[Editorial] What happened to the QUARdisc?

February 2025 Editorial

What happened to the QUARdisc?

Author: Lucio Cadeddu - TNT-Audio Italy
Published: February, 2025

Do you remember QUARdisc? We presented it exactly two years ago in the January 2023 editorial: it was the new half physical and half digital medium (phydigital as they called it) that was supposed to satisfy everyone's needs: those who wanted a beautiful cover in LP format and those who prefer to listen to music in digital format. In fact, the system included a USB stick inside the cover of an LP (no, it's not a joke). To activate the possibility of listening to the contents of the pen stick, however, it was necessary to scan a QR code (hence the name of the support) to register in a cumbersome way on a portal via an app, thanks to which one became part of a sort of community that would even have to interact with the artists themselves. After all this you could finally access an uncompressed 16bit/44kHz or 192bps mp3 file. All at the modest cost of €34.90, launch price. And, speaking of launch, it must be said that the QUARdisc guys had done things big, with reports on the major Italian TV news and on important newspapers.

In the editorial of two years ago I listed all my doubts about the new (?) support, doubts which then generated a vigorous back and forth in the Readers' Corner of this site (see the first letter of the Vol. 1028, which I invite you to read, translating from Italian) between me and one of the inventors of the new format, Alex Petroni. On that occasion I made an appointment with the inventors of the new support two years later, to evaluate its impact on the market, given that they claimed that I had not fully understood the revolutionary significance of their new support. For thirty years I have seen new supports come and go, but above all...going somewhere ;-)

Here we are, then, 24 months later, aged like a good Parmigiano Reggiano cheese. Before writing this editorial I sent an email to QUARdisc to find out where the project was at, but I didn't receive any response. So I went to look at their website, blog and Facebook page. The last blog article dates back to October 27, 2023, 10 months after the launch of the new format. After October 27, 2023, nothing else. Then I moved on to the official Facebook page which to date has 411 (four hundred-eleven) followers. There are more recent posts, which total about one or two likes each. It is unclear whether some references to albums or songs relate to new QUARdisc releases. I would say no, because only two record releases appear on the website, the first, that of Battiato's covers and the one entitled Phantastic by Jimmy Brixton (which still appears in pre-order, though).

One might suspect that the project never really took off or, perhaps, is in a phase of constant creative stasis. In two years I would have expected more, in all sincerity, also given the powerful advertising campaign made on some of the most viewed national news programmes.

What lessons can we draw from this story?

The market is definitely tired of seeing new audio formats every now and then. Those who exist are more than enough and doomed to extinction, given that music streaming platforms will wipe everything out very soon. It will remain a super-niche of vinyl enthusiasts, increasingly narrow, and little else.
If an idea is good, it still makes headway, even without major media support. It's perfectly useless to have friends in the news editorial offices. TV has not influenced the market for decades, only old people and bored housewives watch it when they get tired of posting selfies on social media.
Before embarking on risky commercial ventures, perhaps, and I say perhaps, a properly conducted market survey is mandatory. In this case, an opinion should have been asked from the experts in the sector, from those who really have their finger on the pulse of the situation. It would have been enough just to read our editorials on the sales data of musical media that the RIAA publishes every year: they would have understood what the general feeling of enthusiasts is on the issue of audio supports. Is it possible that in three years of gestation and brainstorming they couldn't figure it out?

It is always sad to see a new enterprise struggling to go ahead, but this time, let me put it straight, it was largely predictable (as I did).

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