Although I agree with you that this is making a mountain out of a mole hill, video games *are different* from "real reality" games, in as much as those video games aim to simulate reality or simulate a fictitious one, and in as much as they lack physical activity. Games that involve playing a plastic guitar are obviously not in that group, but games like GTA are. Games like Pac man provide no exercise but make no attempt at simulating reality.
Adults and older kids enjoy those games, sometimes because we appreciate the realism of the simulation, or because we appreciate the ways in which the simulation defies our notions about reality (you can kill without repercussions, or you can crash a car and not die, or you can jump and then start flying.)
Kids who are too young would probably learn more about reality by experiencing it before they experience simulations, and would probably not enjoy a VR game more than reality itself or more than any other game. They certainly will not learn a whole lot in terms of useful skills under age 3, where "useful" is being able to communicate, learn empathy and getting along, learning that some people lack empathy and are selfish and are perhaps best avoided, learning to follow instructions, and learn not to eat stuff from the floor.
Once a kid is capable of assembling his own Lego block creations, inserting pentagonal pegs in pentagonal holes and stacking unstable wobbly objects in perfect balance, any additional fine motor skill or coordination is not going to provide that much more of a real life advantage, IMHO, and is taking away from a whole bunch of other skills that they also need, like how to treat people and animals for mutual benefit (empathy), and how much they can get away with before they get yelled at (what's appropriate behavior according to their parents).
So I would limit video game playing of any child under 3 to a minimum. And above 3 then the freedom is much greater.
In my opinion, I'd say before age 3, no VR type games for my son and after that age, it would be depending on how much exercise and other activities he is taking part of.
With that said I worry more about my son playing *too much* with model trains. And it just goes to show that children at early ages (especially boys, but some girls too) will always have strange little obsessions that always seem to detract from getting a well rounded education, whether it is telephones, video games, remote controls, treating inanimate objects like their "babies" and so on.
It leaves a parent wondering what is the cause and what is the effect, are kids who love video games "born" with an interest to sedentary but mentally stimulating activities and are they just playing video games as a consequence? will they start obsessing about telephones or counting things if you turn off the TV, yet another sedentary but mentally stimulating activity? There is a little bit of truth to that you know...
ahem... yeah, but try to use all of that bandwidth continuously and see what happens.... You can probably use all your megabits continuously for the duration of that test. but not for a whole hour, heck not even a few minutes. Comcast has traffic shaping that will quickly put your streams in the back burner to allow more interactive packets to get thru in time.
I think most people comenting here have failed to understand the difference between the MP3 format's intrinsic capabilities and the fact that in practice most mp3's are encoded at certain bitrates with certain codecs. Although I am not sure what the typical bitrates are, I am pretty sure that they are not the highest nor with the best codecs. It seems that 192 is quite popular these days.
I would go as far as guessing that the iTunes mp3 codec is the one most frequently used by the consumer. And I am not going to bother comenting on its quality. Other people have done listening tests that are easy to find. Suffice to say it is not among the best.
Finally, the mastering community is not necessarily highly scientiffic and I think it is far more likely that most mastering engineers are "compensating" for mp3's without actually going out there and conducting a poll on what is the most common codec and most common bit rates and doing back and forth testing. In fact, if they did, they probably would not achieve that much better results anyway. Instead I bet that they rely on the well tested assumption that multi band compression will preserve most of everything by making everything loud. This assumption is true, as far as "preserving" goes. Multi band compression being a close analog to the "hearing aid" algorithm.
The job of the mastering engineer as been so far required, not to master for the best conditions possible, but for the most likely medium available. And this is why, multi band compression (aka, finalizer) is probably likely to preserve most of the music in most conditions, including the noisy environment where most MP3's are consumed. In fact, multi band compression is practically a subversion of perceptual coding by bringing the sounds that would otherwise had been masked. The goals of preserving intelligibility and punch sacrifice long term listenability of music.
So, despite the mixed level of "scientificness" in the mastering community, I'd be willing to bet that they are squezing out the most of the format at medium bitrates.
So in short, I think there is validity to this article.
why wouldn't they ask for access to the original multi-track parts? they DO! But they don't always succeed. It's not always a matter of whether the multi-track masters are available.
You seem to assume that Activision reinterpreted the song as a means to avoid copyright infringement. The truth is they have a signed agreement granting permission to make the sound alike version of the song, and one would hope (IDK) that such an agreement reflects the spirit of their intention: To make the sound alike sound, well, alike!
Given the speakers, headphones, and rooms that most people have, any argument about media quality is utterly pointless.
This is simply a media stunt by the recording industry's marketing departments to try and popularize a physical object that people must pay for. Vinyl has all the sex appeal to become that object.
Vinyl needs to be compressed even more so than CD's, as heavy bass can be enough to make the needle pop right out of the groove.
However, all the arguments about increased sound quality, as you point out, are absurd.
I am a mastering engineer, software engineer and have worked on audio software. And in all of my experience there are only a couple of things left to improve upon with current digital audio technology, but for a very small amount of return.
When the music is mixed digitally using certain "professional tools" (no pun intended) it is done in fixed point. A few companies have realized that using double precision floating point *does* sound better. And the difference is measurable. Some sound engineers believe it's also very audible.
In short, sampling a signal, scaling it, summing it and then truncating (or dithering) it, does more than shifting it's level and burying the lower end under the quantization threshold. No technical name exists for this type of distortion, but it is a self correlated noise upon the signal, or cross correlated with the other signals being mixed upon it. What it amounts to is to putting the signal thru a transfer function consisting of a jagged diagonal line (instead of a perfect diagonal line, whose slope matches the gain applied) or jagged grid that shifts up and down with the value of the other streams being mixed. This is analogous to rendering a diagonal line on a computer. The higher the resolution (number of bits) the better. But sadly, at the recording and mixing stage, mixing a large number of tracks with say 24 bits of fixed point resolution is ridiculously bad, even if the final master will be dithered and truncated at 16 bits, because this distorting process will occur repeatedly, for each gainstage, for each track summed. One solution to this is to apply gain and sum at double precision floating point. Yet another, less popular solution, is to actually reproduce each track back into the analog world using high quality DACS and sum in the analog domain. Both sound nearly as good, and certainly better than summing at 24 bits fixed point.
Second, there are certain IIR filters that can't be implemented at just 2x the bandwith. Because of this, the choices are: Upsample and downsample just for that filter (which is computationally expensive and if done at all, seldom done correctly) or just run the entire audio stream at 4 or 8x the bandwith.
What is done today by most studios is run the entire project at 88.2 or 96 kHz sampling frequency. This is great, but requires a very high quality downsampler at the end of the chain to convey the final result.
One could argue that vinyl masters can be cut from a DAC running at 96 kHz and thus have an increased frequency resolution. But that improvement pales in the light of the background hiss level, additional bass compression required for vinyl, preamp distortion, de-emphasis equalizer tolerances, motor speed stability deviations, etc.
I wonder if we just had a tiny speaker on top of a CD player reproducing the very high frequencies that come from the "needle" whether it would finally pass for vinyl.
I bet that much of what is perceived as sounding better for vinyl is the fact that people can hear the sound of the mechanics (the needle itself) as well as the speakers. I remember as a child, that the records sounded a lot better when the turntable lid was open.
It would be great if there was something that the market demands to innovate upon. However, given that most people are willing to trade a little sound quality for portability, (judging from the popularity of mp3's etc) seems unlikely that the innovation will occur around increased audio resolution.
-arr
Actually, a rather sporty and normal electric car is just out. It's expensive and, granted not available to normal people. But for the "average" rich guy, it's very affordable.
http://www.teslamotors.com/
I see, so what you mean is that being religious does not prevent a person from being a scientist. Just like smoking pot, or being a transsexual does not prevent somebody from being a scientist. So either religious belief amount to a decision that many scientists would question but in the end turns out to be harmless to practicing science, or it simply has absolutely nothing to do with science whatsoever. You are either not trying to say anything at all, or you are trying to say "There is room for religious belief for a scientist, despite widespread belief to the contrary". And you cannot make that statement without the wish to validate religious belief.
For example, smoking marijuana does not preclude a person from being a scientist either. And I can imagine many reasonable sounding arguments that could lead one to believe that smoking marijuana probably worsens a person's ability to remember facts and think clearly. But now look at Carl Sagan, he has admitted to using illegal drugs and yet he's a brilliant scientist.
When I make this statement, does that validate smoking pot in any way? On the surface It seems like it does, or at least seems like a rather lame attempt at trying to validate pot smoking, but in fact, smoking pot probably has a *slightly* detrimental effect in a person's brain and yet not enough to preclude somebody as brilliant as Mr. Sagan from being a scientist. So my statement amounts to nothing but an invalid attempt at validating pot smoking.
The only possible use I can see in your statement is as an attempt to validate religious beliefs (my original point) or as no statement at all. (i.e."Many real apples can also be green")
-arr
All religious beliefs are such that no amount of evidence could possibly falsify them. While all non-religious beliefs can be proven false if somebody were to come about new evidence that disproves them.
Thats the difference.
And as far as I know the atheist deride the religious, not for their blind faith, but mostly for their inability to hold meaningful arguments without getting all defensive about it, or resorting to absurd analogies.
The few reasonable religious people that I have met never have belief arguments because they rightfully understand that their beliefs are personal, can't be proven and do not need to validate their beliefs by trying to convince other people. So you don't usually hear much about those kinds of religious people as they tend to be more quiet in these kinds of arguments.
Now on the other hand, look at yourself: When you accuse the atheist of acting on blind faith and waiting for a priest's ruling, you underscore how silly acting on blind faith and following a priest is. Which is precisely, by your own words, what religious people do. So your accusation equally fits the religious as well.
A good argument would accuse the atheist of doing something silly that religious people don't also do.
Ironically, when you call atheists pompous and also say:
"Please, you're acting like a bunch of laymen waiting for the latest ruling or revelation from the priest."
You are somehow making it seem like you know something that everybody else doesn't (as they are just following a priest and can't think for themselves unlike... who, yourself?). In other words, you don't participate in a discussion where both sides can learn something, and instead use the forum in a self-aggrandizing way, as you are "clearly the only one who's not just waiting for the priest's ruling". Now, that's pompous.
-arr
Let's suppose that your statement is right and "Many "real" scientists are religious".
This statement by itself is not very useful unless you expect it to imply something else... For example if I said "Many "real" scientists are men" then I would perhaps imply that men are better suited to science than women. So making a statement that draws a statistical correlation between one attribute and another is only useful if you expect the correlation to have some meaning beyond the original statement.
I am left to assume what you may have possibly implied by saying that "Many "real" scientists are religious".
Perhaps you imply to say that a high correlation exists between being a scientist and being religious, therefore, religion must be "true" or something along those lines.
In other words, your statement aims to validate religion by stating a correlation with science, or it aims to validate religious belief by stating that "if many authoritative figures believe something, then it must be true".
In either case, a statement of statistical correlation of two attributes, like yours is no different than "Many "real" scientists are men" and by itself is not very useful or necessarily supportive of whatever you are trying to imply unless you can find a causal relationship between one and the other.
If somebody was to make a convincing argument for why being a scientist "drives" a person to become religious, then I could see your point going somewhere. Otherwise, you are just trying to drag people into a rather useless argument.
-arr
Slashdot Mirror
Although I agree with you that this is making a mountain out of a mole hill, video games *are different* from "real reality" games, in as much as those video games aim to simulate reality or simulate a fictitious one, and in as much as they lack physical activity. Games that involve playing a plastic guitar are obviously not in that group, but games like GTA are. Games like Pac man provide no exercise but make no attempt at simulating reality.
Adults and older kids enjoy those games, sometimes because we appreciate the realism of the simulation, or because we appreciate the ways in which the simulation defies our notions about reality (you can kill without repercussions, or you can crash a car and not die, or you can jump and then start flying.)
Kids who are too young would probably learn more about reality by experiencing it before they experience simulations, and would probably not enjoy a VR game more than reality itself or more than any other game. They certainly will not learn a whole lot in terms of useful skills under age 3, where "useful" is being able to communicate, learn empathy and getting along, learning that some people lack empathy and are selfish and are perhaps best avoided, learning to follow instructions, and learn not to eat stuff from the floor.
Once a kid is capable of assembling his own Lego block creations, inserting pentagonal pegs in pentagonal holes and stacking unstable wobbly objects in perfect balance, any additional fine motor skill or coordination is not going to provide that much more of a real life advantage, IMHO, and is taking away from a whole bunch of other skills that they also need, like how to treat people and animals for mutual benefit (empathy), and how much they can get away with before they get yelled at (what's appropriate behavior according to their parents).
So I would limit video game playing of any child under 3 to a minimum. And above 3 then the freedom is much greater.
In my opinion, I'd say before age 3, no VR type games for my son and after that age, it would be depending on how much exercise and other activities he is taking part of.
With that said I worry more about my son playing *too much* with model trains. And it just goes to show that children at early ages (especially boys, but some girls too) will always have strange little obsessions that always seem to detract from getting a well rounded education, whether it is telephones, video games, remote controls, treating inanimate objects like their "babies" and so on.
It leaves a parent wondering what is the cause and what is the effect, are kids who love video games "born" with an interest to sedentary but mentally stimulating activities and are they just playing video games as a consequence? will they start obsessing about telephones or counting things if you turn off the TV, yet another sedentary but mentally stimulating activity? There is a little bit of truth to that you know...
-arr
ahem... yeah, but try to use all of that bandwidth continuously and see what happens.... You can probably use all your megabits continuously for the duration of that test. but not for a whole hour, heck not even a few minutes. Comcast has traffic shaping that will quickly put your streams in the back burner to allow more interactive packets to get thru in time.
I think most people comenting here have failed to understand the difference between the MP3 format's intrinsic capabilities and the fact that in practice most mp3's are encoded at certain bitrates with certain codecs. Although I am not sure what the typical bitrates are, I am pretty sure that they are not the highest nor with the best codecs. It seems that 192 is quite popular these days. I would go as far as guessing that the iTunes mp3 codec is the one most frequently used by the consumer. And I am not going to bother comenting on its quality. Other people have done listening tests that are easy to find. Suffice to say it is not among the best. Finally, the mastering community is not necessarily highly scientiffic and I think it is far more likely that most mastering engineers are "compensating" for mp3's without actually going out there and conducting a poll on what is the most common codec and most common bit rates and doing back and forth testing. In fact, if they did, they probably would not achieve that much better results anyway. Instead I bet that they rely on the well tested assumption that multi band compression will preserve most of everything by making everything loud. This assumption is true, as far as "preserving" goes. Multi band compression being a close analog to the "hearing aid" algorithm. The job of the mastering engineer as been so far required, not to master for the best conditions possible, but for the most likely medium available. And this is why, multi band compression (aka, finalizer) is probably likely to preserve most of the music in most conditions, including the noisy environment where most MP3's are consumed. In fact, multi band compression is practically a subversion of perceptual coding by bringing the sounds that would otherwise had been masked. The goals of preserving intelligibility and punch sacrifice long term listenability of music. So, despite the mixed level of "scientificness" in the mastering community, I'd be willing to bet that they are squezing out the most of the format at medium bitrates. So in short, I think there is validity to this article.
why wouldn't they ask for access to the original multi-track parts? they DO! But they don't always succeed. It's not always a matter of whether the multi-track masters are available.
You seem to assume that Activision reinterpreted the song as a means to avoid copyright infringement. The truth is they have a signed agreement granting permission to make the sound alike version of the song, and one would hope (IDK) that such an agreement reflects the spirit of their intention: To make the sound alike sound, well, alike!
Given the speakers, headphones, and rooms that most people have, any argument about media quality is utterly pointless.
This is simply a media stunt by the recording industry's marketing departments to try and popularize a physical object that people must pay for. Vinyl has all the sex appeal to become that object.
Vinyl needs to be compressed even more so than CD's, as heavy bass can be enough to make the needle pop right out of the groove.
However, all the arguments about increased sound quality, as you point out, are absurd.
I am a mastering engineer, software engineer and have worked on audio software. And in all of my experience there are only a couple of things left to improve upon with current digital audio technology, but for a very small amount of return.
When the music is mixed digitally using certain "professional tools" (no pun intended) it is done in fixed point. A few companies have realized that using double precision floating point *does* sound better. And the difference is measurable. Some sound engineers believe it's also very audible.
In short, sampling a signal, scaling it, summing it and then truncating (or dithering) it, does more than shifting it's level and burying the lower end under the quantization threshold. No technical name exists for this type of distortion, but it is a self correlated noise upon the signal, or cross correlated with the other signals being mixed upon it. What it amounts to is to putting the signal thru a transfer function consisting of a jagged diagonal line (instead of a perfect diagonal line, whose slope matches the gain applied) or jagged grid that shifts up and down with the value of the other streams being mixed. This is analogous to rendering a diagonal line on a computer. The higher the resolution (number of bits) the better. But sadly, at the recording and mixing stage, mixing a large number of tracks with say 24 bits of fixed point resolution is ridiculously bad, even if the final master will be dithered and truncated at 16 bits, because this distorting process will occur repeatedly, for each gainstage, for each track summed. One solution to this is to apply gain and sum at double precision floating point. Yet another, less popular solution, is to actually reproduce each track back into the analog world using high quality DACS and sum in the analog domain. Both sound nearly as good, and certainly better than summing at 24 bits fixed point.
Second, there are certain IIR filters that can't be implemented at just 2x the bandwith. Because of this, the choices are: Upsample and downsample just for that filter (which is computationally expensive and if done at all, seldom done correctly) or just run the entire audio stream at 4 or 8x the bandwith.
What is done today by most studios is run the entire project at 88.2 or 96 kHz sampling frequency. This is great, but requires a very high quality downsampler at the end of the chain to convey the final result.
One could argue that vinyl masters can be cut from a DAC running at 96 kHz and thus have an increased frequency resolution. But that improvement pales in the light of the background hiss level, additional bass compression required for vinyl, preamp distortion, de-emphasis equalizer tolerances, motor speed stability deviations, etc.
I wonder if we just had a tiny speaker on top of a CD player reproducing the very high frequencies that come from the "needle" whether it would finally pass for vinyl.
I bet that much of what is perceived as sounding better for vinyl is the fact that people can hear the sound of the mechanics (the needle itself) as well as the speakers. I remember as a child, that the records sounded a lot better when the turntable lid was open.
-arr
It would be great if there was something that the market demands to innovate upon. However, given that most people are willing to trade a little sound quality for portability, (judging from the popularity of mp3's etc) seems unlikely that the innovation will occur around increased audio resolution. -arr
Actually, a rather sporty and normal electric car is just out. It's expensive and, granted not available to normal people. But for the "average" rich guy, it's very affordable. http://www.teslamotors.com/
I see, so what you mean is that being religious does not prevent a person from being a scientist. Just like smoking pot, or being a transsexual does not prevent somebody from being a scientist. So either religious belief amount to a decision that many scientists would question but in the end turns out to be harmless to practicing science, or it simply has absolutely nothing to do with science whatsoever. You are either not trying to say anything at all, or you are trying to say "There is room for religious belief for a scientist, despite widespread belief to the contrary". And you cannot make that statement without the wish to validate religious belief. For example, smoking marijuana does not preclude a person from being a scientist either. And I can imagine many reasonable sounding arguments that could lead one to believe that smoking marijuana probably worsens a person's ability to remember facts and think clearly. But now look at Carl Sagan, he has admitted to using illegal drugs and yet he's a brilliant scientist. When I make this statement, does that validate smoking pot in any way? On the surface It seems like it does, or at least seems like a rather lame attempt at trying to validate pot smoking, but in fact, smoking pot probably has a *slightly* detrimental effect in a person's brain and yet not enough to preclude somebody as brilliant as Mr. Sagan from being a scientist. So my statement amounts to nothing but an invalid attempt at validating pot smoking. The only possible use I can see in your statement is as an attempt to validate religious beliefs (my original point) or as no statement at all. (i.e."Many real apples can also be green") -arr
All religious beliefs are such that no amount of evidence could possibly falsify them. While all non-religious beliefs can be proven false if somebody were to come about new evidence that disproves them. Thats the difference. And as far as I know the atheist deride the religious, not for their blind faith, but mostly for their inability to hold meaningful arguments without getting all defensive about it, or resorting to absurd analogies. The few reasonable religious people that I have met never have belief arguments because they rightfully understand that their beliefs are personal, can't be proven and do not need to validate their beliefs by trying to convince other people. So you don't usually hear much about those kinds of religious people as they tend to be more quiet in these kinds of arguments. Now on the other hand, look at yourself: When you accuse the atheist of acting on blind faith and waiting for a priest's ruling, you underscore how silly acting on blind faith and following a priest is. Which is precisely, by your own words, what religious people do. So your accusation equally fits the religious as well. A good argument would accuse the atheist of doing something silly that religious people don't also do. Ironically, when you call atheists pompous and also say: "Please, you're acting like a bunch of laymen waiting for the latest ruling or revelation from the priest." You are somehow making it seem like you know something that everybody else doesn't (as they are just following a priest and can't think for themselves unlike ... who, yourself?). In other words, you don't participate in a discussion where both sides can learn something, and instead use the forum in a self-aggrandizing way, as you are "clearly the only one who's not just waiting for the priest's ruling". Now, that's pompous.
-arr
Let's suppose that your statement is right and "Many "real" scientists are religious". This statement by itself is not very useful unless you expect it to imply something else... For example if I said "Many "real" scientists are men" then I would perhaps imply that men are better suited to science than women. So making a statement that draws a statistical correlation between one attribute and another is only useful if you expect the correlation to have some meaning beyond the original statement. I am left to assume what you may have possibly implied by saying that "Many "real" scientists are religious". Perhaps you imply to say that a high correlation exists between being a scientist and being religious, therefore, religion must be "true" or something along those lines. In other words, your statement aims to validate religion by stating a correlation with science, or it aims to validate religious belief by stating that "if many authoritative figures believe something, then it must be true". In either case, a statement of statistical correlation of two attributes, like yours is no different than "Many "real" scientists are men" and by itself is not very useful or necessarily supportive of whatever you are trying to imply unless you can find a causal relationship between one and the other. If somebody was to make a convincing argument for why being a scientist "drives" a person to become religious, then I could see your point going somewhere. Otherwise, you are just trying to drag people into a rather useless argument. -arr