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Re: Future recording formats (was homemade hydrophone)

Subject: Re: Future recording formats (was homemade hydrophone)
From: Marty Michener <>
Date: Fri, 01 Mar 2002 10:07:27 -0500
At 06:36 PM 2/28/02 -0500, you wrote:


>The disks are used in some of their video recorders. I can get the disks
>all over the place right now.
>
>Before the advent of the mp3 craze the MD newsgroups were full of
>speculation on when Sony might put out a audio version. Now that packing
>the max amount of low quality compressed music into whatever seems like
>the only goal, you don't hear many even talking about that disk.
>
>I could get very grumpy, not that it would do any good.
>
>Walt
>

Folks:

In the original product descriptions, around 1990, Sony actually described 
a soon-to-be-released DATA drive for the MD, where drives would soon be 
available for all computers that would give us the honest data storage of 
the disk's actual capacity (around 250 megs?).

Vaporware!  I suspect what went wrong was either 1. the transfer rates were 
only about 100k per second, as we see in real audio recorders, or 2 they 
figured that people might copy audio DATA from disk to disk, or 3 they just 
couldn't imagine invading the ZIP disk market, or some combination of the 
three.

Internal ZIP drives, which took forever to reach the add-on market, copy 
data around 400k per second.  Of course this is plenty fast to record 44.1k 
16 stereo, full bore, but I wonder about the power requirements, as 
compared to the laser tech of CDROM and laser-plus magnetic of MD?

Remember that Sony is one of the largest OWNERS of copyrighted material in 
the world.  Their other divisions must take marching orders from that huge 
corporate financial resource.  Look at who owns the copyrights now to 
movies, songs, plays etc.  This is bound to make everything else take a 
low-risk route to the future, as seen by the BillGates types within Sony.

my very best,

Marty Michener
MIST Software Associates
75 Hannah Drive, Hollis, NH 03049

coming soon : EnjoyBirds bird identification software.




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