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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."
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.
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.