How Soon Forgotten?

I still have my 8-track tapes.

IT'S COMING BACK, DAMMIT!!

(Not too distant future)

Daddy, what is a NY Times?

In 1958 I was working for an uncle bailing straw in rural southern Ontario , and I ran over a stick with a nail and had a flat rear tire.

Went to the farmer's house and asked his wife if I could use the phone , expecting to see a rotary phone. There on the wall was a crank (magneto) phone which I did not know how to use.

When I asked the farmer's wife to dial (place the call for me) , she looked at me like I was from another planet!

We had crank phones in our area up until the early 90's. My call was a short...two longs, and a short crank on the handle.
It was considered bad etiquette to use the phone after 8 pm unless it was an emergency and the more folks 'listening in' was noticeable by the decrease in general volume on the line!

I stopped reading when he favourably compared a friggin Bose bluetooth speaker to a (assumedly)high-end receiver/amplifier/speaker setup.

It's like saying our kids are lucky they won't have to drive to work in the future; instead they can crawl there naked in the mud while burning money to stay warm. Yay!

But seriously. This article is basically a string of advertisements. Or is that the joke?

As long as I retain my own 'media' I can't be cut off from my data online, if it's suddenly declared "subversive".

As long as I retain my own 'media' I can't be cut off from my data online, if it's suddenly declared "subversive".

My Harmon Kardon turntable and tuner/amplifier and I get along just fine thanks to used record stores.

I'm ticked off though that Blockbuster and Rogers video are, or have closed, shortly after I bought the Blu-ray player. Can anyone comment on the quality of Netflix or similar services?

Cyclist:
Netflix streaming is excellent, nice response to controls, great picture.

Amazon Prime: not so responsive, fair selection (they want you to rent some old films for some reason).

Hulu+: Good content (current run TV, Criterion Collection, etc.), terrible response to control inputs, prone to locking up.

Ha ha, suckers. When the next Carrington event hits, your cloud (cuckoo land) music rentals will be totally vaped. Whereas I will have literally thousands of hard-copy CDs that I won't be able to play on my zapped CD player powered by the distant memory of a melted grid supply.

What are you going to do then, hmmm?

I pity the MP3 generation - they have never heard full spectrum unclipped ambient sound over the lab quality loud speakers from a discreet amps with less tan .001% harmonic distortion.

I have yet to find earbuds that will carry full spectrum without drop out areas and I never heard an MP3 that didn't show the tell tale signs of signal compression and autio clipping - I won't even gt into the poor quality od audio reproduction in MP3 players (yes computers too)

What I see happening here is an overall degeneration in the quality of mass produced music and I have to figure the robber barons who own distribution monopolies are laughing all the way to the bank at a generation who will accept crap sound equipment because MP3s make the recording of music far less demanding than it was when people could hear studio/recording flaws.

I'll match an audiophile reel to reel tape deck against any MP3 based audio system.

What's a video rental store?

@Occam

What about FLAC or other lossless codecs, can you tell the difference? Genuinely curious because I can't, but I wouldn't really consider myself an audiophile. I agree that MP3s are horrendous though, especially anything below 320kbps.

It's all very well and good to complain about the terrible quality of MP3s, but once I started losing my high-frequency response due to aging ears I realized I never again had to agonize over whether to spend the extra bucks for an "audiophile-grade" sound system.

They all sound pretty much the same to me now...   ;-)

I played some vinyl for my kids when they were around 5 and 8 years old. They were amazed but it blew their minds when I flipped the record over and played the other side!

I've got Altec Santanas combined with Bose computer speakers with subwoofer (plus another Yamaha subwoof). Depth and, er, breadth. For TV plus, help, discs.

Mark
Ottawa

I'm 41. My buddy owns the main music store in Windsor, ON. He can't keep turntables stocked for the life of him. If anything...vinyl is coming back with new pressings of older titles. Besides, there's no better sounding jazz in a recorded medium than that of an LP.

I'm 41. My buddy owns the main music store in Windsor, ON. He can't keep turntables stocked for the life of him. If anything...vinyl is coming back with new pressings of older titles. Besides, there's no better sounding jazz in a recorded medium than that of an LP.

'how to use the rotary phone'

Tell her to watch The Matrix, so she'll know how to avoid Big Brother in the future too.

old duffer: 'and the more folks 'listening in'

Ya i stayed at an acreage once and knew when people listened in by the distinct click.

Buddy and I would start talking about alien invasions, life on Mars, and who shot Kennedy, etc - usually by then we heard the hang up click...

Streaming suffers from one insoluble problem: bandwidth. The more People there are watching Netflix at one time, the more bandwidth they consume on the Web. Basic server/client architecture, one server with many clients, each one getting their own packet stream.

I read recently that a third of the traffic on the web was Netflix. http://www.cnn.com/2011/10/27/tech/web/netflix-internet-bandwith-mashable/index.html

60% of traffic was "real-time entertainment apps" which include streamed audio and video, plus web gaming. Netflix has more than half of that. Already.

What's on Netflix Canada? B movies and old, crappy TV shows. Netflix USA has a much better selection, but can't be viewed in Canaduh because of lawyers. Same deal with Hulu. People watching crappy old movies soaked up 33% of the web last year.

But back to the bandwidth thing. Anyone who thinks "the cloud" is going to be where we all get our TV and radio and store all our terabytes of crap is not well clued about the basic mathematics of network architecture and packet switching.

Its too slow. Its not going to happen unless we all get optical fiber right into the house, and unless there is a breakthrough in the base logic of server/client architecture. You can't serve the whole North American market with TV from a few local nodes. There isn't enough backbone room to do it, and if there were it would be astronomically too expensive. Just think what would have happened in 1960 if everyone in Canada picked up the phone at the same time and wanted to make a call. That's what we're talking about here.

Something to consider is how large web services accept your data when you start up a server with them. They don't take it over the wire, they get you to send them a -disk-. Because otherwise its too slow.

Consider also that the industry is planning to offer 60 terabyte hard drives by 2016. Currently Hitachi makes a 4 terabyte unit, you can buy it on New Egg for $300 bucks. I have something like 6 terabytes on three drives in my PC here, mostly because I can. Redundancy is good, redundancy is good! (Also backups of backups. Also hard copy of documents. Redundancy is good!)

Not to mention the mighty 32 gig thumb drive, which has fallen in price to under $25 bucks. You can get all your songs and every word you ever wrote in your entire life on one of those things. (Ask yourself why Apple still charges you such a huge premium for flash

With local storage becoming so stunningly cheap as to be almost free, I am wondering to myself here who all the stooges are going to be that stick all their personal stuff in a cloud where unpleasant people can frig with it. Probably dorks like Sam Grobart, author of this puff piece.

"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway."

As to audio and mockery of the "black-and-brown tower of components", I have yet to hear anything powered by less than 200 watts RMS per channel that doesn't sound like a bean can on a string. A Bryston 4B is about minimum for decent sound, running a pair of Energy 22s and a top of the line turntable. Win Burhoe designed the Energy 22's tweeter, and is one of the great unsung geniuses of the 20th century.

Hooking an iPod to that combination would cause the Stereo Gods to hit you with a lightning bolt I'm sure.

@ Powerfactor

Anything requirering DSP is a corrupted audio signal. I patch my sources through a discrete amp and the difference between high end analog, DSP files like CD and MP3 input is quite apparent - particularly over full spectrum loud speakers. Studio quality headset will show this as well.

Earbuds and MP3 players have created a demand for digitally time optimized respose - I find it to be flat, characterless and with no ambience.

I remember when telephone numbers started with a name - that was because a learned university prof declared that human beings were incapable of learning strings of more than four numbers. I wonder if he has a ten-digit telephone number today in his seniors' home?

And, yes, we had a magneto phone in the 1950s - 80R13 would be the 80th line at the switchboard and the rings were one long, three short for our house. That's a 'B' in Morse code which was still in use when I started flying so I was "pre-trained".

"Daddy, what is a NY Times?"

Dammit beat me to it.

Phantom above "Just think what would have happened in 1960 if everyone in Canada picked up the phone at the same time and wanted to make a call. "

Yep, it's true. Just think Christmas Day or New Years at midnight in the 60's and 70's...

Oh yeah. There weren't no redial buttons either...

Everything's Amazing and Nobody's Happy - Louis CK:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8r1CZTLk-Gk

Hilarious!

MP3s sound OK on most PC speakers but lousy on a high-end sound system - brass notes are grainy and unlistenable. The hallmark of good sound system is that it faithfully reproduces all source material without ever sounding loud - even at high volume levels. Most CDs aren't much better than MP3s, quality vinyl played on a decent turntable with a good cartridge will amaze you. Sadly, quality doesn't come cheap - I have $16K invested in audio gear and still feel there's room for improvement.

The only 'high end' sound I've experienced is at the IMAX theatre. Earplugs would have come in handy...

Sooner listen to the birds.

In the olden days, we actually had to get up off the couch to change the channel on the black and white. And there were only 3 channels. How did we ever survive?

In a way we have come full circle with regard to music. In the 50s and 60s the singles were the rage and they were mixed so that they sounded good on a car radio's tinny speakers. In the 70s and 80s the album reigned and it was best experienced on the most expensive stereo equipment you could afford or swing credit for. Now we are back to singles as the format of choice and the sound is compressed to remove dynamic range so that they sound good on MP3 players. This is progress?

I use an Auzentech Meridian 2G for stereo and 5.1, 7.1 play back. It's a great little board for superior computer sound. This board features swappable op-amps for the audiophile.

For the professionals out there, check out RME-Audio and Universal Audio:

http://www.rme-audio.de/en_products_hdspe_madi.php
for pro audio recording at the studio level.

http://www.uaudio.com/uad-plug-ins/pcie/uad-2-quad-omni-6.html and their plethora of plugins.

You will need your checkbook for the pro gear...

If you are unhappy with your computer sound do some homework and get a board the meets your budget. Just accepting the chip the mobo manufacturer glues on the board will give you the result you deserve...

Cheers

Hans Rupprecht, Commander in Chief

1st Saint Nicolaas Army
Army Group “True North”

Daddy whats a job?

From URBAN, BUT NOT URBANE, SUV:

"If you doubt this pussification theory, stick a kid in front of an analog clock, rotary telephone, or in a car with manual crank windows. Then witness the cripple you believed was your little genius."

Interesting story about rotary phones:

Years ago, the phone company actually used to LEASE your phone to you. They would charge you a monthly fee for your rotary dialed phone. They continued this practice even after tone phones came into being.

Well, one elderly woman subject to severe status quo bias kept on paying her bill each month for DECADES with the same, old rotary phone. She could have paid $10 at a Walgreens to buy a brand new touch-tone phone, but she was paying about that much to lease her old rotary phone.

Over time, she paid tens of thousands of dollars for it:

http://www.usatoday.com/news/offbeat/2006-09-14-phone_x.htm

@Aviator:

Now that I have my address book stored in my phone, I don't remember a single phone number or address of anyone in it.

In fact, I can't remember my home phone number because I never dial it and never give it out. The only reason I have a home phone is because the alarm system requires it.

Ahem.

After returning from living abroad for many years, I went to pick up some things I'd kept in storage at a friend's.

A few boxes were simply labelled (in my own lettering): LPS.

I had no idea what that meant until I opened one of the boxes: it was my collection of long-playing vinyl records.

Hey Phantom, that drive is CDN$270 from MemoryExpress:

http://www.memoryexpress.com/Products/MX37532

PiperPaul, smokin' deal! That's my point, really. How long before that thing is available under $100? I figure a year or two, max.

Who needs a cloud (that you still have to PAY for) when storage is so freakin' cheap and getting cheaper every day?

Cloud is great for mega-corps that have to wring the last ounce of computation juice out of their servers. That's what it was designed for in the first place. But for end users at home? No way.

Besides, the PC started out in the first place as the disruptive paradigm shift that gave -everybody- an IBM mainframe in the living room. The Big Guys have been trying to put that genie back in the bottle since Bill Gates ate IBM's lunch. They see cloud computing coupled with mobile phones as a way to recapture all us boneheads who think we should be allowed to do what we want, when we want. Its stupid, but apparently that's what they see.

Guess who the NY Slimes works for?