111–120 of 194 posts
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No it doesn't, that's BS. No one prefers the sound of MP3. Vinyl sounds better not because of some alleged "distortion", either.
If the artifacts of vinyl pressing and playback are not distortion, what are they?
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If the artifacts of vinyl pressing and playback are not distortion, what are they?
I thought people prefer the sound of vinyl because it's analog and has a much wider range that digital music. (Not because it's distorted)
Yes! Thank you. I love the old pixel aesthetic, but today's art should fit today's constraints. Those classic games will always be around, awaiting your next nostalgia rush. Screw stagnation. Likewise, I like old Victorians and Art Deco, but I wouldn't be excited about one built today. No one would respect a 2015 medieval-style castle quite like one from 1515.
However, a medieval-style castle would still be cool if it was built in 2015.
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If the artifacts of vinyl pressing and playback are not distortion, what are they?
I thought people prefer the sound of vinyl because it's analog and has a much wider range that digital music. (Not because it's distorted)
Pixel art games nowadays all look more or less the same. Actual games from the 90s didn't look alike at all. Also most games use pixel art as an excuse for lazy animations with a little amount of frames. I really wonder why everyone likes it so much and I often think maybe something is wrong with my taste :/
A fundamental difference between Japanese and Western animation is their approach to motion. Western animation emphasized fluid motion, attempting to stick to the maximum framerate (24 FPS) allowed by the film medium as much as possible. This could produce striking results, but tended to limit artists to more simpler, slower, more deliberate stretch and squash movements that would make sense when interpolated across…
Most Western animation has historically been done at 12fps ("on twos"); you go to 24fps for very fast motion or stuff you want to be super-smooth. This holds even in big-budget 2D theatrical features[1]. You will also find no small amount of super-stylized motion - dig up "The Dover Boys" (dir. Chuck Jones), commonly cited as the first cartoon to experiment with the smears, multiple images, and other crazy stylizations of motion. Single-frame your way through that someday; it's full of amazing semi-abstract images.
(First in the US, at least; there may have been people in the East playing with this as well, but there was very little cross-pollination at this time.)
The big difference between the Western and Eastern animation traditions, in my mind, comes from different decisions in how to best allocate "pencil mileage". You have a budget of X number of miles of lines drawn by your animators for each project; how do you spend it? Westerners generally pursued "the illusion of life", favoring really fluid and subtle motion over a huge number of drawings. This meant that very few single drawings could be very complicated. Easterners, on the other hand, gravitated towards complicated character designs. You might spend four or five times as much effort drawing a single frame. This meant that very few motions could be fluid.
Fluidity of motion × character design complexity = pencil mileage. Pencil mileage is fixed by your budget. Which one of those do you want to emphasize? You can't have both unless your budget is amazing. (This is also why animated commercials can have both; they can cost more per second than some features.)
To eyes trained in one tradition, the other one looks like crap. Why is this Eastern cartoon barely more than a slide show half the time? Why is this Western cartoon full of such simplified designs? Personally, it took me many years to learn how to appreciate Eastern animation.
(Also it is worth noting that most lovingly-animated Western games quickly converged on quickly popping into a motion as a result of a control input, with exaggerated settling into the new pose - look at Crash Bandicoot, Earthworm Jim, or Aladdin.)
I am rambling. Mostly I just wanted to mention that my experience of the Western tradition (including years of single-stepping cartoons) is largely on twos, with occasional bursts of ones.
[1] except for anything Richard Williams directed because he is kind of a total obsessive who would wander around the studio late at night and inbetween stuff onto ones that maybe should have never been on ones. See 'Raggedy Ann and Andy' for instance. Or if you want to actually see a decent movie hunt up the Recobbled Cut of 'The Thief and the Cobbler' because RA&A is pretty much 80 minutes of pure nightmare fuel.
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I thought people prefer the sound of vinyl because it's analog and has a much wider range that digital music. (Not because it's distorted)
Vinyl in actual use has a much narrower range than CDs or MP3s. One things that is common, though, is for Vinyl to be mastered differently than the digital final result. So, it is entirely possible for the CD/MP3 release of a given song to have a much narrower dynamic range than a Vinyl release of a given song despite being released on demonstrably inferior technology.
“Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distort…
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Even if everybody moves to FLAC or other lossless music format, musicians will still likely add in MP3 compression artifact sounds. After all, like with vinyl, it makes the music sound warmer .
No it doesn't, that's BS. No one prefers the sound of MP3. Vinyl sounds better not because of some alleged "distortion", either.
Students were asked to judge the quality of a variety of
compression methods randomly mixed with uncompressed 44.1 KHz
audio. The music examples included both orchestral, jazz and
rock music. When I first did this I was expecting to hear
preferences for uncompressed audio and expecting to see MP3 (at
128, 160 and 192 bit rates) well below other methods (including
a proprietary wavelet-based approach and AAC). To my surprise,
in the rock examples the MP3 at 128 was preferred. I repeated
the experiment over 6 years and found the preference for MP3 -
particularly in music with high energy (cymbal crashes, brass
hits, etc) rising over time.
... each year the preference for music in MP3 format rises.
In other words, students prefer the quality of that kind of
sound over the sound of music of much higher quality. He said
that they seemed to prefer “sizzle sounds” that MP3s bring to
music. It is a sound they are familiar with.
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I thought people prefer the sound of vinyl because it's analog and has a much wider range that digital music. (Not because it's distorted)
Vinyl in actual use has a much narrower range than CDs or MP3s. One things that is common, though, is for Vinyl to be mastered differently than the digital final result. So, it is entirely possible for the CD/MP3 release of a given song to have a much narrower dynamic range than a Vinyl release of a given song despite being released on demonstrably inferior technology.
Vinyl has been demonstrated to be able to cut and playback frequencies of up to 70khz, and many commercially released records from as far back as the 70s had data up to the mid 40khz range (and in fact this is required for quadraphonic playback).