First-ever Night Ride 1968-03-06

[rushomancy]

--- In peel@yahoogroups.com, RobF <robfleay@...> wrote:
>
> > I do not see how FLAC is any better for a 40 year old 
> > mono recording. Shoot me down in flames if you must, but 
> > do it in a friendly way, please. 
> 
> I'm with you Steve. I'm ripping tapes as we speak and I'm buggered 
if I can tell the difference between the mp3 and the flac versions. I 
know what Peel would have made of the discussion anyway.
> 
> Now where's my Razorcuts flexi gone? 

Howdy, folks.  As a member in good standing of this group for oh, 
well it must be at least a week, I figure I will throw my two cents 
in regarding some of the controversies in the group of late.

First, regarding FLAC: The notion that FLAC somehow represents a 
dramatic improvement over a well-ripped MP3 is just not true for most 
listeners.  So given the increased filesize of FLAC files, what is 
the advantage?  Well, to my mind it's mainly that FLAC is an archival 
format, and I would certainly consider what the fine folks here are 
doing archival work.  That's not to say that the shows shouldn't be 
made available in MP3 eventually- I think most people would be 
perfectly happy with it- but already we have had people here talking 
about speed correction and EQing, processes that necessarily cause 
lossy encoded files to be further degraded in quality.  I'm not some 
kind of audiophile nut, but given that presumably one of the goals of 
this is to preserve a part of history, at the very least FLAC files 
ought to be made available for those who want them.

Regarding moving the list over to a web board: Again, I'm not some 
partisan fanatic with a deep lifelong commitment to Yahoo Groups, 
especially considering that I only joined last week, but I have 
observed that the debate over this issue can easily become bitter and 
divisive.  Given that there's already an active and thriving 
community here and that the mailing list format doesn't seem to have 
caused any serious problems thus far (the posts in my digest are 
automatically threaded, which is quite nice), I tend to subscribe to 
the theory of "If it ain't broke, don't fix it".  Your mileage may, 
of course, vary!