No "loss leaders" in WI = HIGHER FOOD PRICES (Webster: foreclose, vs)

[timberline742]

Originally Posted by Drover

You might still prefer the product of analog recording and vinyl playback and it may sound better to you subjectively, and I certainly won't tell you that you're wrong any more than I'd tell someone they're wrong to prefer a painting to a photograph. But by any objective measure, today's digital technology is capable of producing more accurate recording and higher quality playback.

This is why you don't get it. If you want more accurate to the original WAV files, then yes, but that is not "better", and that isn't subjective really. Unless you consider all tastes subjective, which they are not. There is a reason why recordings from the early/mid 70s, and the vinyl masters that came from them, blow away the sound quality of the digital versions of those same tracks on today's media (usually the vinyl versions included).

Never mind the hundreds or even thousands of 60s and 70s records that I have that look and sound minty, while how many of those even 80s CDs have held up? Almost none. Even when cared for well.

[Drover]

Well, you're not the first vinyl snob to claim their preference is objective, and you won't be the last. Many classical aficionados insist with equal fervor that their preference for digital is objective too. Which of these mutually exclusive claims is true?

[madison999]

Originally Posted by Drover

On the contrary, loss-lead pricing is often a direct response to competition, leading to one of the very things the competition is supposed to create: lower prices. It's only "anti-competitive" in the sense that it could give one retailer an advantage over another with regard to pricing that single item... but again, trying to gain a competitive advantage is the very essence of competition. By your reasoning, anything that succeeds is producing a competitive advantage is "anti-competitive."

Wow. Loss leader pricing has one purpose; to put out the competition's lights. If used for any other reason it is really just an exercise in incompetence.

And no, I don't remember Best Buy and Walmart having a huge selection or loss-leader prices. In fact I can't figure out how Best Buy ever sold a CD considering how expensive they were and still are, last I looked. Walmart may have had and still have loss-leader pricing for CDs but their selection has never been "huuuuuge" focusing instead on more recognized artists, leaving market space for actual music stores to carry a wider selection of lesser-known artists. In short, Walmart and Best Buy have never had anything approximating a monopoly on CDs sales. In fact, neither of them are even the #1 retailer for CDs -- Amazon is.

See, 15 years ago and today do not occupy the same space in time, so feel free to stop jumping back and forth as though they are one in the same.. I gave an example of what two businesses did IN MADISON (and in other locations I am sure) approximately 15 years ago.

If you lived on the east side after Best Buy did that and think they didn't have a monopoly on cd sales for that area you are wrong. And how have national statistics crept into this conversation? Last time i checked there were strange words like regional and test, and companies were allowed to apply those words and their definitions to their business practices as they chose.

The demise of the CD retail market has zero to do with loss-lead pricing and is almost entirely attributable to technology shifts giving major labels the ability to skip the record shop altogether and smaller artists to basically self-distribute through electronic means. Walmart isn't the only retailer to scale back their CD selection -- everybody has except maybe vintage specialty shops. The market just isn't there any more. Hell, some car companies have stopped putting CD players in their cars because they're wasting valuable real estate on the head unit.

Again, I am talking about the loss leader actions of two businesses at a certain place and time. What the above has to do with Madison in 1999 is beyond me.

As for 150% of the previous prices, best I can tell Walmart still sells CDs for about $9 to $13-14. The first CD I bought cost $17. That was back in 1988. Adjusted for inflation that would be $35 today. In the early to mid 90s when CDs had achieved ubiquitous market penetration, the average price dropped to about $12 if you shopped around or found it on special, or about $15 if you just walked into a CD/casette hawker like Camelot or Tower Records and grabbed it off the non-sale rack. Again, adjusted for inflation that would be about $18-$24 in today's money. So I don't see how Walmart is supposedly jacking up the prices when at worst they've held their own in nominal terms thus gone down in real terms, and may actually still be lower than the likes that Tower/Camelot/Borders/etc. charged 15-20 years ago even in nominal terms.

Completely irrelevant to anything I have said.





While their durability was oversold when they first hit the market, CDs are more durable when taken care of. A properly stored and handled CD will have the same sound quality after its one millionth play as it does on its first. Try that with an LP or a cassette. And while they're certainly vulnerable to deep scratching, they can sustain far more surface scratching than vinyl can without impacting sound quality.

Furthermore, CDs are a lossless format. Digital recording captures audio sound more accurately (for instance, no tape saturation) and suffers no loss in sound quality in the production and mixing process if the original recording and the mixing/production are also done in a lossless digital format. If there's an issue with sound quality of any given CD, that was a decision or error made in the production process, not because of any inherent flaws in the format. (See Pogue Mahon by The Pogues for instance.) I don't think people who sing the praises of LPs have any idea the magnitude of sonic compromises required to fit a standard-length album on a 12" LP. The sound data on a properly produced CD is far more complete.

If anything is the biggest scam in the history of music retail, it's mp3s. While they're a lot more convenient, they represent a significant regression in audio quality, and you're still paying about as much per track as if it were a CD-quality reproduction. Plus there's virtually zero incremental cost to distribute electronic copies of music but it's still priced like there is.

I put my answers in bold above...not yelling, just wanted to differentiate the answers from the initial comments, thought it was easier to read bold than underlined.

[Drover]

First of all, you specified two national retailers; you didn't say anything abut the Madison market specifically.

Second, if the purpose of loss-lead pricing to "put out the competition's lights" then so is any other marketing ploy that's designed to attract more business. It's a practice driven by the very competition you claim to want to protect, producing one of the major benefits of competition (lower prices) that is typically given as one of the reasons for encouraging competition, yet you advocate price controls -- one of the most anti-competitive actions there is -- as a remedy to a practice that produces exactly what competition is supposed to achieve in the first place. I'd call it circular reasoning but it's more of Mobius strip.

Third, to say that two retailers created a monopoly is an oxymoron.

Fourth, do you know for a fact that Best Buy and Walmart were selling CDs below cost or are you just speculating? If so, how did they get away with it in Wisconsin -- none of their competitors had the presence of mind to file a complaint?

Finally, there are still CD retailers in Madison other than Best Buy and Walmart, including one I regularly shopped at 20 years ago who have managed to hold out in the most expensive part of town. So there's no CD monopoly in Madison, loss-lead pricing by BB and WM or not.

[cheese plate]

Why are you still arguing about CD production/sales and audio quality with 2 people who actually ran/run record labels? I'm being serious now, how exactly do you feel that you are in any sort of position to challenge us when we did this professionally and you did not? Unbelievable. Do you walk up to engineers and tell them they're building it wrong? If you meet Jordan Spieth, are you going to lead with "you hold your putter wrong"?

Because you literally have no clue what you're talking about here. Best Buy was well-known then for having prices locals couldn't compete with; looking back, they put a fair number of businesses out to pasture because of it, leading (ha!) back to the main topic here.

And I have a 100% conversion rate for people who previously thought analog didn't sound better than digital. Just stop by some day and I'll play some of the original classic 45s you've heard digitally for decades. One listen to the Coral original of Buddy Holly's "Everyday" usually does it. You can hear things you didn't even know existed in the recording, clear as a bell. It has a much greater dynamic range (CDs have compressed ranges) than what gets played on the radio. The difference with digital is price, not quality. It is insanely cheap (in comparison) and easy to record this way vs. analog. It does not, however, sound better.

Originally Posted by timberline742

Never mind the hundreds or even thousands of 60s and 70s records that I have that look and sound minty, while how many of those even 80s CDs have held up? Almost none. Even when cared for well.

Right, this is a fact. All the new records I bought in the 80s are fine, but a lot of the CDs from then are unplayable. It's also funny that only a tiny, tiny percentage of CDs are worth more than a pine tree air freshener, but a large number of underground vinyl classics go for a full-month's rent. CDs are garbage. I can make them at home.

[cheese plate]

CDs made a dent in the classical world, which is a much different world than contemporary music (blues, country, jazz, rock, hip hop, and so on). Room sound/ambience isn't as cherished; the "band" aspect isn't as important as a scrubbed sound, where you can hear all (50, 60, etc) instruments. Classical is not as visceral as, say, rock, where "feel" and attitude are part of the picture. You will defintely hear classical fans fawning over CDs, but I don't know of any other genre where this is the case with hardcore fans.

[Drover]

Originally Posted by cheese plate

Why are you still arguing about CD production/sales and audio quality with 2 people who actually ran/run record labels?

Because appeal to authority is not a dispositive argument.

Originally Posted by cheese plate

I'm being serious now, how exactly do you feel that you are in any sort of position to challenge us when we did this professionally and you did not?

Because anyone's preferences can be challenged, especially when they claim those preferences are some sort of objective standard. Evidently, they're not. As Rich Pell, professor of electronic media at Carnegie-Mellon puts it, "if you prefer the sound of vinyl that's great. However that subjective judgment shouldn't be confused with the objective facts, which show that CD/digital does a far more accurate job of reproducing the original musical signal." Oh yeah -- he also happens to own a vinyl record label. Then there's NYU professor and industry-elite sound engineer Jim Anderson's take: "I think some people interpret [vinyl's] lack of top end and interpret an analog type of distortion as warmth. It's a misinterpretation of it. But if they like it, they like it. That's fine."

Film composer and mix engineer Joost Jannsens strikes a similar chord (pardon the pun): "Theoretically speaking, vinyl doesn’t come close to the sound of digital. Higher resolutions, more clarity, much more headroom and detail... Practically speaking though, vinyl sounds better for many people (though this is a matter of TASTE) [emphasis original] because of imperfections. A little noise here and there, a little shimmer, some distortion all add up to an imperfect, but very naturally and beautifully sounding record." Meanwhile, Dan Pensado was much less sanguine on the digital vs. analog debate when he infamously said, "show me a guy who doesn't like a particular format, and I'll show you a guy who doesn't know how to use it.”

Whose authority is more authoritative: Pell's, Anderson's, Jannsens', Pensado's or yours?

When it comes to preference, the answer is "none of the above," which the other four generally acknowledge even as some of them make their own preferences known.

Originally Posted by cheese plate

Unbelievable. Do you walk up to engineers and tell them they're building it wrong? If you meet Jordan Spieth, are you going to lead with "you hold your putter wrong"?

Non sequitur. I never said what you or anyone else is doing is wrong.

Originally Posted by cheese plate

Because you literally have no clue what you're talking about here. Best Buy was well-known then for having prices locals couldn't compete with; looking back, they put a fair number of businesses out to pasture because of it, leading (ha!) back to the main topic here.

The time frame cited for Best Buy supposedly putting all these places out of business -- somewhere after the early 2000s -- is when CD sales began their rapid decline worldwide. Best Buy didn't cause that, new technologies did. Even if we take as true that Best Buy put some retailers out of business, they do not and never had anything close to a monopoly on CD sales as was claimed in this thread.

Originally Posted by cheese plate

And I have a 100% conversion rate for people who previously thought analog didn't sound better than digital. Just stop by some day and I'll play some of the original classic 45s you've heard digitally for decades. One listen to the Coral original of Buddy Holly's "Everyday" usually does it. You can hear things you didn't even know existed in the recording, clear as a bell. It has a much greater dynamic range (CDs have compressed ranges) than what gets played on the radio. The difference with digital is price, not quality. It is insanely cheap (in comparison) and easy to record this way vs. analog. It does not, however, sound better.

That's a matter of opinion/preference.

I have no doubt that there are plenty of vinyl releases out there that capture more detail than your average CD release. Even so, it is entirely possible to capture every bit as much detail on CD as on vinyl and then some, and with less noise for that matter, when sound engineers are allowed to focus on detail instead of loudness.

[madison999]

drover just google best buy and wal mart loss leader cd's.

Beyond that, I have no more time for you, have a nice life.

[cheese plate]

Yeah, it's like a 4 year old stomping his feet and yelling, "BECAUSE I SAID SO!!!"

[Drover]

Originally Posted by cheese plate

Yeah, it's like a 4 year old stomping his feet and yelling, "BECAUSE I SAID SO!!!"

Ironic observation from someone who threw a tantrum because someone had the audacity to challenge him.