Unfortunately, in a market economy, technological progress often gets sidelined. Several companies will come up with incompatable systems. One of them will eventually win out and the others will disappear, leaving the public with a lot of useless gadgets, and often people have recorded video and audio in what has become an obsolete medium and they have to pay to have their material converted. How many people gambled on BetaMax? It gave a superior picture to VHS at the time, but VHS won out. I've seen it happen throughout history. I used to take home movies using 9.5mm film. The quality was much better than Regular 8, and they eventually started to put it into cassettes, similar to Super-8, but Super-8 won out. How many people invested in the Osborne computer system? I used to use the CPM operating system on my computer. It was better thought out that MS.DOS because they anticipated the infinite expansion of RAM. But IBM got Bill Gates to design an operating system for them, and he stole the CPM system but decided that no computer would ever need more than 640k of RAM. Beyond that it was called Extended Memory. Windows is still stuck with that problem to this day, and they've had to work around it.
Reel-to-Reel was much better than Audio Cassettes, which were designed for dictating machines. When someone decided to develop Audio Cassettes as hi-fi equipment few people believed that that tiny tape running so slow could ever offer hi-fi quality, and the tape hiss was terrible, so they had to invent Dolby B, a consumer version of the professional Dolby A, to give anything like a good signal, even though DBX was a better system.
And how many people got stuck with 8-Track Cassettes?
Since they worked at twice the speed of the later audio cassettes and used twice the width of tape, you would expect better, but the mechanisms that had to move the heads up and down to change tracks soon fell out of alignment, and the tapes developed wow and flutter due to their design. Add to that the fact that you couldn't rewind them, which meant that you couldn't take a noise level test and return to the start, and if you recorded something too long, then with the tape being a continuous circle you would start recording over what you've just recorded without even knowing it.
Then Minidisks came in. A much better quality than audio cassettes, but they couldn't exceed 90 minutes and nowadays nobody stocks them. The MD140 Minidisks, which were originally designed for computer backup, were much better, and a lot of digital mini-studios were built and sold to use them, but the computer world soon grew out of the maximum 140 megabytes and stopped using them, and once that happened, since recording amateurs constituted only a tiny fraction of sales, they went out of use, leaving people with equipment that only runs on a specialist type of minidisk made by smaller companies at extravagant prices.
Then CDs came in. Since the same size CDs were used for hi-fi and computers they became immediately popular, even though CD stand-alone recorders require Music CDs. It gets even worse. The stand-alone recorders are usually not backward-compatable, and will only work on Music CDs made at the time the recorders were built. Now, after so many people have thrown out their LPs, which sounded better than CDs except for the surface noise. We're told that they have a limited life expectancy. But our LPs will still be around and playable centuries after to CDs have lost their surface layers. Now they're marketting DVDs the same way. People are throwing out their VHS tapes and buying the DVDs, but the DVDs also have a limited life.
Have you ever used a hard disk recorder, put in hours of work on your new recording, only to come up with DISK ERROR? Forget any idea of saving your work. You have to start again from scratch. At least with tape, if it broke you could tape it back together, and it would still work. Even that scare tactic of magnetism, which they say will erase your tapes, rarely does. I have tapes from jam sessions in the 50s and 60s which still play as well as they did back then. About the only way you're going to lose your tape recording is if the brakes on your rewind wheel are defective and it stretches the tape, or you neglectfully change direction at full speed, and then it's your own fault. High class machines won't let you do that, by the way.
Progess? Yes, but it's two steps forwards and one step backwards all the time, and it's the consumers who keep up with the latest technology who have to pay for the errors of the designers and the vagarities of a fickle market.
