What will become of my beloved CDs?

Don't start with the 8-track thing. I have a 3M 8-track player hooked into what is a fairly decent high end system. The output stage has been modded and the Black Diamond Racing cones that support it cost more than the player, as does the interconnect. Good 8-tracks can be had for less than 10 cents each. I have a decent collection of the tapes. They generally sound warm and closed-in, but so what?
For the cost of one $15.00 CD one can own 150 8-tracks. The sound on them is no worse than many transfers of master tape to CD, although it tends to be in the other direction. Where a bad CD can sound harsh, 8-tracks just sound dull and rolled off. I also listen to open reel tape, LP, CD, AM and FM.

Viridian! Dude! I was so thrilled to learn that I'm not the only one with a High End 8-track system. I replaced all the capacitors with Zen and Crescendo caps from North Creek and rewired with Litz. Roy Orbison has never been ths same. It was as if a veil had been lifted; the sound was simply more real, more present, more available. The PRaT was so immense it literally knocked me off my feet--a veritable prat fall!

Now here's the kicker. The model I modified was a Craig "Fireball Roberts Special" that I rescued from a 1968 Ford F-150 pickup. One corner of the case was cracked. I applied a couple of bandaids to hold it together. To my total amazement, not only was the case secured but the sound was enormously improved, as well. Much more air, while the bottom end was tightened and a lot more musical.

But wait....I found that different bandaids gave dramatically different results. I'm currently using Flintstone Wee Ones from Curad that I have modified by freezing them in CO2 (used a fire extinguisher). The difference is just incredible and they aren't even broken in yet.

Hats off from one 8-tracker to another!

will

I'm not so sure about the hard disc thing. A DVD holds between 4 and 20 Gigabytes of information ... so if your collection was all in high resolution, than you might have 8,000 Gbytes, a substantial hard disk. Now as technology marches forward there might be such a device but then there is the issue of back-up. I for one will want some form of back-up so that when the hard-drive takes a dump I won't be downloading for ... well lets see with a 1 megabit per second data connection. Um 8 Tbytes would take 64 million seconds, only a little over 2 years. But maybe our high speed access will be better or maybe we won't want high resolution multi-channel audio.

Lots of unknowns but I think your collection won't be obsolete for a while (I hope so for my sake as well).

And you know opnions are just like something else ... everyone has one ... for what it's worth.

JW

The way things are going, the music biz will soon cut off any media that is bit-accesible. You and I are sitting on virtual master tapes! And as upsampling, etc. becomes more refined (and it will) your collection will only become more valuable (and better sounding). I'd not worry.

An article from NY Times regarding the current state of on-line classical music: http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/11/arts/music/11KOZI.html