CNET Scandal:

Actually, Bill, I believe the RIAA is losing the battle for other reasons. I'm all for protecting the rights of the artist. God knows these days your career can begin and end in a blink. Very few have any real staying power and they should get the money they earned for being in a studio, mouth to mike until the wee hours of the morning, for being on a tour bus at times for nearly an entire year and so on. After the stage lights go off and the crowd files out, it's not an easy life and all involved should get their due.

However, I believe ongoing piracy has quite a bit to do with the strong arm tactics that the RIAA, MPAA, government and other entities are using to combat it. When the consumers are treated like criminals before they even start looking for music or movies, it rubs them the wrong way. Both record labels and movie studios are so bent on doing it their way or the highway, that legitimate options outside of Itunes and Netflix are few and far between, and vary greatly in quality. Licensing has a lot to do with this, especially for streaming sites like Netflix or Spotify. Content is spotty because you may have to go here for one movie studio's films or a band, and another place for something else. You can, depending upon your likes, sometimes have to visit 3 or more legitimate websites to find everything you're looking for. That's a very good way for getting consumers to go legit to fail.

Going back to the strong arm tactics, governments, the U.S especially, not that long ago went on an anti-piracy strike and started taking down blogs they could prove or they considered under their definition to be promoting or engaging in piracy. What happened? Hundreds of non-related blogs went down with these offenders, some to never have returned. It was the perfect "throwing the baby out with the bathwater" situation, and it's still going on with ICE now.

I'm not defending pirates nor am I saying "to hell" with artists making a living and supporting those who actively protect the artists. I'm merely stating the fact that these organizations are no chivalrous knights in shining armor and that record labels, movie studios, the RIAA/MPAA and so on are putting a lot of this on themselves by conducting what amounts to a present day witch hunt, with even the slightest notion that piracy is occurring or you might be pirating, enough to send you to the stake.

 

Please - I am going by documented history - Read the links I provided. I don't expect you to automatically accept my word simply because I say so - hence the links. Please have the same courtesy with us. I note you have provided nothing to substantiate what you claim.

IEC 98 came late in the day and as noted in the links I provided, was rolled into RIAA standards in the 70s - way after RIAA became the standard. DIN standards deal primarily with the physical characteristics of connectors, screws, and all sorts of physical things - including the springiness of floors in sporting venues.

The fact you have not heard of something does not mean it does not exist. Yes, "RCA" is bantered about a lot but that is more by habit - like RCA plug for a phono connector, or "kleenix" for a tissue.

Note the $1700 Liberty Audio B2B-1 Phono Amp specifications lists RIAA Accuracy. So does this $30 TCC TC-400G/L Phono Preamp. They don't list RCA specs (other than number of connectors) or anything about DIN or IEC98, or any IEC (except for AC input).

@Mman79 - I do not disagree with you about the methods used to stop piracy often spread too wide of a net and innocent people often got tangled up in it. I do not justify or condone that.

But it is wrong to totally dismiss and criticize multifaceted organizations when only a portion of their products or services don't meet with your (talking to the crowd here) approval.

For example, people bash IE9 all the time because they don't like Microsoft. This in spite of the fact, IE9 continues to prove itself, over and over again, to be the most secure browser out there. Just today, the US Govt's Dept of Homeland Security released its latest US-CERT Vulnerability Summary showing many critical Firefox vulnerabilities. (I strongly recommend anyone concerned about security - especially those who give advice about security - subscribe to that summary).

And yet the bottom line is the choice of browser does not matter - IF the computer is otherwise fully updated, protected with a current anti-malware solution, behind a software based firewall, and of course, the user (always the weakest link) must avoid risky behavior.

So bash the RIAA for those things that deserve bashing. Not just because some folks don't like them.

The fact of the matter is, it has always been easy to buy the music we want legitimately. But sadly, it has become to easy to just steal it. So easy, in fact, that too many people feel they simply have the right to take, since it is so easy to do so without likely being caught.

Also - so many totally forget the armies of hard working, poorly paid people who put the music on the shelves for consumers. Sound engineers, grips, studio operators, LP and CD press operators, cover artists, sleeve/insert printers, distributors, retailers, and many more besides the actual musicians - all depend on revenues from sales to put food on their tables, shoes on their kid's feet, and a roof over their heads.

 

Actually, it might be these people who stand the most to lose.

 

From pirating - I agree.

 

Bill,

DIN Covers LOTS more than what you think and not just limited to audio.

"However, as this was essentially an American standard, it had little impact outside of the USA. The RIAA equalisation only became a truly international standard by the mid-to-late 1970’s when European recording labels slowly and finally began to adopt the RIAA equalisation."

http://www.amr-audio.co.uk/html/faq_ph.html#ref




Cheers, Nick

 

Ummm, I think you are confusing responders. Note I didn't mention the word audio above when I said above, "DIN standards deal primarily with the physical characteristics of connectors, screws, and all sorts of physical things - including the springiness of floors in sporting venues." There are many 1000s of DIN standards.

Nevertheless, this topic is all about audio.

As for this being an American standard, that is in name only and is really only because here is where the majority of big studios were and where most of the world's albums were pressed. Europe was still in recovery from the war and budgets for home electronics were stretched already just to have a radio, not to mention the emerging television industry. Look how many different TV standards are still in place today because no one broadcast standard dominated over the others before markets became saturated (too expensive to force a change). NTSC, SECAM, a dozen versions of PAL, and more.

It does not matter what the product maker calls the equalization curve it uses in its phono equipment. It only matters that it conforms to standard "established" by the RIAA as the world's single standard.

***********

Back to the piracy issue - the problem is laws take forever to become law, and even longer to become international law. Nevertheless, if your country is a member of the UN, or EU, your country has agreed to abide by copyright laws and intellectual property rights rooted back to agreements made at the Berne and Paris Conventions in the 1880s, and before.

Vinyl ruled for decades and making a copy of a vinyl record was never easy, or cheap. So piracy was not a worry.

Suddenly, in the matter of just a few short years, 8-tracks showed up. Then 8-track recorders and dual-deck duplicators. Then cassettes, cassette recorders, and phono-to-tape recording became easy.

CDs came with no hiss, and CD to cassette recorders, recordable CDs, the Internet, torrents, P2P, thumb drives!!!!

Piracy got out of hand, while law makers caught sitting on their thumb...drive.

The RIAA and anti-piracy groups were left like sloths in the dust, totally unprepared for the rampant theft of songs - or how to get a handle on it.

Society knew they were stealing, but ignored the fact it was wrong. Because it was too easy. The RIAA lashed out at 14 year olds for sharing favorite songs while big pirating sites and their lawyers claimed Freedom of Speech.

But now it is up to consumers again to make it right. It is easy to legally purchase only the songs we like, in digital format. It is still easy to steal them, but that does not mean we (or our kids and grandkids) should.

Besides, illegal filesharing is a major source of malware, and favorite distribution method used by badguys when releasing their new code.

 

No.
The standard curve was established by serveral standards bodies worldwide, not just the RIAA as you claim.
I have quoted once to this already, even the Wikipedia article that you linked to confirms this.

"several standards bodies around the world adopted the same playback curve -identical to the RCA Victor New Orthophonic curve- which became standard throughout the national and international record markets".


Cheers, Nick.

 

I did not say "only". It seems there's a need to split hairs here.

The fact other bodies adapted the same standard but don't call it RIAA is, as I noted before, immaterial.

A single standard by many names is still a single standard.