I am going to make a prediction here…

Most of my predictions are pretty good, but my timing is usually way, WAY off. Just sayin’.

I predict that most of the music and movies we have known will sometime in the not-to-distant future be… persona-non-Grata. Unwelcome to the average listener.

The logic goes like this. Many of you may know that Netflix had to raise their prices by 60% yesterday. Why? Because the Recording Industry is charging them much more than a year ago. Think: 10 times as much.

But we can all watch YouTube for free [maybe a commercial].

The idea is that there will be a time when there are so many bands and movie makers making content for free – AND that they will be so easy to find – that listening to someone LIKE Miles Davis for free will beat paying $100/month to corporations that sue little old ladies for downloading music and blind guys for downloading porn.

I think artists will make money not by selling content but by selling tickets to shows – and other methods by which they work with the music/movie lover instead of suing them. What a concept huh? 😉

I think this could happen at any time – but is most likely in the next 5 to 10 years.

Before that we will probably see micro-payments where you pay a few cents per minute and can listen/see anything you want [Do you realize that at $1/song itunes is – if each song is 3 minutes long, they make $20/hour off of someone who is just exploring new music? -This is where.how we have always been kind of ripped off. Buying an album, hoping it will be good because you heard of one of the artists before or because of the cool cover…. been there, done that 1000s of times. Gets expensive and is usually unsatisfactory.]

I overheard the Pandora CEO justifying their market cap now that they are a publicly traded company and he said something that was very interesting to me.

Something to the effect that 60-80% of the time people do NOT want to choose what music they want to listen to, but have it chosen for them. Now, for the dominant internet radio website, it makes sense that they would say something like this. But is it true? And for however true it is, what does it mean for audiophiles?

Audiophiles who have nothing of audiophile quality that plays music for us [excluding friends and significant others].

Yeah, there are some nice tuners and some music servers out there – but hardly what one would call audiophile-quality.

Like, you know, why can’t a $100K turntable come with a mechanism – totally detached from but designed to work with the table – that randomly selects albums and plays them for us? Or a CD carousel player with a similar quality profile?

Anyway, I do think that it is a pain to pick out music to play all the time and I can understand why people accept a degradation in sonic performance in order to have someone else do it for them. Not sure any of this justifies Pandora’s stock price – but that is not going to bother me late at night.

[I know. Not many posts lately. The system sounded great and I stayed away from the paper and online rags But that only lasted so long… ;-). There is a lot more to talk about… in future posts here.]

OK. This is kind of … well… I want to say bad things about Comcast, especially the move to digital cable TV. What this ultimately means for high-end audio is unclear, the rush of people abandoning TV for internet video will probably be good for computer audio – since people will be used to using a computer for ‘living-room type entertainment’ and bad for old-style components-in-the-livingroom setups. But do not know for sure. Obviously.

Anyway, the move to digital cable from analog has been disastrous. I have some programs still recorded on a TiVo from the analog cable days, and here are the differences:

* The audio is both brighter and more muffled at the same time. Words are MUCH harder to understand now. When the sound gets a little too loud then it is hard, edgy and harsh.

* Roughly half of the picture is chopped off (all the sides have been cropped off about 25%)

* Blacks and grays are now black (many darkish movies are now unwatchable)

* changing channels now takes about 5 to 10 seconds (presumably it is sending a signal over the internet for each button push, and they are very slow at responding, unlike Google search which responds immediately each letter you type. for example)

* As people migrate away from TV, the quality of the programming has declined to primarily appeal to the types of people who do not feel comfortable on the internet.

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Like most people, we have no choice but to use Comcast. We used to have a small cable company for Boulder County, Jones Intercable, but Comcast bought them out. What happens is that companies here in the U.S. can buy out a small competitor, take over their customer base, lower services and raise prices for those customers, and then use the resulting profits [and promise of future profits] to leverage and buy out yet another small competitor, repeating the process over and over until there are no small competitors left.

I do not really bemoan the end of TV, as such – but to have it end this way is kind of sad. I understand Google TV will offer internet video (YouTube, Vimeo, Dailymotion, etc) in a large screen format in our living-rooms, which is great but I do not see that having a high-end sound system hooked up to your video system is going to be of much benefit [it definitely WAS for analog cable, which I heartily enjoyed for 25 years; with digital cable it has been hit and miss… the source quality being so bad. Now with internet video… it isn’t as bad as digital cable, but it ain’t ‘CD quality’ which all of a sudden we are looking *UP* to… ? *sigh*].