Stocks, Investing, Gambling, Bitcoin .etc

Look, I’m not a fucking broker or a hustler, okay? I don’t care that you keep running around telling me or others to go waste our time and money to put into markets that can be incredibly unpredictable. It is all about luck, chance and risk. Things most wouldn’t want to put themselves on the line over even if they were down next to nothing. They’d rather buy lottery tickets.

  • mad_asshatter@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    Vinyl records…reprise!

    Like holy fuck! I was buying that shit in the 60s, 70s, and 80s!!

    Snap, crackle, pop, wow, flutter, echo, overruns, skips…

    • tal@lemmy.today
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      7 months ago

      So, I am not a vinyl fan, and do not own any. And I agree that the “quality argument” about vinyl being analog and thus being higher fidelity is pretty senseless. But a couple of points:

      Vinyl avoided the loudness war

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war

      The loudness war (or loudness race) is a trend of increasing audio levels in recorded music, which reduces audio fidelity and—according to many critics—listener enjoyment. Increasing loudness was first reported as early as the 1940s, with respect to mastering practices for 7-inch singles.

      Modern recordings that use extreme dynamic range compression and other measures to increase loudness therefore can sacrifice sound quality to loudness. The competitive escalation of loudness has led music fans and members of the musical press to refer to the affected albums as “victims of the loudness war”.

      Because of the limitations of the vinyl format, the ability to manipulate loudness was also limited. Attempts to achieve extreme loudness could render the medium unplayable. Digital media such as CDs remove these restrictions and as a result, increasing loudness levels have been a more severe issue in the CD era.

      I’d guess that audio recorded with the expectation that it would be played on vinyl is probably optimized for that format

      Same idea for old headphones or amplifiers or whatever. I don’t know specifics.

      LCD and LED displays, in 2024, are pretty much across-the-board better than CRTs in 1990. But a lot of old video game emulators try to reproduce artifacts that resulted from low display fidelity of CRTs. Scanlines. Blurriness. Blooming. Curvature of display. Even a bit of color fringing or the like. That’s because the game was designed to be played on the system in question (or one closely approximating it). The art very frequently looks better, less jagged.

      I have magnificent MIDI soundfonts that can make any MIDI audio played on my computer sound vastly more realistic than it does on old, 1990s computer synth hardware or on something like a Super Nintendo. But the music can sound much worse, because the artists were designing the soundtrack with an eye to making it sound pleasant on hardware that had the characteristics of the time.

      Album art

      Vinyl records were not very space efficient. But that meant that artists had a huge amount of space to create album artwork compared to CDs.

      That’s not something that I’m personally into, but some people really are.

      Now, all the above being said, I don’t own vinyl or a turntable and have no interest in ever getting one. But there are some arguments that I can understand for why people may prefer them.

      • papalonian@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        I’m a small vinyl collector (not the kind with a wall full of ancient albums, but if I really like an album or want to support a smaller artist I’ll buy their vinyl). It’s mostly the first and last points for me. I used to be (and still kind of am) an audiophile type but I can’t really tell the difference between vinyl and streaming from Spotify, so the quality argument is out the window for me. But being able to listen to multiple albums without touch the volume knob is great, and I love going through album artwork, reading anecdotes from the artist, etc. One of my favorite vinyls is a sort of concept album that tells the story of a man who threw his life away to the sea only to be “reborn” a new man, and the album artwork inside the vinyl is absolutely phenomenal. (Deep Blue by Parkway Drive for the curious)