R.I.P. VCR

It now seems official. VCR machines will no longer be sold by some electrical retailers from next year. DVD (and, for that matter, hard disk) recording is to fill the shoes of what has been a common companion to the tv for twenty+ years. "The future is digital" is what we have been told for quite a while now. That probably all began with the introduction of the compact disc into mainstream culture in the mid-eighties.
Braver `experts' are telling us that the days of the CD are numbered, too. DVD-A and SACD are among the newer formats that cater for recorded music. Good as the sound may be, the newer formats' promise of better quality sound and convenience is largely a front for the introduction of copyright protection that is trickier to implement on the CD format. The sheer ubiquity of the CD format seems to suggest that mass change will be a while coming, though. I'm sure the humble audiocassette is still the format of necessity in some parts of the world.
Perhaps the whole optical-disc thing will be circumvented. Hard-disk based music/video servers could be the next big storm to rush into the home entertainment world. Some homes are wired for this today. Maybe soon our entire music collection will be stored on a remote server somewhere, waiting to be accessed via a network that today gets around by the title of `internet'.
The way we listen to music seems to have changed. The advent of the MP3 music player means that downloading a single rather than buying the whole album is the way things are going (although singles on CD have been around since the beginning of the format). Are recordings made purely with the success of singles in mind, rather than the strength of a well thought out coherent album that lives long in the hearts (and players) of fans?
Digital technology is a useful thing. For media storage, editing and transmission it can't be beat. The snag is that the current version of human beings live in a world that for all practical purposes is analogue. Since the end result can only be judged by how it is perceived by the human listener or viewer, the quality of a digital system is only as good as the mechanisms in place to transport between the digital realm and the real, organic world that we live in.

Note: as is convention, disk implies magnetic storage (e.g. hard-drive) and disc refers to optical storage (e.g. CD, DVD) - lest anyone think I was getting sloppy with spelling. Magneto-optical formats like MiniDisc seem happy spelt, well, MiniDisc.