Slashdot Mirror
13-Year-Old Trades iPod For a Walkman For a Week
BBC Magazine convinced 13-year-old Scott Campbell to trade in his iPod for a Walkman for a week and see what he thought. Scott thinks the iPod wins when it comes to sound quality, color, weight, and the shuffle feature. The Walkman, however, offers two headphone sockets, making it much easier to listen to music with a friend. My favorite part of the review is, "It took me three days to figure out that there was another side to the tape. That was not the only naive mistake that I made; I mistook the metal/normal switch on the Walkman for a genre-specific equalizer, but later I discovered that it was in fact used to switch between two different types of cassette."
ActionReplay with the fastload. Man was that good. Especially with the 1541 (3mins to 10 secs).
It is however possible, on both formats, for a loud sound like an kick drum hit to appear immediately before or after it actually is supposed to be heard, because the tape layers on the spool print through onto layers above them. When I used to do gun recordings with a Nagra 4-S you would always store the tapes "tails out" or FFwded to the end, so that any print through would sound after the actual sound, and would sound like an echo, rather than preceding the sound and ruining the attack.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
A friend of mine had to teach their kid how to use the "phone without buttons", recently. Let's just say that it's non-obvious, and much more so than I expected.
Your points are good, but leave off one interesting bit about cassette players -- not all of them were especially good at matching the same tape speed. I had a sony that would play just the tiniest bit faster than it should, mucking up the pace and tone of the recording. Oddly enough, the sanyo it replaced had a speed control so that you could adjust for that.
Finally, he never got to listen to two of my favorite cassette bands -- "de-magnetizer" and "head cleaner" -- what's a cassette experience without 'em?
.. pa-ra-bo-la, pa-ra-bo-la, 2 pi R, 2 pi R, where's your latus rectum, where's your latus rectum, 2 pi R
Just curious, you didn't write up your experiment, did you? My old prof would probably be interested in reading.
Also, are you sure that the CDs were "worse" at reproduction on absolute terms, or that the analogue recordings simply induced distortions that you found pleasant, like tube-induced second harmonic distortion? It's almost impossible to do double-blind audio analysis with analogue v digital, because analogue always gives itself away with noise, and I've read that subjective listeners often cannot tell the difference between analogue and digital for most program material if the digital is noised up, or if needle pops are added, or if programs like string-heavy orchestral programs are given even-harmonic distortion.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
Doubt it. Looks to me like the reporter gave the kid the Walkman, let him play with it for a week, asked him questions about his experience, and then wrote the article from the viewpoint of the kid. A 13 year old would not say "remeber that?" in reference to things he is seeing for the first time.
This isn't really uncommon practice in the journalism world. My sister was interviewed by an Isreaeli reporter shortly after the rocket attacks a few months back, because of her status as an American and her proximity (she was a few blocks from where the rockets struck). The reporter synthesized all her answers and thoughts during the interview and wrote the article as though it had been written by my sister. It gave the whole article a sense of first-person immediacy, instead of the dry descriptions of a reporter who wasn't there.
mirrorshades radio -- darkwave, industrial, futurepop, ebm.
Vegeta99 is right about the sound quality. (I don't know about the chemical composition of the tape-- it's probably on Wikipedia, but I can't be bothered to look it up. ;) The cases were always plastic, of course.
Metal tapes were a lot more expensive than regular tapes, and you could only buy them at specialty stores, such as Musicland. If you were going to create a master mix and then duplicate it on a cutting-edge dual-cassette deck, you would create the master on a metal tape ($4 to $5 each in mid-80's currency IIRC) and then duplicate it onto a normal tape (either something like a decent mid-level Maxell or, if you had no money, cheap POS tapes [made from recycled scraps] which were sold at Walgreen's). The normal tape would go into the Walkman; if it chewed that up, you were OK. However, if you were a poor student, you made do with what you had. Rule Of Thumb: the cheaper the Walkman, the more likely it will eat your tapes.
If your tape did get eaten, you had two choices:
1) toss it
2) get out a screwdriver, take the case apart, and try to respool the tape without twisting or pulling too hard. [The more you paid for your tape, the more likely this option was.]
Tapes were also _the_ way to listen to your music in a car. And a professionally recorded tape played for the first time sounded almost as good as a CD does, so it's not as if we were total philistines! ;)
All that said, we Walkman users would sometimes look despairingly at our 60-cassette case of tapes and dream of the day when a small, lightweight object would hold all of those songs at once. And now it's here!
It will take someone older than me to explain that whole 8-track thing, though...
I find it disturbing that, according to the article at least, this particular kid had problems working out for himself that a cassette tape is two-sided and what half of the controls on the Walkman do.
As a kid, I can remember taking some bits of machinery apart to clean or service them, and just to see how they worked. (For example, my parents were in the clothes-making/tailoring trade and I frequently messed about with old sewing machines to fix them or clean them.) I also got into electronics at a fairly young age and knew some basics about car mechanics.
It seems a shame that kids these days don't get the chance to (or are just not interested in) take things apart just to see how they work - from my perspective, I developed an "engineering brain" from a really early age that has served me well throughout my career.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.