As I sat back in my comfortable chair my mind wandered with thoughts of digital recording, lossless quality and archival life-spans of recordings.
Frank Tuttle Smells Something Burning
Regular readers will be familiar with my fondness for emerging technologies and my willingness to embrace the future whilst carrying the lessons learnt from the past. With this in mind you could understand the tumultuous combination of great sadness and happiness I felt on the realisation that no amount of head cleaning or alignment adjustment was going to restore my video recorder to optimum working order.
It seemed like only a few short years ago that, much like Moses had descended from the mountains carrying two stone tablets inscribed with the Ten Commandments, in what some have described as the earliest version of a PDA, I stood before my television holding a VHS and a Beta video recorder. Now both had succumbed to the passage of time. The Beta machine had gone out of favour many years earlier due mainly to its superior picture quality and now, thanks to one too many recording sessions of movie marathons, the latest VHS machine was showing definite signs of reduced vim and vigour.
Extensive boy scout training had prepared me for this time, so I was fairly confident in my decision to replace the trusted video recorder with a DVD recorder. As I sat back in my comfortable chair my mind wandered with thoughts of digital recording, lossless quality and archival life-spans of recordings. I suddenly shifted uneasily and promptly went to my CD collection and hid my Leo Sayer and Paula Abdul CDs.
Now while I was more than equipped to enter the arena of DVD ownership I was far from prepared for the issue of DVD recording formats. In hindsight it really should have come as no surprise that there would be a formatting issue to deal with in the DVD recording equation - after all, the issue of tape sizes that plagued the video recorder era could not translate to a DVD media as all discs were round and the same size. Well actually that turned out not to be true either, as I discovered when introduced to DVD RAM discs which essentially are the same discs, however, much like Walt Disney encased in his cryogenic chamber, choose not to be removed. I should say it is possible for the enthusiastically ill-informed to remove the actual disc, however the effectiveness of the item is somewhat diminished. One could say the same thing about Walt Disney.
Unfortunately this was to be just the start of it. A myriad of "pluses", "minuses", "Rs" and "Ws" then entered the equation. While not being the biggest study of abstract numerology or indeed foreign languages, I concentrated as much as I thought necessary as a sales-like-person, potentially younger in years than that of the video recorder I was replacing, confirmed the exact need of these letters and symbols. Thoroughly convinced, if yet no more informed, I chose a unit with the most letters and symbols utilising my keen sense of observation to assume that the last set of numbers and symbols would be the price.
Many happy hours of recording have since been enjoyed. With each rapid advancement I make through a set of commercials the memory of analogue tape recordings fades like a video left on a large speaker for too long. So as I ponder on what to do with a "few" remaining video tapes that I have stacked in the shelves, at least I know I will never be short of a drink coaster when I need one. Now if I could just find that Tijuana Brass album.
Submitted by Frank on January 03, 2006.
