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> ... VHS players rapidly became throw-away items – eventually nobody really cared if they only lasted a year or two. I don't know if I'm losing my marbles, but I don't ever recall a time growing up when my family (or anyone else I knew) were buying a new VCR every year or two.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
MD pricing can definitely be hit-or-miss, especially on those desirable USB NetMD units. But enough were sold that a little patience all but guarantees you'll find something satisfactory.
It comes across as weird to me that it's so hard to get an actual NetMD deck which isn't portable since my mental image is that I make cassette tapes with a deck plugged into my stereo/computer and play them back on a walkman or car deck. But yeah, at some point I just started recording MD's off my computer the same way I record cassettes.
I wasn't able to do DAT because of the extremely high prices. So I mainly ended up with copy-of-a-copy-of-a-copy analog cassette, which usually sounded terrible (lots of tape hiss and distortion).
Analog cassettes had their own issues: dual tape decks made very poor copies (I think this was some sort of copy protection feature) although you could use two decks. I was really glad to see analog go- these days, nearly eveyrthing is digitally recorded, with all the conveniences of digital, and many old reel to reel tapes and DATs have been captured with high quality devices.
It's also kind of funny that I lived through the entire CD era- from the first obscenely expensive CD readers to an age when everybody could buy a cheap blu-ray recorder to CDs being obsolete.
> ... VHS players rapidly became throw-away items – eventually nobody really cared if they only lasted a year or two. I don't know if I'm losing my marbles, but I don't ever recall a time growing up when my family (or anyone else I knew) were buying a new VCR every year or two.
Today I think of VHS as ideal for people who want to get into an obsolete format. I often see decks for sale for $12 that work great at our reuse center and prerecorded tapes with great moves up to 2005 or so are $1-2 there or the Salvation Army. The decks I see are late models which have automatic tracking and VHS HiFi and are highly reliable -- commercial movies are usually encoded in Dolby Pro Logic and often soun…
We have crazy powerful DSPs (like a low end GPU), advances in coding and error correction codes, and highly advanced lossy compression algorithms now 8)
Previously on HN: film on vinyl LP (pretty terrible, not much to work with), super high quality VHS reading by hooking up ADCs directly to the video heads + software, and VHS tape streamers (IIRC 1-2 GB with circa 1993 cheap hardware).
> ... VHS players rapidly became throw-away items – eventually nobody really cared if they only lasted a year or two. I don't know if I'm losing my marbles, but I don't ever recall a time growing up when my family (or anyone else I knew) were buying a new VCR every year or two.
Meanwhile, the "basement" VCR my dad bought new in '85 still works to this day, but that one was less programmable, so we always used the cheap ones to record off the air.
Where I worked had mostly moved to sound devices and such for high quality 2 track recordings. Portable Sadie or pro tools for multitracks.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Today I think of VHS as ideal for people who want to get into an obsolete format. I often see decks for sale for $12 that work great at our reuse center and prerecorded tapes with great moves up to 2005 or so are $1-2 there or the Salvation Army. The decks I see are late models which have automatic tracking and VHS HiFi and are highly reliable -- commercial movies are usually encoded in Dolby Pro Logic and often soun…
Obsolete formats (especially with high performance mechanics) are fun, but VHS picture quality isn't. My idea of fun would be to try to get the best picture quality possible by throwing appropriate digital encoding + error correction + compression at the problem - the more anachronistic, the better. We have crazy powerful DSPs (like a low end GPU), advances in coding and error correction codes, and highly advanced lo…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KueSbYs7yMU
https://github.com/simoninns/DomesdayDuplicator
https://github.com/happycube/ld-decode