I’m not talking about “something else”. I’m responding directly to this comment:
In it, you claim that there are no losses in the CD format except in frequencies that no one can hear. You then advise me to educate myself.
But your statement is incredibly misleading because CDs are full of distortions and digital artifacts that make them far inferior to modern digital studio masters which are recorded at much higher bitrates and at higher sample resolutions. In most cases CDs are also far inferior to older analog studio masters. And that’s why high-resolution audio exists, and why digital cinema audio sounds so much better than CDs. One of many reasons that discriminating listeners like having the vinyl option is that the tradeoffs and limitations are different from CDs – there is no more and no less to this argument than that. But representing CDs as the last word in perfect sound – because anything they are missing or distorting is not audible – is just plain wrong.
I think you need to educate youself on the subject of this discussion,. It isn 't “is CD the best format EVAH?”, or “Is Hi-res audio better than CD?”, no, it’s “is mp3 “better than” CD?” You keep attempting to drive the discussion away from the question.
No one is arguing that CDs are better than the digital masters, so I don’t understand why you spend so muich effort to argue me out of a postion that I don’t have. And backl to the point - CDs are better than vinyl in every category other than the hipster factor.
Actually, the discussion about Hi-Res Audio was a hijack of the CD vs mp3 hijack. I think the “subject of this discussion” is Abandoned formats making a significant comeback …
MP3 offers a 48 kHz sample rate (like DAT) vs 44.1 for CD, so I suppose under certain circumstances it could be considered “better than CD”. But I think it falls into the same ball park. Also, both MP3 and the sound on CDs are clearly music delivery formats, not what you start with to lay down tracks in the studio.
Film has been making something of a comeback, especially among amateurs who are looking to do something more artsy and hands-on with their work. There’s a community darkroom at an arts center where I live, where, for about $20 a month, you can go in and process your own film and make your own prints. They provide all the chemicals and equipment. I understand that before the pandemic there were quite a few people signing up for it.
Back in 2015 when I was on vacation my watch broke. There was a Wal-Mart a couple blocks away so I walked over to buy an inexpensive one…don’t need one except to tell time and date. Looking at several hundred they had on display, all of them were analog (pointers for hours and minutes) except one digital; which is the one I wanted and bought.
My minds been officially blown. For a few years I’ve heard people talk about the Miata being a good car for emos, and I didn’t understand this up until now and thought it was because of their/our penchant for ironically liking things, that and it has two seats so it’s easier to be alone in.
But emos also have a penchant for lo-fi and immediacy and retro, so upon reading these posts I can see why they might like the Miata for its low tech and retroness.
My daughter had to have a car one semester at college (doing rounds at far-flung hospitals). I was so glad to loan her a lo-fi car. NONE of her friends could drive a stick, so they didn’t ask to borrow it, and in fact they were sometimes confused by the controls:
“How do I get the window up… hey, where are the buttons? Oh, so I use… this? Wait, NOW I get why they talk about cranking a window up! Cool…”
Sometimes I wonder if what we get with the “analog/LP is better” crowd isn’t anything actually objective, but more like the difference between film and digital photography. Some people prefer the look of certain films over the look of a digital photograph. Doesn’t mean that the film is better at recording it, just that it looks a certain way that people like.
The same thing might be true for records vs. digital.
Excellent analogy. I often describe music in visual terms: “That song sounds as if, well… if it was a photo, it’d be over-sharpened in Photoshop.”
And I do believe that mp3s are the JPEGs of music…
(Hey, they’re compressed, and too much results in annoying artifacts)
I stand corrected as to the factual error.
I also stand by my personal impression, which is that a track-to-track comparison yields more warmth, more nuance, more range on an LP than a CD.
I knowingly paid good money to see “Superman Returns”. The sole reason is that it was the first feature film shot on the Panavision Genesis system.
As a working cinematographer I wanted to know what my industry was in for.
The film felt like I was watching a video game up there on the screen. Zero grain movement, of course. The color rendering and textures made it feel very video game-ish. More evident to me in the wide shots. The close-ups were weird as well.
Similarly, watching the first project shown using the RED Digital One cinema camera were off-putting. The lack of shutter strobing and lack of grain could be put down to my love of film stock, but the stuff just looked OFF. ( Peter Jackson did a lovely job with his WWI recreation short film, no question about it ).
It’s what I’ve absorbed media on for 4 of my 58 years. Our optic systems in our bodies don’t have grain !! I know this, and yet digital cinema looks funky.
The Arri Alexa has gotten better. Add to it the brilliant choice to embed a spinning mirror in the CMOS area to simulate the flicker, and they really got it good. I also prefer the overall look of an Alexa chip ( the original ones, anyway ) over the RED One or the Genesis.
That’s actually a pretty good analogy; both rely on throwing out information that the algorithms perceive as un-seeable or un-hearable. If you’re doing it on a high quality large source file, it’s usually pretty good, but if you have a janky and/or small source, you end up with artifacts and bad quality.
As far as the film analogy goes, what gave me the idea is that I have a photo manipulation software package, and one of the options that you can buy for it is the ability to impose stuff like film grain, film exposure curves and film color responses onto digital photographs. So for example, you might go take your photo with your spiffy Canon EOS DSLR in full color, but on the back end, you can make it look like it was taken with Tri-X 400 or Kodachrome 25. Interesting, but only really necessary if you LIKE the look of film.
A good Zeiss lens?? This is an SLR? If it isn’t a Leica, please tell me what kind of body it is. Near as I’ve found, only Leica cameras made in German used genuine Zeiss glass.
The post says point and shoot. The Yashica and Contax point and shoots use Zeiss. There may be others. Hell, I used to have Zeiss lenses … as in prescription eyeglasses.
I’d bought it on a Camera Guy’s recommendation (the way I sold my wife on the purchase was: “So, a camera’s basically a box with a window. This is a plain box with a really good window.”). I took it to a church picnic and heard “Yaah, ees a Carl Zeissss lensss!”, turned and an old German great-grandpa explained how his first camera after the war had a lens made by Carl Zeiss himself.
Later, our minister explained that “after the war” meant after he was released from a concentration camp.
I had an eye doctor appointment at the local Walmart this weekend and wandered the store a bit after. I was really surprised to see a display of record albums displayed. I knew they’d gotten a little more popular lately but I didn’t realize even Walmart would have them.
