Back then we used to reminisce uphill, both ways!
I think the artistic use of sound quality is very interesting. Certain artists and genres have qualities as a feature not a bug.
Listening to Andrew Weatherall RIP talking about formats ā¦ itās interesting heād often find music on vinyl then record to CD. He wants the qualities of the record (soft compression, dulled highs and lows?) but doesnāt care for lugging around all those boxes.
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We were talking explicitly about psytrance, which is a well-defined electronic music subgenre: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychedelic_trance
@mynewcolour Hehe talk about it. I completely destroyed my back as a DJ 15 years ago, constantly dragging around two 40+ kg DJ bags full of Vinyl.
The rise of the Pioneer DJ CD players slowly finding their way into clubs in the 2003-2006 period, was a huge blessing for me. Since carrying around a handful of CDĀ“s was a hell lot easier than a ton of Vinyl. So I also started transferring my most used records onto CD.
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but normalisation is not compression.
normalisation is reducing/increasing the signal a uniform amount. more here;
https://productionadvice.co.uk/stats-for-nerds/
I think that is what most streaming services now do (but using loudness over time rather than peak to normalise)
I think thereās a good chance mainstream masters will already be getting a bit more dynamic or will do soon because of this - everything is in theory the same loudness on Spotify now, so actually the way to sound loud is to have dynamics.
on the other hand, ears like loud things, so maybe people will keep hounding mastering engineers to make things louder instead.
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Also, I think recording music at ALL is clearly the real issue and should be stopped. Keep it REAL.
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About those wire recorders: their sound quality is awful, lo fi and heavily bandlimited, they sound about the same as old analog telephone lines (so no low end and high freqs extend to about 4-5kHz) and whats worse, the wire recordings are very fragile and lose their sound faster than a dubplate acetate. Using one will get you a sound no doubt, but itll be so lofi that Iām not sure you couldnt reproduce it more or less 100% with processing, since there is very little nuance left in the recordings 
Hereās a bunch of wire recordings waiting to be digitized & restored at my workplaceā¦ Not looking forward to working these in tbh!
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Can you share something about where you work and what you do there? This looks like it might be interesting to read more about. 
My day job (among other things) involves digitizing and restauration of audio sources from 2-track and multitrack analog tape, vinyl etc and also transferring audio from DAT tapes, DTRS and DASH tapes with timecode. Its all part of a massive project which exists in order to archive all the old broadcasting material into the cloud.
Its interesting and important work, but hella boring too at times.
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Cool ā thereās an awful lot of content there in wire ā i would imagine there might be something worth discovering in that pile that will justify the work.
You donāt have to answer this question ā but i wonder if there is something insurmountable in the technology that prevents higher quality, or would there be technical changes to improve it. Early, early tape has a lot of problems too, that got surmounted.
Back on topic, and with an affordable self recordable vinyl ā thereās a product called Phonocut thatās in development right now through Kickstarter. Itās definitely got a reduction in sound quality but on the other hand itās affordable, and has an interesting sound as well. There is a thread on Elektronauts, and the last post i put there is on a group of people that does one-off LP recording of much higher quality. So that sort of thing exists too.
(I donāt know if Phonocut does the compression digitally or not ā but compression is easy enough to do in analog.)
yeah that phonocut is dope! I hope the kickstarter on that one goes well.
And yeh, sure enough, thereās culturally significant material in the stuff Iām transferring no doubt, but its also problematic in terms of copyright etc. So not sure yet what will happen to all of it in the near future at least. Most of it will probably be left unused, sadly.
As for the steel wire technology, it was precursor tech to actual analog tape, so thats what eventually became of it - A huge leap in sound quality, robustness and reliability!
It did ā so for those with the cash and the interest itās there for you. Interesting to think about all the ways people will use that thing.