51–60 of 101 posts
I think some younger people might have never really seen a CRT. And they're positively rare now. I encountered a CRT TV in the hospital waiting room recently and was a bit startled to see one. So for those only passingly familiar, if you get the opportunity, spend a bit of time experimenting with it visually. Jiggle your eyes, look away suddenly, and then back, and try oblique angles. Maybe you'll see what they mean…
Sometimes I think about the bizarre path computer technology took. For instance, long-term storage. It would stand to reason that we'd invent some kind of big electrical array, and that's the best we could hope for. But hard drive technology (which relies on crazy materials technology for the platter and magnets, crazy high-precision encoders, and crazy physics like floating a tiny spring over the air bubble created…
> like people in the 80s who swore that vinyl records "sounded better" I'm not one of those people who ever thought vinyl sounded better than a properly recorded and mastered digital version and I've always believed a high-bandwidth digital audio signal chain can recreate the "warmth" and other artifacts of tube compressors well beyond the threshold of human perception, however a broadcast-quality, high-definition CR…
One day she said there is a simple way to prove it. Certain stringed instruments have the string move on their own to the correct note if you put them near a source of similar sound. If you put these instruments in front of a speaker playing from an analog source and have the strings move, then play the exact same music but from a digital source on the same speaker, the strings stop moving, even if to most humans it sounds exactly the same.
Sadly I never had the gear to test this, I am not a professional musician and was learning from that person as a hobby (she is a teacher for professional musicians).
Some images to demonstrate how retro games look on CRT vs unfiltered on a modern display: https://x.com/ruuupu1 https://old.reddit.com/r/crtgaming/comments/owdtpu/thats_why... https://old.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/anwgxf/here_is_an_e... Modern emulators have post-processing filters to simulate the look, which is great. But it's not quite the same as the real thing.
Blowing things up to that size is not representative. Back when I first started playing things on emulators we were using 12" to 20" CRTs or LCDs with much higher resolution than a TV, so whether CRT or LCD the pixels were chunkier. None of the nostalgia is how I remember it at all. The average CRT TV had crap color and poor brightness and going from that and the flicker of 1-to-1 size NTSC on a 20-something TV to an…
These were different beasts to civilian TVs, even top of the line Trinitron. They had none on the RF circuitry of a regular TV and the inputs were typically component, or, in the late nineties, digital, but not the digital we know today, that signal came down one BNC connector.
We had an outside broadcast company which had massive trucks full of screens for televising sports, concerts and public events. A new boss decided to outfit the new trucks with domestic TVs rather than the expected mega-expensive D1s. The trucks did not last long, much to the amusement of the crew. The TVs rattled themselves to pieces before they made it to their first event.
Unlike the civilian TVs, the Sony D1 monitors were designed to be repaired. We had people for that and you could often see the innards of one of them if you went to see the engineers in their den. They generally did not need to be repaired, but, if you have hundreds of the things then you raised the odds of having a few need a little bit of servicing.
In the studio environment they were rack mounted with air conditioning and extremely neat cabling to some type of desk where you had the buttons to choose what camera, VT or other source went to the screen. Lighting in the gallery was also controlled, so the picture you saw was the definitive picture, with no fiddling of brightness or contrast necessary. The blacks were black, which flat screens were only really able to achieve decades later with AMOLED.
In the basement with the DigiBeta tape machines we had smaller D1s in the racks, often with an adjacent oscilloscope. You could tell if the content was 'adult material' by the oscilloscope, which I always found amusing.
The magic of TV in that era was the analog nature of the CRT. The studio set was usually very battered and yet you could put a few tens of thousands of watts of lighting onto it for the cameras to show something beautiful on the D1 monitors. The advent of HD was problematic in this regard as every dent and scratch would show, along with every wrinkle and blemish on the presenter's faces.
Video games of the era were designed around the hardware, in Europe this meant 720 x 576 PAL, with lots of that image as 'overscan'. Note that JPG was also designed for the magic of analog, with slow CPUs. You can change the look up table in JPG to make it work for digital and fast CPUs but only MozJPEG does that.
You mention flickering, and most CRTs would be flickery, think of electrical shops of the era and what you would see out of the corner of your eye. Clearly you would not want this in a studio gallery lest anyone collapse with an epileptic fit. In Europe we had 50Hz rather than 60Hz, so, even with interlacing, flicker was a thing but only in the electrical shop, not in the studio gallery. This had more to do with genlock (for analog) than phosphor persistence trickery.
Regarding the article, I am pleased that the D1 monitors of old have found a new fan base that truly appreciate them. In period we put a lot of work into our setups and, to this day, I struggle to come to terms with all of that expertise and expense having gone forever.
In broadcasting there has always been an 'old guard' that can remember the 'good old days'. I now feel like one of those fuddy duddies!!!
Sometimes I think about the bizarre path computer technology took. For instance, long-term storage. It would stand to reason that we'd invent some kind of big electrical array, and that's the best we could hope for. But hard drive technology (which relies on crazy materials technology for the platter and magnets, crazy high-precision encoders, and crazy physics like floating a tiny spring over the air bubble created…
And China is still building, today, brand new CRT boards for CRT TVs and monitors. You can buy them on AliExpress.
I don't know if CRT themselves are still being built though.
I'm hanging on to my vintage arcade cab from the 80s with its still-working huge CRT screen. Hope I fail before that thing (and I hope it doesn't fail anytime soon!).
Sometimes I think about the bizarre path computer technology took. For instance, long-term storage. It would stand to reason that we'd invent some kind of big electrical array, and that's the best we could hope for. But hard drive technology (which relies on crazy materials technology for the platter and magnets, crazy high-precision encoders, and crazy physics like floating a tiny spring over the air bubble created…
> The switch to LCDs/LEDs was in a lot of ways a step back. Sure, we don't have huge 40lb boxes on our desks, but we lost the ultra-fast refresh rate enabled by the electron beam, not to mention the internal glow that made computers magical (maybe I'm just an old fuddy-duddy, like people in the 80s who swore that vinyl records "sounded better"). CRTs don't have particularly good refresh rates. There is very little de…
Growing up my dad was a Mac guy and he had all kinds of Apple stuff. The weird page sized monitor, performa 600, trackball mouse, ergonomic keyboard. Granted my father was in software and this was the early 90s but it would _definitely_ define my initial passion for computers.
I’ve been looking for this monitor so that I can restore his setup. I have his Performa, peripherals, and restored those. I just need that giant monitor he used to use.
My father passed away last year. My world has been different ever since.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> like people in the 80s who swore that vinyl records "sounded better" I'm not one of those people who ever thought vinyl sounded better than a properly recorded and mastered digital version and I've always believed a high-bandwidth digital audio signal chain can recreate the "warmth" and other artifacts of tube compressors well beyond the threshold of human perception, however a broadcast-quality, high-definition CR…
I had a music teacher that insisted analog recordings were different. One day she said there is a simple way to prove it. Certain stringed instruments have the string move on their own to the correct note if you put them near a source of similar sound. If you put these instruments in front of a speaker playing from an analog source and have the strings move, then play the exact same music but from a digital source on…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> like people in the 80s who swore that vinyl records "sounded better" I'm not one of those people who ever thought vinyl sounded better than a properly recorded and mastered digital version and I've always believed a high-bandwidth digital audio signal chain can recreate the "warmth" and other artifacts of tube compressors well beyond the threshold of human perception, however a broadcast-quality, high-definition CR…
I had a music teacher that insisted analog recordings were different. One day she said there is a simple way to prove it. Certain stringed instruments have the string move on their own to the correct note if you put them near a source of similar sound. If you put these instruments in front of a speaker playing from an analog source and have the strings move, then play the exact same music but from a digital source on…
Those aren't old TVs. When I was a kid, I'd go to the TV repair shops and take old "unrepairable" vacuum tube TVs (no transistors!) off their hands. At home I tried to fix them. I had no idea how to fix them. But I had a lot of fun trying. One of the fun things was to randomly swap around the vacuum tubes and see what would happen. Very entertaining! I used to have a box full of scavenged tubes. Sadly, I eventually t…
But don't worry, TV tubes are practically worthless. I've been to swap meets for an antique radio club in my area. Sometimes, there will be a few boxes of tubes from TV sets there (400-500 tubes) and people literally can't give them away. Tubes from audio equipment are the only ones people are after.