The biggest business expense isn't taxes (for the most part since they're variable), it's labor. Not just the labor to assemble parts and what not but on the supplier side too. That's where the US has the biggest issues, not to mention unions, etc. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for jobs coming back to the US and am an employer myself for a small company of 30 people. We get *slammed* for taxes (37.5 percent is what plan for all in state/feds on all "profit") even using a competent and well-respected accounting firm. Even "profit" is a lie, we keep all the "profit" in the company. So when we have a not so great year that "profit" is gone even though we've paid taxes on it and we can't spread out the loses like the big guys. So I get stuck with a $100K tax bill every year and only have a $170K salary. Sucks balls.
bottom line is, there's no logical way businesses will find it economically competitive to support first world standards of living for their employees rather than third world standards, even if the employees live here and not there, and we can whine and stamp our feet all we want but that won't fix the problem.
Out of all the babble does seem to come one gem of an idea.
Let's lower the corporate tax rate...we have "on paper" the highest in the world.
I say on paper, because the big boy corps, have enough tax attorney's and experts on payroll (whole departments in fact) to find every loophole to pay less and less, while the SMALL businesses get stuck paying the high fees and taxes.
So, let's lower it to a much lower rate, one that competes with the rest of the world, but at the same time...cut out all the deductions and loopholes. You pay x% on profits after your expenses, period.
Doing that would encourage businesses to come back to the US.
Rather than penalize, let's make it a business favorable environment to have your business on US soil, AND have US workers doing the work.
I don't think a business or a person should have a tax form longer than 1-2 pages long.
I doubt this will come about, in that it would take too much power away from congress over us all.
how can you make it favorable to have US workers doing the work without paying them wages competitive with the third world?
Trump just says stuff because he doesn't actually know how anything works. Business included. He's a complete moron who just got handed a silver spoon at birth. His apparent success should not be any indication he has a clue how anything other than bribing works in the world. He know nothing about politics, nothing about business, nothing about people, nothing about the world. He's gotten were he is simply because of money.
Sounds like every US president ever. What exactly was your point?
ironically, al gore (for instance) really does understand stuff and makes an effort to educate himself. which nets him being made fun of by people who can't imagine that a politician could actually have a vision to pave the legislative right of way for the internet, because they wouldn't, so they vote for the guy who makes it obvious that he could never have that much going on upstairs. see also "Lamar Smith, chairman of the house committee on science, space, and technology"
Trump just says stuff because he doesn't actually know how anything works. Business included. He's a complete moron who just got handed a silver spoon at birth. His apparent success should not be any indication he has a clue how anything other than bribing works in the world. He know nothing about politics, nothing about business, nothing about people, nothing about the world. He's gotten were he is simply because of money.
this is the same man who was going to call up Bill Gates to get him to shut down the bad parts of the internet
although i do take issue with your statement that he knows nothing about people. he obviously knows lots about appealing to people's illogical drives and urges.
provides the logic most often used to justify offshoring and "free" international trade. However, the theory (logical as it is) is founded on a number of premises. A number of these premises held centuries ago but not so much any more. There is, notably, the premise that "factors of production" (e.g., factories and resources) cannot easily be moved. And money and credit were supposedly not conjurable at whim from nothing but government dictat. GIGO, even if the machine can run for some time on garbage and momentum.
another big factor the theory doesn't take into account (seems to me, anyway) is the malleability of public demand for goods. The far east in general demonstrated an ability to manufacture consumer goods more efficiently than the US, and so manufacturing shifted there. But that brought about a general marketing drive to peddle consumer goods never before dreamed of, causing even more demand for the foreign manufacturing, for essentially disposable whim purchases which couldn't possibly be manufactured in the US at a price that wouldn't be prohibitive.
Its effectively a disguised import tariff and the US has gone to a lot of trouble to get "free trade" agreements with many countries, or alternatively deals with minimal customs duties. He'll end up with the regulatory bodies saying that this form of tax is illegal under the agreements and the USA would have to pay a lot of compensation
one thing about import tariffs etc is the threat of retroactive actions, an economic version of mutually assured destruction. if you don't let us sell our cars in the US, then we won't let you sell your wheat in Japan. however, given that the US doesn't manufacture anything much exportable these days, and now our agricultural export business is hitting rock bottom, it may be that whoever gets into power will feel they have nothing to lose by instituting lots of import tariffs. of course, this doesn't solve anything; unemployment will go down, wages may even go up, but the price of goods will then rise to absorb the excess. it's all just pushing the bulge in the carpet around from one corner to another. no matter how you move it around or even split it into smaller bulges, that won't make it vanish.
I listen to Rush Limbaugh's show every couple of weeks and I know he's currently hawking at least two products: Donald Trump and Apple technology. By focusing on one of Rush's biggest advertisers (Apple), maybe Trump ensures he dominates Rush's show (as Rush tries to thread the needle between defending Apple and not trashing Trump) for a few more days?
(I don't think the effect of Rush's power in the primary polls can be underestimated. When he was hawking Scott Walker, Walker led in the polls. When he stopped hawking Walker, the guy dropped down to something like 1% support.)
future generations may well look back and say that in this era, the primaries and even the elections became secondary to the polls; in which case, Rush is really driving the bus.
This seems like evidence that Trump doesn't really understand macro-economics. The reason why manufacturing of consumer goods was shipped overseas is because it was discovered that we couldn't afford the consumer goods as well at higher prices to pay American workers to make the goods. Thus, we moved the manufacturing overseas to bring down the price point to something more palatable to the typical American consumer. There is a far more complex economic issue going on here. We need to peel back the layers of the onion and find out answers to some real questions:
1) Why do goods cost what they do? What are the components of the cost?
2) Why can Americans afford to buy more product at a different price point than others. That has to do with wages and costs of goods.
All of these are inter-related. There are better presidential candidates to get into these details than Trump and probably less biased.
exactly. used to be, distance, oceans, etc. constituted a considerable barrier to cash flow. this allowed a considerable accumulation of wealth in north america. technology for communication and transportation has punctured large holes in the barrier and the accumulated wealth is flowing out to seek its own level, globally. you can't stop this without plugging the holes, and that's unlikely to happen voluntarily, and to happen involuntarily would require a pretty serious setback to our technological standard of living, such that it wouldn't represent any improvement. in fact, a similar thing happened relatively recently as the accumulated wealth of the northeast US over the past 200 years was tapped and dispersed, large amounts of it ending up in the hands of the radical rightwing nouveau riche in the southwest, who went on to purchase the Republican party from the newly impoverished formerly wealthy northeastern conservatives' going out of business sale.
Yes and every of those companies skew their annual/quarterly reports of profits and reallocate a good portion of those recorded profits from the U.S. and say they got it from Europe or Asia where the corporate tax is a lot less.
What are you talking about? The main complaint about Apple is that they didn't "repatriate" their profit overseas. To be absolutely clear on this: Apple makes money by selling products overseas. These days more and more money is being made in Asia as markets there get bigger. Apple didn't "skew" the books as you imply. Now Apple (like every other company) has two choices when it comes to this money: 1) keep it overseas or 2) repatriate it by moving it back to the US. To do #2, they have to pay 40% taxes. So like MANY OTHER companies, they decided not to repatriate money made overseas and not pay taxes they don't have to pay. Considering that Apple (like other companies) have expenses like buildings, personnel, etc to fund, keeping it overseas is just business. But thanks for proving my point.
So what you said about establishing a small HQ for the area to deal with local formalities better is correct; but the main headline is about taxes.
Again, Apple bases their subsidiaries based on where it gives them the most tax advantages. So you missed the point.
the foreign profit question has been moot for a long time. typically a corporation's domestic and foreign enterprises are separate legal entities, even if one may own the other. as such, the foreign corporation can certainly make loans to the domestic entity of whatever amount it wishes, including but not limited to the value of any foreign profits. the domestic entity pays no taxes on this amount. whatever interest it may pay for the loan simply gets rolled into the profits of the foreign entity and and can be recycled in subsequent iterations of the process.
this is old business school thinking, has been going on since forever; suitable not just for evading domestic taxes on foreign profits, but for shuffling large sums around internationally for any reason.
I'm not sure what their reasons are. Mine used to be that I had to deal with various non-trivial levels of background noise -- turn the volume up loud enough to hear the quiet parts over that noise and the loud parts were enough to knock you over. These days, it's more that aging ears have greatly narrowed the spread between loud enough to understand and loud enough to hurt.
just add a little high freq distortion and gated white noise. http://www.aphex.com/products/... in the initial days of solid state audio, everybody was so thrilled with how much better the highs sounded compared to tube amps. then people noticed listener fatigue setting in. then the observations of high freq distortion. then the next generation of much improved amps. then repeat when digital audio becomes a thing.
One of the hacks I always wanted to do ( and still looking for parts for) is a flame speaker. I plan to do it outside maybe even in a bonfire if I can keep the wires from melting.
you can get plenty of flame speakers on the/. comments.
Not a hack, per se -- but to do tubes and wrench on 'em yourself pretty much means you're a hacker.
Beat me to it. I built a GainClone amp a few years back, and while it was impressive, something was missing. On the pure hunch that the single ended triode (SET) zealots were actually onto something, I decided to build a Tubelab SSE. Best thing I have ever built, bar none. The side-by-side comparison with my chip amp was astounding, even with the cheap Chinese 6L6VG tubes I used while shaking down the new build. The typical SET tube amp is not the best fit for ballz-to-the-wall rock or full symphony material, but Steely Dan, Diana Krall, Nora Jones, or Cowboy Junkies? Yeah, way worth the time.
you can build fine IC amps, or fine discrete transistor amps, or fine tube amps, or fine digital amps. however, the kinds of errors that occur in imperfect tube amps are less irritating than the kind of errors that occur in imperfect solid state amps, which are less irritating than the kind of errors which occur in imperfect digital amps, as a generalization. which seems to correlate with the prevalence of similar kinds of distortion in "natural" sound, as my halfbaked observation.
Guitar distortion pedals can be a cheap and easy thing to build. The simplest form is just an amp (either op-amp or single transistor) followed by clipping diodes. One potentiometer to control the voltage out of the amp stage (higher voltage means the diodes clip more, means more distortion) and another controls the output volume by dropping the signal to ground. And if the kids are the ones playing the instruments, they might enjoy the different effects that can be gained by just using one diode, or mismatching them (silicon one way, germanium the other). Any instrument can be run through a homemade one, even a microphone if someone plays non-electric instruments.
i used to fool around with that stuff, more from the electronic standpoint than the musician, so caveats. anyway, you could do some fun effects by using an opamp with a power supply that supplied too low a voltage. and/or for an amp that required positive and negative supplies relative to ground, providing asymmetric voltages. fun with clipping!
with a simple ac power cord from an old lamp, you can demonstrate that pickles fluoresce when 110 volts is applied to the ends. and as a bonus, the same setup cooks hot dogs efficiently.
i first encountered it in the late seventies, sony had a smallish radio (i don't recall that it had a cassette player; definitely no vinyl playback) which featured a big center speaker and two little side firing speakers that gave a really wide soundstage, and i was so intrigued I had to look at the schematic fo see how it was done; to my then childish mind, it was waaaay out of the box thinking.
You don't seem to understand the terms decode and encode. They are not unique and new to the digital realm. Audio / Analog encoders and decoders existed before computers. I assure you, this circuit functions as a simple analog decoder.
Vinyl at one point, if played with the correct cartridge and stylus, could reliably produce up to 45 khz, used to multiplex 4 channels (true quad, not matrixed) in the SQ system. It did (and does) have problems with warping, the need for a better turntable/pickup system than many users had to avoid quick wearout, issues with cleaning and scratching, IOW the real world. Many vinyl recordings (if you go beyond Top-40 and similar mass-market pop) do have a wide and relatively clean frequency range.
As a practical matter, the human ear filters everything below about 20 hz and above 10-20 khz (depending on age, noise exposure, and genetics). A carefully-produced CD at 16 bit/44.1 khz can reproduce everything that's audible, and a more than adequate dynamic range, without the pickiness of vinyl regarding setup and equipment quality. Production is the key - and generally requires higher sample rates and bit depths while working to allow for the vagaries of the process. Just as production quality was and is important for vinyl.
There were vinyl LPs of a pipe organ in Sydney, Australia, that has a full-sized 64' stop (bottom octave: 8-16 hz). Not sure how that was accurately recorded on tape machines with odd response artifacts at low frequencies, let alone microphones that generally didn't go that low, but it got onto the record. You can't hear it, but with the right system you can feel it. Tends to cause feedback if the turntable is in the same room as the speakers, though. CDs produced from the original tapes produce a cleaner bottom end.
when i was back there in high school, a friend's dad had a McIntosh system with big Wharfedale speakers, the kind that came with good quality English sand to fill the cabinet with because local sand might not be of comparable sonic purity.... anyway, when you pushed that setup, you would reliably find that the vinyl of that era contained sufficient lows to punish your guts until you barfed.
Slashdot Mirror
The biggest business expense isn't taxes (for the most part since they're variable), it's labor. Not just the labor to assemble parts and what not but on the supplier side too. That's where the US has the biggest issues, not to mention unions, etc. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for jobs coming back to the US and am an employer myself for a small company of 30 people. We get *slammed* for taxes (37.5 percent is what plan for all in state/feds on all "profit") even using a competent and well-respected accounting firm. Even "profit" is a lie, we keep all the "profit" in the company. So when we have a not so great year that "profit" is gone even though we've paid taxes on it and we can't spread out the loses like the big guys. So I get stuck with a $100K tax bill every year and only have a $170K salary. Sucks balls.
bottom line is, there's no logical way businesses will find it economically competitive to support first world standards of living for their employees rather than third world standards, even if the employees live here and not there, and we can whine and stamp our feet all we want but that won't fix the problem.
Out of all the babble does seem to come one gem of an idea.
Let's lower the corporate tax rate...we have "on paper" the highest in the world.
I say on paper, because the big boy corps, have enough tax attorney's and experts on payroll (whole departments in fact) to find every loophole to pay less and less, while the SMALL businesses get stuck paying the high fees and taxes.
So, let's lower it to a much lower rate, one that competes with the rest of the world, but at the same time...cut out all the deductions and loopholes. You pay x% on profits after your expenses, period.
Doing that would encourage businesses to come back to the US.
Rather than penalize, let's make it a business favorable environment to have your business on US soil, AND have US workers doing the work.
I don't think a business or a person should have a tax form longer than 1-2 pages long.
I doubt this will come about, in that it would take too much power away from congress over us all.
how can you make it favorable to have US workers doing the work without paying them wages competitive with the third world?
"A wise man speaks when he has something to say. A fool speaks when he has to say something."
an entertainer speaks whenever you give him an audience and a microphone.
It's great we live in America, which has a system designed to survive through a string of lousy presidents.
sadly, we can't survive through a string of lousy citizenries.
Trump just says stuff because he doesn't actually know how anything works. Business included. He's a complete moron who just got handed a silver spoon at birth. His apparent success should not be any indication he has a clue how anything other than bribing works in the world. He know nothing about politics, nothing about business, nothing about people, nothing about the world. He's gotten were he is simply because of money.
Sounds like every US president ever. What exactly was your point?
ironically, al gore (for instance) really does understand stuff and makes an effort to educate himself. which nets him being made fun of by people who can't imagine that a politician could actually have a vision to pave the legislative right of way for the internet, because they wouldn't, so they vote for the guy who makes it obvious that he could never have that much going on upstairs. see also "Lamar Smith, chairman of the house committee on science, space, and technology"
Trump just says stuff because he doesn't actually know how anything works. Business included. He's a complete moron who just got handed a silver spoon at birth. His apparent success should not be any indication he has a clue how anything other than bribing works in the world. He know nothing about politics, nothing about business, nothing about people, nothing about the world. He's gotten were he is simply because of money.
this is the same man who was going to call up Bill Gates to get him to shut down the bad parts of the internet
although i do take issue with your statement that he knows nothing about people. he obviously knows lots about appealing to people's illogical drives and urges.
1st gen only, after that robots will build robots (that's never had a bad ending in stories >:-) )
No problem, Capt. Kirk knows how to deal with uppity robots.
provides the logic most often used to justify offshoring and "free" international trade. However, the theory (logical as it is) is founded on a number of premises. A number of these premises held centuries ago but not so much any more. There is, notably, the premise that "factors of production" (e.g., factories and resources) cannot easily be moved. And money and credit were supposedly not conjurable at whim from nothing but government dictat. GIGO, even if the machine can run for some time on garbage and momentum.
another big factor the theory doesn't take into account (seems to me, anyway) is the malleability of public demand for goods. The far east in general demonstrated an ability to manufacture consumer goods more efficiently than the US, and so manufacturing shifted there. But that brought about a general marketing drive to peddle consumer goods never before dreamed of, causing even more demand for the foreign manufacturing, for essentially disposable whim purchases which couldn't possibly be manufactured in the US at a price that wouldn't be prohibitive.
Its effectively a disguised import tariff and the US has gone to a lot of trouble to get "free trade" agreements with many countries, or alternatively deals with minimal customs duties. He'll end up with the regulatory bodies saying that this form of tax is illegal under the agreements and the USA would have to pay a lot of compensation
one thing about import tariffs etc is the threat of retroactive actions, an economic version of mutually assured destruction. if you don't let us sell our cars in the US, then we won't let you sell your wheat in Japan. however, given that the US doesn't manufacture anything much exportable these days, and now our agricultural export business is hitting rock bottom, it may be that whoever gets into power will feel they have nothing to lose by instituting lots of import tariffs.
of course, this doesn't solve anything; unemployment will go down, wages may even go up, but the price of goods will then rise to absorb the excess. it's all just pushing the bulge in the carpet around from one corner to another. no matter how you move it around or even split it into smaller bulges, that won't make it vanish.
>> Why start with Apple?
I listen to Rush Limbaugh's show every couple of weeks and I know he's currently hawking at least two products: Donald Trump and Apple technology. By focusing on one of Rush's biggest advertisers (Apple), maybe Trump ensures he dominates Rush's show (as Rush tries to thread the needle between defending Apple and not trashing Trump) for a few more days?
(I don't think the effect of Rush's power in the primary polls can be underestimated. When he was hawking Scott Walker, Walker led in the polls. When he stopped hawking Walker, the guy dropped down to something like 1% support.)
future generations may well look back and say that in this era, the primaries and even the elections became secondary to the polls; in which case, Rush is really driving the bus.
This seems like evidence that Trump doesn't really understand macro-economics. The reason why manufacturing of consumer goods was shipped overseas is because it was discovered that we couldn't afford the consumer goods as well at higher prices to pay American workers to make the goods. Thus, we moved the manufacturing overseas to bring down the price point to something more palatable to the typical American consumer. There is a far more complex economic issue going on here. We need to peel back the layers of the onion and find out answers to some real questions:
All of these are inter-related. There are better presidential candidates to get into these details than Trump and probably less biased.
exactly. used to be, distance, oceans, etc. constituted a considerable barrier to cash flow. this allowed a considerable accumulation of wealth in north america. technology for communication and transportation has punctured large holes in the barrier and the accumulated wealth is flowing out to seek its own level, globally. you can't stop this without plugging the holes, and that's unlikely to happen voluntarily, and to happen involuntarily would require a pretty serious setback to our technological standard of living, such that it wouldn't represent any improvement.
in fact, a similar thing happened relatively recently as the accumulated wealth of the northeast US over the past 200 years was tapped and dispersed, large amounts of it ending up in the hands of the radical rightwing nouveau riche in the southwest, who went on to purchase the Republican party from the newly impoverished formerly wealthy northeastern conservatives' going out of business sale.
trump/palin 2016!
Yes and every of those companies skew their annual/quarterly reports of profits and reallocate a good portion of those recorded profits from the U.S. and say they got it from Europe or Asia where the corporate tax is a lot less.
What are you talking about? The main complaint about Apple is that they didn't "repatriate" their profit overseas. To be absolutely clear on this: Apple makes money by selling products overseas. These days more and more money is being made in Asia as markets there get bigger. Apple didn't "skew" the books as you imply. Now Apple (like every other company) has two choices when it comes to this money: 1) keep it overseas or 2) repatriate it by moving it back to the US. To do #2, they have to pay 40% taxes. So like MANY OTHER companies, they decided not to repatriate money made overseas and not pay taxes they don't have to pay. Considering that Apple (like other companies) have expenses like buildings, personnel, etc to fund, keeping it overseas is just business. But thanks for proving my point.
So what you said about establishing a small HQ for the area to deal with local formalities better is correct; but the main headline is about taxes.
Again, Apple bases their subsidiaries based on where it gives them the most tax advantages. So you missed the point.
the foreign profit question has been moot for a long time. typically a corporation's domestic and foreign enterprises are separate legal entities, even if one may own the other. as such, the foreign corporation can certainly make loans to the domestic entity of whatever amount it wishes, including but not limited to the value of any foreign profits. the domestic entity pays no taxes on this amount. whatever interest it may pay for the loan simply gets rolled into the profits of the foreign entity and and can be recycled in subsequent iterations of the process.
this is old business school thinking, has been going on since forever; suitable not just for evading domestic taxes on foreign profits, but for shuffling large sums around internationally for any reason.
When Trump starts making his own crap in the US, maybe he can be taken seriously on the issue.
I really had no idea that you could manufacture real-estate oversees and import it into the US.
Please tell me more about this!
you can certainly manufacture unsustainable debt overseas and import that. did you ever read the story of trump tower?
The man's run enough companies into bankruptcy, why not go big.
I'm not sure what their reasons are. Mine used to be that I had to deal with various non-trivial levels of background noise -- turn the volume up loud enough to hear the quiet parts over that noise and the loud parts were enough to knock you over. These days, it's more that aging ears have greatly narrowed the spread between loud enough to understand and loud enough to hurt.
just add a little high freq distortion and gated white noise. http://www.aphex.com/products/... in the initial days of solid state audio, everybody was so thrilled with how much better the highs sounded compared to tube amps. then people noticed listener fatigue setting in. then the observations of high freq distortion. then the next generation of much improved amps. then repeat when digital audio becomes a thing.
One of the hacks I always wanted to do ( and still looking for parts for) is a flame speaker. I plan to do it outside maybe even in a bonfire if I can keep the wires from melting.
you can get plenty of flame speakers on the /. comments.
Not a hack, per se -- but to do tubes and wrench on 'em yourself pretty much means you're a hacker.
Beat me to it. I built a GainClone amp a few years back, and while it was impressive, something was missing. On the pure hunch that the single ended triode (SET) zealots were actually onto something, I decided to build a Tubelab SSE. Best thing I have ever built, bar none. The side-by-side comparison with my chip amp was astounding, even with the cheap Chinese 6L6VG tubes I used while shaking down the new build. The typical SET tube amp is not the best fit for ballz-to-the-wall rock or full symphony material, but Steely Dan, Diana Krall, Nora Jones, or Cowboy Junkies? Yeah, way worth the time.
you can build fine IC amps, or fine discrete transistor amps, or fine tube amps, or fine digital amps. however, the kinds of errors that occur in imperfect tube amps are less irritating than the kind of errors that occur in imperfect solid state amps, which are less irritating than the kind of errors which occur in imperfect digital amps, as a generalization. which seems to correlate with the prevalence of similar kinds of distortion in "natural" sound, as my halfbaked observation.
Guitar distortion pedals can be a cheap and easy thing to build. The simplest form is just an amp (either op-amp or single transistor) followed by clipping diodes. One potentiometer to control the voltage out of the amp stage (higher voltage means the diodes clip more, means more distortion) and another controls the output volume by dropping the signal to ground. And if the kids are the ones playing the instruments, they might enjoy the different effects that can be gained by just using one diode, or mismatching them (silicon one way, germanium the other). Any instrument can be run through a homemade one, even a microphone if someone plays non-electric instruments.
i used to fool around with that stuff, more from the electronic standpoint than the musician, so caveats. anyway, you could do some fun effects by using an opamp with a power supply that supplied too low a voltage. and/or for an amp that required positive and negative supplies relative to ground, providing asymmetric voltages.
fun with clipping!
whoosh?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
with a simple ac power cord from an old lamp, you can demonstrate that pickles fluoresce when 110 volts is applied to the ends. and as a bonus, the same setup cooks hot dogs efficiently.
Yup. Difference matrix. Been around for years.
i first encountered it in the late seventies, sony had a smallish radio (i don't recall that it had a cassette player; definitely no vinyl playback) which featured a big center speaker and two little side firing speakers that gave a really wide soundstage, and i was so intrigued I had to look at the schematic fo see how it was done; to my then childish mind, it was waaaay out of the box thinking.
You don't seem to understand the terms decode and encode. They are not unique and new to the digital realm. Audio / Analog encoders and decoders existed before computers. I assure you, this circuit functions as a simple analog decoder.
decode is ib my node.
That's old as shit. We had a program to do that with the voicemail cards my old company made way back in the 80s.
Windows Media Player or whatever they called it had a skin that did that and one that gave the frequency spectrum.
Vinyl at one point, if played with the correct cartridge and stylus, could reliably produce up to 45 khz, used to multiplex 4 channels (true quad, not matrixed) in the SQ system. It did (and does) have problems with warping, the need for a better turntable/pickup system than many users had to avoid quick wearout, issues with cleaning and scratching, IOW the real world. Many vinyl recordings (if you go beyond Top-40 and similar mass-market pop) do have a wide and relatively clean frequency range.
As a practical matter, the human ear filters everything below about 20 hz and above 10-20 khz (depending on age, noise exposure, and genetics). A carefully-produced CD at 16 bit/44.1 khz can reproduce everything that's audible, and a more than adequate dynamic range, without the pickiness of vinyl regarding setup and equipment quality. Production is the key - and generally requires higher sample rates and bit depths while working to allow for the vagaries of the process. Just as production quality was and is important for vinyl.
There were vinyl LPs of a pipe organ in Sydney, Australia, that has a full-sized 64' stop (bottom octave: 8-16 hz). Not sure how that was accurately recorded on tape machines with odd response artifacts at low frequencies, let alone microphones that generally didn't go that low, but it got onto the record. You can't hear it, but with the right system you can feel it. Tends to cause feedback if the turntable is in the same room as the speakers, though. CDs produced from the original tapes produce a cleaner bottom end.
when i was back there in high school, a friend's dad had a McIntosh system with big Wharfedale speakers, the kind that came with good quality English sand to fill the cabinet with because local sand might not be of comparable sonic purity.... anyway, when you pushed that setup, you would reliably find that the vinyl of that era contained sufficient lows to punish your guts until you barfed.