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C. Marc Wagner's avatar

You've asked an interesting question there, Ed. On the one hand, we live in an analog world so it seems like analog media "ought to be" the best choice. However, analog is susceptible to degradation. Regardless of the physical media, The original copy degrades with successive copies. Finally, the quality of the recording media impacts the quality of the final product.

Digital is NOT analog. Nevertheless, the quality of a digital recording may be arbitraryily high and it never degrades.

Access to digital media is no longer dependent upon owning a copy of the recording but, in absence of media, the listener needs a subscription to to a service granting a license to the recording in question.

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Genevieve's avatar

We travel occasionally with an autistic son who needs a few staple media items for some stability. We now can no longer guarantee there will be a DVD player in the holiday houses and have even requested permission to bring along a small Blu-Ray player. (I probably need to cast from an iPad to their smart tellies, I suppose). Although I’ve had online writing platforms since the early noughties, I have not yet succumbed to not so smart TVs and streaming - we have a 15 year old TV with a HDMI port, so we manage with MUBI and some arty on demand services and read a lot! but I’m not looking forward to talking to yet another machine that wants a login and might pinch my personals.

I am starting to feel like my grandmother, who drove a buggy to school with her twin sister more than 100 years ago - “it’s a different world”.

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