The Blu-ray Bingo
I gave it all I had. I fought against the CD tooth and nail. I despised it, I detested it, and I reviled it. I loved my cassette collection. It took me years of careful, plotting calculation to build it up to 450 beautifully clunky cassettes. I had world music, classic rock, shoe-gaze, traditional folk, heavy metal, even some Goth. It was a thing of beauty. And it didn’t survive.
There is latitude at first. The push towards any new technology can be resisted at first. You still have your cassette layer in your car and at home, there’s no need to jump on an expensive bandwagon. But the insidious nature of technology is that everything gets phased out. Mind you, phase is the operative word. It’s a slow, nefarious process.
Oh, so slow. When I bought a new car, guess what did not come standard anymore? It wasn’t power steering. A CD player replaced the cassette player. When my jam box went on the fritz, the only thing on the market was a cassette/CD player. Once they can get the new technology into your home, living side-by-side with the old stuff, they’ve got you.
Then, you wake up one morning and wonder. You begin to wonder why you’re still using the cassette player. It’s clunky and pops and no two sides ever have the same amount of music on them. You begin to see all the arguments against the old technology do, in fact, hold water. Yeah, cassettes do suck. The CD can give me the closest approximation to what the artist initially intended. They’re even better than LPs because they can be played through without flipping the wax over.
So, the same goes with the new Blu-ray blitz. So what that the Blu-ray is designed to play back in HD quality? So what that it can hold five times as much information as a regular DVD? So what that its better? So you can see the slippery slope you’re now on. Sooner or later, the Blu-ray will be the de facto format. Until they develop the holographic disc.
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