21–30 of 32 posts
I quit reading at homeopathic medicine.
I genuinely think that was the worst example he could have possibly used. There might be something to electro-gardening, and everybody will agree that a tractor doesn't need to be a computer, but homeopathy just sells the placebo effect. There's no remotely plausible physical mechanism behind it. Makes everything else he's suggesting seem suspect, IMO.
I quit reading at homeopathic medicine.
Bring back older cars with poor safety and high energy costs? Seriously?
Distrust medicine and agriculture?
Wtf is this doing on HN?
This is the author :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Michael_Greer
> John Michael Greer (born 1962) is an American writer and druid who writes on religious, environmentalist, and occult topics.
The fact that this blog has such high readership is an indictment on our poor education system. Though, granted, it looks like a much older audience that is commenting.
> Record companies accordingly used sampling rates just dense enough to keep most listeners from complaining, and called it good. It was good for their profits, sure, but it made the music sound flat and tinny. Were there CDs with lower sampling rates than the standard 44.1kHz? I could understand complaining about low quality DACs or something, but if 44kHz is not enough for you then you're either a child or a bat.
In the beginning, it was extremely expensive to make analog low-pass filters that were steep enough to block frequencies over 22 kHz, but to pass those under 20 kHz.
So many audio-to-digital conversions used cheaper anti-aliasing filters, with a narrower pass-band, which could be significantly lower than the 20 kHz promised by the CD technology. The CDs mastered in this way had a worse quality than claimed.
Even today, such analog low-pass filters would be too expensive, which is why now everybody uses much higher sampling frequencies for audio, like 192 kHz.
If a 44.1 kHz digital stream is desired, it is obtained through digital filtering and decimation, which are free of the constructive problems of analog filters.
But higher sampling frequencies where impossible in the early years of CDs, when the existing 16-bit ADCs barely reached 44.1 kHz.
Moreover, 16-bit DACs were very expensive, so the cheaper CD players used DACs with a lower resolution, like 14-bit DACs, which further reduced the quality of playback.
So for some years in the beginning, typical CD quality was not as good as advertised and as demonstrated by using equipment much more expensive than what was typical for consumer players or even in the recording studios with smaller budgets.
I quit reading at homeopathic medicine.
On that note, I recently learned how popular homeopathic medicine is in Germany. That was surprising to me given the stereotypes about German people being so... down to Earth. Can someone explain the apparent contradiction to me?
I quit reading at homeopathic medicine.
Yeah, this whole thing is bullshit. Bring back older cars with poor safety and high energy costs? Seriously? Distrust medicine and agriculture? Wtf is this doing on HN? This is the author : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Michael_Greer > John Michael Greer (born 1962) is an American writer and druid who writes on religious, environmentalist, and occult topics. The fact that this blog has such high readership is an…
> The mere facts that these days, each new round of gimmickry that gets the prized label “progress” tends to generate more downsides than upsides, and that the shining future paradise has been getting visibly further off for decades, has barely begun to dent that touching and childlike faith. Many of us are alive solely because of technologies developed in the last 20-30 years, and (I at least) find such objectively…
A really really tiny percentage of us is that. Make it 100 years and you got something. 150 years is even better.
I hate when people say that vynils are better than CDs. Sure, some people feel this way for the "vintage" sound of vynils. But that's a personal and niche opinion that isn't objective or widely seen as better by listeners. I was there when the switch happened . I can't express how happy I was to get rid of vynils and cassette tapes and trade the whole thing for CDs. I'm a "musicphile" and always disliked vynils for t…
Their unavoidable defect was that the quality degraded continuously with the number of times you played them.
When played on a cheaper turntable, even playing them only 3 or 4 times could be enough for a noticeable degradation of the quality.
That is why before CDs most audiophiles who were not too poor played their vinyls only once, to transfer them onto an open reel magnetic tape, which was played from then on, to avoid wearing the vinyl record.
The discourse is nuanced, but isn't CD standard sampling rate greater than anything that's obtainable in practice with vynil?
It's well above the rate you need to reproduce everything a human can physically hear; this is one of the big points that shows the author as a moron... The change from cd to vinyl "sound" was largely about mastering, and cheap digital production technology being not that great. But you can find examples of the same master going to cd or vinyl, and there's no benefit to the vinyl. And I say this as someone who enjoys…
The 44.1 kHz sampling frequency is theoretically able to ensure a 20 kHz pass-band for audio signals.
But this does not mean that this is true for an actual recording.
A 44.1 kHz ADC cannot be used without being preceded by an analog low-pass filter.
An analog low-pass filter that blocks signals over 22 kHz and passes those under 20 kHz has always been and it would be even today very expensive.
That is why many early CD recordings may have used worse anti-aliasing filters, which could have reduced the pass-band to significantly less than 20 kHz, possibly also introducing audible artifacts due to a non-flat frequency characteristic at the high end of their pass-band.
Because of the great difficulty of making digital recordings when using a 44.1 kHz sampling frequency, as soon as faster ADCs became available, the standard method has become to use at least a double sampling frequency or even better a quadruple sampling frequency, and then use digital filtering and decimation for creating the CD audio.
However this became possible only many years later after the introduction of CDs.
I.e. OP suggests FORD leave out all the modern safety improvements (air bags, crumple zones, ABS brakes) this is exactly the argument the GOP have about capitalism: regulations simply stand in the way of profits.
The whole article is narrow minded and short sighted IMHO.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's well above the rate you need to reproduce everything a human can physically hear; this is one of the big points that shows the author as a moron... The change from cd to vinyl "sound" was largely about mastering, and cheap digital production technology being not that great. But you can find examples of the same master going to cd or vinyl, and there's no benefit to the vinyl. And I say this as someone who enjoys…
The author might be a moron, but this is not evidence of it. The 44.1 kHz sampling frequency is theoretically able to ensure a 20 kHz pass-band for audio signals. But this does not mean that this is true for an actual recording. A 44.1 kHz ADC cannot be used without being preceded by an analog low-pass filter. An analog low-pass filter that blocks signals over 22 kHz and passes those under 20 kHz has always been and…