and get much more satisfaction out of it than digital spent many times over. $350 for that new budget Rega is enough to blow away ANY digital player I've heard that cost less than $10k. Probably any digital rig at any cost. The two formats simply cannot sound like each other no matter how much money you spend. And yes, I currently have both SACD and DVD-Audio capable players. I like them for what they are (especially 2-channel SACD), but I'm talking in the area of imaging, realism. liquidity, smoothness & frequency response. No comparison to vinyl and the imaging especially is never right in the digital domain. If you have revealing enough speakers, you will find that the bulk of musical information in a stereo recording is squished and mono-like in the digital domain, whereas analogue allows the instruments to float beside, under, above and beyond your speakers.
AND... make no mistake about other formats that have come and gone. DCC for example. That's directly recording 1's and 0's to cassette and was, therefore, a true digital medium. So was the Adam tape drive technology from the 80's IIRC, that digitally recorded data to an analogue tape (metal formulated usually). And then there were a few VHS decks that had the ability to use their video heads, modulated in such a way as to record digital audio. Speaking of that, was the very short lived D-VHS medium (all digital of course)! All of these were superior technologies that went by the wayside partly because of the confusion the industries cast upon the general public during these ever continually volatile digital times. Nobody agreeing on standards and I also firmly believe they were quickly discarded because they are so long lasting. Every industry today wants you to re-purchase their goods. Over and over and over again. Anything that represents longevity must be cast out, else how are these greedy bastards going to continue to line their pockets for "innovation" or not? And that's what it's all about.
What we need and what I desire is a modern tape drive system one a consumer level with near-consumer replaceable parts (capstans, pinch rollers, belts) based on either compact cassette OR reel-to-reel so we can properly store our data or music - just like the big boys *still* do. What the Joe Sixpack consumer is sold today, is by and large, garbage designed to be obsolete as soon as you take it right out of the packaging. It's seriously flawed, sounds like crap, doesn't retain data for any real length of time and is essentially stripping people of the passion we once had for music, photography, gaming or whatever.
Take the photography industry for example. Who hasn't lost valuable pics yet thanks to the flaws inherent in digital storage? You can't accidentally "delete" a negative the same way. Not to mention all the pics that are purposely being discarded because, all of the sudden, everybody is an "expert" photographer and critic. Psychology behind this phenomenon isn't rocket science, but seems again - most people would rather not recognize or deal with it. At the expense of quality, it's simply too much fun snapping cheesy pics off your phone camera, listening to mp3's on a seriously small wafer and all the other silly things people get a kick out of today. The world is just rife with cheese I guess. :lol:
, yikes! Didn't mean to get so off topic... to remain on-topic, I would say that listening to a horrible format (mp3) on an Amiga is a futile exercise to say the least. Yes, it may be fun to play around with and experiment (did it myself) as that's always what it's been about classic computing wise, but to sit - even casually listen to music in the background like that, with horrible fidelity... your Amiga is better equipped performing some other worthwhile task. lol May as well just play a CD back using a SCSI CD drive for superior results. I spent $60 on an external USB soundcard for my 060/Deneb equipped Miggy and was still disappointed in the performance of both the audio AND the "multi-tasking" ability of the Amiga.
Anyone want to buy a SoundBlaster X-Fi that's like new in the box? $40 shipped within the U.S. 
Man! I m so happy that someone really knows what he is talking about, so i m not the only one here who thinks MP3 is music (sound) without soul!
:laughing:
Greatly explained about sound coming from 2 speakers making sound in the room like you where at the hall, not mentioning that you can also hear individual musicans sitting nearer or deeper back or at a different height!
;p
save2.6 have you ever tried to record music at VHS or better BETAmax?
I compared them against many cd players and the result was fascinating good!!! I also made some video backup systems to backup all my amiga stuff/discs to vhs tape also (on good high grade ones) for archiving them.
Yes they all work today like many many C-64 tapes that are older more than 20 years and works also very well, i made some copy units for making exact copys of tapes to have them just in case...
Sorry for OT people!
