It’s Box Set Time of Year…..Again…Part 1
Rarely, in my decades of music obsession have I pined away the days waiting for a product to be released. And it was. Last Friday. The “No Other” Superdeluxe edition box set of Gene Clark’s magnum opus, from 4AD records. The product comes in a rather large box (2 or 3 inches deep – big enough to pile in every album that Clark ever released), and features a silver vinyl album (no gatefold but includes a poster), a hybrid SACD all wrapped up as if it were a Japanese release of the remixed original album, a 7″ single, a lovely hardback book and a trifold booklet that contains two hybrid SACDs of outtakes and a blu-ray disc of the original album, the remixed version, a 5.1 hires surround version and the two outtakes albums – all at 24/96. The product is gorgeous, just beautifully constructed and would make a great christmas gift for a Byrds/Clarke/music fan. I spent every free moment in the last week listening to it. It costs £140 (€170).
Here’s the rub: I have dozens and dozens of box sets, bought over the last 30 years, and most of them are stored carefully in plastic boxes in a storage locker – they take up a huge amount of space (the worst offender, ever, was Neil Young’s archives – which seemed at the time to be the size of an empty suitcase)). Gene Clark will find his way to join more recent acquisitions – on the bottom shelf of a Kallax unit. The music industry knows this, and in their view, any time that I listen to the set in the future, it is likely from the 16 bit rips of the SACDs’ hybrid layer that has been saved to my server and delivered by Roon or equivalent. This is the only legal way I can liberate the contents on this box set to listen to on my FiiO M9 music player, music server, Sonos etc. No No No!
While I was pondering how I was going to extract the high res files from the Blu-ray (I would love to have the DSD bitstream on the SACD, but think it likely just a conversion from PCM), I noticed that I could stream the whole darn thing from Qobuz as part of my account, at 24/96, – essentially for free. Worse, Qobuz will sell me the 3 albums at 24/96 for €17.49 -to own- about 1/10th of the cost of the box set. Considering that 1. I already have a vinyl copy of the album (the 2012 MOV version – which I think sounds at least as good), 2. I have no interest in the 7 inch single, 2. I only have one SACD player that is likely to die at any moment (is it worth replacing?), 3. A lot of folks have had trouble even playing the Blu-ray disc, 4. I have read the book already, 5. I really have nowhere to store the box, WHAT is the point? In the end, what I really wanted was the 5.1 HiRes surround version, that requires illegal software to break out of the Blu-Ray disc.
Think about this – you pay €170 for a product that – if you drop it or the dog bites it – you could lose it forever. Due to ludicrous shortsightedness (going back decades) of the music industry you are forbidden – by law – just about everywhere (digital millennium copyright act etc) to extract this product from the prison in which it has been held to put it on your own hard drive or portable player for your own use. [At some stage in the future you will not be able to find an SACD player or a Blu-Ray player to play these – have you tried to play a VHS or Betamax tape recently? Wedding video? You’ll need to go to a museum.]
On the other hand, for €17.49 you can buy said music (obviously not the 5.1 version), in flac format, download it and copy it an infinite number of times (including distributing it on the internet if you are of that mindset).
So, here is my plea to the music industry: PEOPLE WHO BUY PHYSICAL PRODUCTS, PARTICULARLY EXPENSIVE BOX SETS ARE YOUR BEST CUSTOMERS, PLEASE INCLUDE A USB STICK OR DOWNLOAD CODE FOR THE SET IN HIGH RESOLUTION, IN THE BOX, SO THAT WE CAN ENJOY THE PRODUCT AS WE WISH WITHOUT BREAKING THE LAW. And NO we don’t want crappy MP3 downloads – what year is this 2009?
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