Back in the early 1970s, I passed by a store that sold piano rolls on my way to work. I stopped in one day out of curiosity, and asked the guy who ran the store about his merchandise. He said that anyone could sit at a recording player piano and make a piano roll, and that some of the rolls he had for sale had actually been recorded personally by the famous composer [Shostakovich?...or someone else] who had actually written the music.
I thought about that for awhile. If I had a player piano, and I had a piano roll personally recorded by someone, wouldn't that be as close to having the musician himself playing in the room for you? Why would you want any "more modern" technology than that to play that music? Recording formats have changed periodically over the last century or so, with proponents and opponents waxing eloquently over their improvements and quality, but the real goal is to play the music performance as real as possible with the least amount of fuss, right?
It's also interesting to realize that that recorded paper roll, whose technology is over a century old, is actually digital.
