Below We have a short article by Gary Cannavo
Read below why we have asked this question time and time again!
What do you Think? Which one is better?
Or
Being a dj in the music industry for a long time
now and growing up as
many old school djs have. We've loved our wax
because no matter what,
"Vinyl" was the best sounding quality we had,
still to this date, It would
be hard to find a better true sounding digital file
that would challenge
yesterdays wax on any BIG club system of the
highest calibers. But the day has come to where
all of today’s dj’s need to progress and go with today’s
standard formats.
CD Hard Copy or Hard Drive.
So we all have to ask
ourselves, which is better, safer?
Well we have both sides of that coin.
Some djs still enjoy mixing cd’s with their
vinyl that swear up & down by it, others
prefer the digital medium as in mp3, m4a & wav files
etc. But which is the longer lasting format? Then we need to
ask ourselves, which is the better investment? Lets explore this for a
moment shall we. If your a dj in todays dj record pools, you will get
the choice of joining their CD membership and get promotional
copy cd singles and albums or join for the quick digital download to
add files to your hard drives music library on your Desk or Laptop. That's
if that respected record pool has a
digital site where this can be done for you
BUT there does seem to be a problem with Hard Drives
as I've heard and seen many times. The best drives on
today’s market no matter what the make or model seem to
have a shelf life of 6 to 8 years max. Having internal platters
spinning at thousands of revs per minute will wear out eventually.
I'm sure there are djs who have a very good argument that say
"Hey! my hard drive has already lasted me 10 or
more years so what are you talking about?? Give it time,
it will go down sooner or later. They all do. Then you've got
the djs who will tell you it doesn't matter if it blows out, I've
got 3 back up drives sitting home ready to go! We'll how many
of us seen or heard of hard drives sitting on our shelves for
months claimed to be "ready to go", blow out as soon as
you run power through it? Then what do you do?
When this happens and we've all been there. Have
to start all over again gathering, finding and searching
for all the music you once had, Loved and collected that
took many hours and hours of work and start over. Sound
familiar ohh boy, that’s fun. Or pay a retrieval company
several hundreds of dollars to try and recover your lost info,
that’s if they can. I'm sure you've seen or heard this dilemma.
Now lets visit the value of your investment of time and yes,
cold hard cash buying and downloading these hard to find
and rare gems you've amassed.
Now lets touch on CD's here for a moment.
Yes cds thesedays seems to be a distraction,cluttering up
your room or record room then seem
to get in your way when you least want them to.
BUT just think of some of the promotional cd’s
you've gotten years earlier and ask your self?
Are these worth anything? The answer to that
question is YES! Hard Copy CDS are hard to
come by now, not many are produced in these
digital times. Major and Independent
Major Record Companies spend a
LOT of money creating the"Not For Sale" or
"For Promotional Use Only" cds you see.
Most all of them have mixes there are only
on that particular cd and no where else. Then as
time goes on the number of cds that were made
for that one project gets less and less as they
get used, thrown out, worn out, scratched etc.
So the numbers through the years go way,
way down and you'll now find yourself
holding what we call in the industry
"Survivors" These pieces become
valuable to any music collector,
music enthusiast or dj because there
are now none around which makes them a
valuable piece to of property to own.
Any professional recording studio
will always have a killer cd library that
goes WAY back. Why because having hard
copy is the way to go according to the djs I speak to.