Kitz Forum
Chat => Chit Chat => Topic started by: Weaver on May 22, 2019, 02:28:27 AM
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It’s interesting to look decades ahead. One day DSL and metallic paths will be long-forgotten, totally obsolete and people will fondly or otherwise remember all the problems, maintenance, the tweaking and the vast body of lore, knowledge, expertise associated with dsl, lines and modems.
Like vinyl records, with noise scratches, warps, off-centring and problems with cartridge alignment and arm geometry, all that knowledge will be irrelevant and possibly lost. I used to know all about different types of arm and cartridge. I set up an arm with alignment geometry kits to try and minimise the max geometric angular alignment error across the record. Put damping fluid in the arm. Had an RIAA eq input on an integrated amp. All that went when CD arrived, and vinyl was forgotten. I unlike others have, no fondness for vinyl. I hated it back in the 70s, it was a nightmare as keeping records clean was horrible plus there was the nightmare of records arriving damaged in the first place. I should perhaps have shelled out a small fortune for a Keith Monks machine’. But the moment I heard about digital audio, I couldn’t wait for the first CD players.
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You obviously haven't heard, vinyl is making a comeback, some shops even have vinyl sections. I believe CD sales are declining and record sales increasing.
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I just discussed analog audio as an example because the forgetting of the lore is a true phenomenon for some people at least. I doubt that dsl will persist in any location but of course there may be a long tail. However my central concern is that we forget.
I believe that there was a danger of this a while ago at NASA where expertise from the 1960s related to moon-capable rocketry was in danger of being lost. I heard some story about bringing in retired engineers to capture their knowledge.
Another example was the Y2K initiative, in which I participated. I heard that ancient COBOL mainframe programmers were brought back to fix very old code. Some mainframe lore and culture will have been or will soon be forgotten.
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I have a different take on this. I don’t think anything will be, or even can be, forgotten any more, owing to digital storage. And storage capability seems to be expanding faster than knowledge, if that makes sense?
I’m not sure that’s a good thing. My worry is there might come a time where future generations are unable to understand the concept of the word “forgotten” in its current form. Effectively “recorded history” might be restarted. Things that missed the boat of digital storage, such as Apollo and other big historical events, good and bad, might come to be treated as if they had simply never happened.
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Vinyl: How many on here have collections of old LPs? We were surprised recently by a chat on Bargain Hunt with someone dealing in old records and how some of the more obscure bands can be worth something. One example he gave was Gentle Giant, Acquiring The Taste which we have a copy of the original vinyl LP.
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I still have all my LPs. Most have been supplemented by corresponding CDs that are ripped to my media server for the undeniable convenience, but I still play Vinyl once in a blue moon. Often, the reason I do so is to convince sceptics that Vinyl really does sound nicer. I connect a stand-alone CD player to the same analogue Amp as the turntable so I can get both CD and Vinyl copies of the same recording playing in unison, then switch between them for direct comparison. As often as not, the sceptics are convinced. :)
I'm not so sure about the more modern habit, of USB-connected turntables. Surely that just creates the worst of both worlds - you get the clicks and pops inherent to vinyl, as well as the ever-so-slightly inferior sound quality inherent to digital?
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Vinyl: How many on here have collections of old LPs? We were surprised recently by a chat on Bargain Hunt with someone dealing in old records and how some of the more obscure bands can be worth something. One example he gave was Gentle Giant, Acquiring The Taste which we have a copy of the original vinyl LP.
I have quite a few LPs (100+) dating back from the 1960s. I have phases of interest when I select a few and play them on my 1974 Linn Sondek LP12 deck and SME tone arm which is still going strong albeit has had a new digital motor and updated Ortofon cartridge. I still have the original Shure V15 though. I’ve bought a few new releases on vinyl recently and also a few “vintage” pressings. Trouble with LPs is the constant toing and froing to change sides!
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My focus was on the loss of knowledge of the most personal and practical kind, of minutiae. Thousands of human languages are being lost and they will never have been adequately captured.
I’m pleased to hear about the much-loved LP12. I had an SME Mk III arm on my Thorens TD160S turntable, which lived on two concrete blocks on a three-inch thick wall shelf bolted to three brick walls - on the long side and on the ends, between a chimney breast and side wall. The shelf was strong enough for me to lie on it. Built by my father after an earlier crappy turntable sitting on a wooden blanket box aka microphone plus resonator destroyed my first pair of speakers’ crossovers with bass acoustic feedback. Bless him, father understood the task, and them some, went totally over the top and built the Humber Bridge, but certainly achieved the desideratum.
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I've just emptied my bookcase of hundreds of DVDs and Blu-rays. To be replaced with my Vinyl LPs that were stored away in 1997. Of course I had to get a new turntable so a treat to myself of a Rega Planer RP1 and a Yamaha Amp. Very nice.
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My own turntable is also a Rega, a Planar 2 vintage circa 1990, with Creek 4040 amplifier and Mission 761 speakers. That’s all decidedly “budget” by standards posted, and I am envious of the systems others have described, but I remain satisfied with that kit and have never felt the need to improve upon it.
Whilst I rarely (not never) use the original Rega/Creek configuration, the 30 year old Mission speakers remain in full time employment as front Left and Right in my home cinema surround system with modern digital AV amplifier. They sound vastly, vastly, vastly, superior to the silly little miniature speakers that came with the system. I simply do without a front centre speaker, rather than try to find one to match the Missions. :)
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Will we mourn our forgetting of metallic path lore though? Or will we laugh and curse the outages, crosstalk, RFI and SNRM variations? Will there be nothing interesting to talk about when we are all on reliable dull FTTP. No equivalent discussion group for electricity users; well who knows - could talk about wiring and generators, lightning, wild weather and brownouts.
There still will be problems with crappy ISPs and problems ‘out there’ on the wider internet, issues relating to the core internet itself and relating to major service and content providers.
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My own prediction...?
Elimination of full metalic path effectively necessitates VoIP. Just as CDs in certain ways can never be as good as Vinyl, VoIP in other ways can never be as good as POTS, especially as regards latency. As with CDs vs Vinyl, we’ll be assured by the marketeers that it is simply impossible for average human beings to detect the detriment of VoIP vs POTS.
But if it transpires, as with CD vs Vinyl, that many human beings deviate from average and find VoIP unpleasant, they won’t be able to simply restock and rejuvenate old appuratus, as the metalic path will have been irredeemably lost. :(
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It might be VoIP in its own VLAN or other L2 ring-fenced channel straight into a telco. Or it might be actual internet VoIP but with effective pervasive QoS which really does ring-fence the bandwidth at L3.
It will be absolutely horrible otherwise and the public won’t put up with it, not after they have been used to phones that ‘just work’. The voice-channel at L2 route will be something to keep telcos relevant maybe, a differentiation between IPs. Or else there will be a panic to get QoS put into more core routers.
I wonder if people might get interested in having separate IP routing with dual L3 virtual pipes everywhere right across the guts of the internet, with one pipe of a pair being QoS-high entrance only. Separately visible in the routing tables. Would that make sense? (No. :-) )
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I can understand why vinyl is making a comeback because the analogue style music with his crispy crackling sounds actually gives it life and feeling.
The good or bad side of digital, depending on your point of view, is the music is very clear. I don't think it transmits the musical instruments or voices of the singers in their pure form because it cleans up the audio, and I think that takes away some of the emotive side, for me anyways.
I agree with 7LM that most things will be archived. Youtube is a good example of that. I can go to youtube and find music videos of songs I'd heard in the 80s for free. Or even old tv programmes. I like old British comedies and sometimes I'll find a title that looks good but I'm not sure how it will play so I type it in to youtube and 9 times out of 10 someone as uploaded either an episode or a trailer for it. Some programmes I've only found on youtube as I don't think they have made the demand to get printed on a dvd to sell.
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The thing about vinyl is that it is not ‘hi fi’ according to the true ‘Quad’ definition, but rather it is attractive sound rather than accurate. The microphony creates feedback and added reverb which is very pleasant. The same can be said albeit to a far far less extent for valve amps, which
suffer benefit from microphony and also can, in the case of non-hifi models, exhibit pleasing third and fifth harmonic distortion and have soft clipping. My wife has a guitar amp that has one real valve in it because of the attractive sound. Of course true high fidelity audio needs to be accurate, not containing added sugar and MSG. For pop music, the ‘accuracy’ thing is arguably largely meaningless as the studio recording is an artificial created construct shaped by the engineer. So I can very much appreciate the motivation.
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Hmm, not convinced that microphony expains the vinyl difference, else the difference would be absent when using headphones?
One possible explanation I have come across is that the brain perceives recorded music to be more reallistic if it can correlate what it hears with what it sees. With vinyl, we see a stylus being lowered to the surface, and hear a click as it makes contact, then some background rumble as it trudges along the groove to where the more dense area of track where music starts. Everything adds up, the brain accepts what is happening. If there’s a scratch, the brain can visualise the mechanical effect, predict and maybe even filter out each subsequent ‘pop’ as the stylus hits the damage. Whereas with CD all we get is this magical stream of (very good) music, which is slightly counterintuitive to the natural world, as we can’t see where it comes from. :-\
Another thing that gets digital music a bad reputation is of course the various compressed formats, but that’s avoidable by not doing that. Also with some CDs, and digital recordings in general, are sometimes deliberately processed and “emphasised” by the studio on the assumption they should be optimised for portable earphones, or for car audio, or for background music in elevators. They then sound downright strange, if played in a normal home environment with half decent speakers.
No matter what the explanation, I do often find it easy to convince sceptics that Vinyl sounds nicer, and more natural, just by letting them switch back/forth for a while. In particular, certain vocals that I can think of, can create a feeling that the artist is in the room with me on vinyl. That just doesn’t happen with corresponding CD release of same album.
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The issue of microphony is well documented and I have had personal unfortunate acquaintance with it. There’s more to it than just that though.
There is also reverb within the vinyl record itself, with the sound from the stylus echoing around and coming back from the outer rim of the record. I think headphones are indeed more accurate in this respect, as you say.
Some turntables isolate much better than others of course and some supports are more solid. There’s also the option of a cover over the turntable which shields the cartridge and record from the sound from the speakers. This can all be tested by turning the gain up and down and a record cut at a high level will be better of course too.
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I don’t doubt that microphony exists, affecting vinyl replay in an adverse way, and always present to a greater or lesser extent, though infintesimaly small when using headphones.
I do doubt whether it influences the effect, illusionary or otherwise, whereby many people think Vinyl sounds nicer. My doubts are based on the fact that such folks, if I am typical, would assert that vinyl sounds nicer even through headphones, which would exclude the microphony factor. :)
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From my personal experience and articles I have read, I would say that vinyl sounds ‘nicer’ on some recordings because they were mastered wrong, assuming treble loss in the master cutting phase and precompensating for it. Some digital recordings in my experience are horrible, too bright and things got better when engineers forgot about vinyl being the target.
I absolutely agree about vinyl being nicer, in certain cases only though.
It is my belief that microphony if present can sound nicer because everyone likes reverb, so much so that performers add artificial reverb and in most situations all musicians seek natural reverb out. My wife is a singer, as was I after a fashion, although only an amateur unlike her, and she can attest to this love of all sources of reverb.
I have shouted into a valve amp and got microphony back and of course a turntable is more sensitive.
A high-end turntable will often use an expensive cartridge that requires a very high gain. This too increases the microphony. And the vinyl-internal stylus reverb is always present. Articles have been published on this subject and that is why some high end turntables have specially designed record mats some of which are sticky, many are damping felt. Record clamps also play a part although this is less clear and I don’t remember seeing much written about them. Didn’t the Oracle turntable come with a clamp? I always used one and a special sticky damping mat, on my Thorens.
But sevenlayermuddle is right to be sceptical as I have never seen anything published about human testing of record player microphony or amp microphony. I do have personal experience of it though and I can’t say anything about the reverb because of the possibility of reverb already being orsent in recordings and I didn’t do A-B comparisons with very high end headphones, but then in any case you would just be testing speakers vs headphones so the test would be hopeless. But I got the feeling that the bass was enhanced and warmer when there was more uncontrolled acoustic feedback and the sound retreated become colder and darker and more distant when the record player support was dramatically improved by the Humber Bridge and concrete blocks. One interesting test for anyone to do would be record player lid/cover-on-vs-off. (If you have one.) it seems to me that hinged lids are not clever as they are microphones unless the lid is fully closed and the whole thing is damped. A swinging wobbling lid on a part-closed hinge is very silly. A lid that is oversized and goes right over the outside of the whole turntable, like a bell jar, would be a better option surely. I just put a very heavy paperweight on my lid.
Actually forget headphones - a better test would be to put the turntable in the next room or in an insulated box, out of the way of the speakers. Then do a test with high gain.
God all of this is taking me back.
I don’t mind talking about audio _at all_ but I was interested in the future of dsl so I started something with a mention of a topic that we all love. Should perhaps have split the thread. Will we mourn dsl and copper? Anyone for COBOL? (Shudders.)
I did a lot of Z80 assembler for a living at work to begin with, 100% full time. I found it really annoying though, even though it is a capable 8 but processor but a but slow unless it’s strengths can shine. Other processors I all found enjoyable but not the Z80. Aside from that I really miss writing in assembler and mourn the transition into high level languages for pretty much absolutely everything. that’s why I have been writing a few very small bits of AMD64/Intel x64 asm code recently for a giant speed-up of certain algorithms wher compilers don’t have access to certain new instructions or don’t know to use them.
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I actually think the audio debate is very relevant to DSL. Should FTTP ever deprive us of the metalic path for telephony, there might be corresponding arguments over VoIP vs POTS. For example, packetisation delays, compression artefacts, comfort noise, all of which have potential to be debated and liked/disliked. :)
Re assemblers, yes, a great way to program. I started with mainframe assembler, did some Intel but never liked It, found Motorola much easier. I have done some Microchip PIC at hobby level, which is fun too, disciplines you to produce small footprint efficient code. I regret I never got the chance to write PowerPC assembler, simply because I think I would have felt some satisfaction whenever using the instruction “EIEIO”. :D
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enforce_In-order_Execution_of_I/O
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I find the vinyl -v- CD debate rather interesting.
As someone who can recall saving up several months wages for a "Music System" that contained a CD player, I was blown away by the sound quality of my very first CD.
The reason I wanted a CD player - being a big Dire Straits fan, it was the sound quality of Brothers in Arms and there were only about half a dozen available CDs back then - but make no mistake the CD was definitely better than the vinyl version.
Gawd knows what happened to most of my record collection, because at one time I had a lot. As a teen I had just about every top 10 single, and a fair collection of LP's and even some 12" EPs that I had to specially order. I suspect most of them went AWOL after my last house move and/or my daughter sold them like she did with her full collection of first edition Disney VHS tapes that I later found she sold for peanuts :'(
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I don’t know what happened to all the LPs. They may have got lost in a house move. When we had a flat in Crouch End / Hornsey, in North London for eleven years 1987-1998, after which we left and came to Skye, even at the start of that period, back in 1987, I didn’t have a turntable any more in that flat. I had given the Thorens and my amp to someone at work so it would go to a good home.
Kitz - I was there too, my wife loved that Dire Straits album and the sound of it was special.