I learned that the kind of insane balkanization of consumer products that we see with gaming consoles is spreading to other areas. That the us vs. them rhetoric that was once only found in the realms of religion and politics is now bleeding into online flame wars about which corporate-backed digital movie format is better.
Every time there's an article about Blu-Ray someone always trots out the point that Blu-ray is not, in fact, Sony's, but is actually from a larger group of manufacturers and media companies.
Well, yes, there are a lot of members, but Blu-ray is still Sony's. They not only have the most invested in Blu-ray, they have the most to gain:
1) They developed the hardware platform entirely on their own and gain royalties from the format's sales 2) The success or failure of their gaming console is tied inexorably to the success or failure of the format 3) The decision to splinter off from the DVD Consortium, following the DVD Consortium's choice of HD-DVD as the next format (supposedly chosen because it would be ready sooner), was entirely theirs. Broader industry support came after that decision, and was reportedly driven by studio fear of Microsoft. Without Sony, there's no format war.
There's a very very good reason that people associate this format with Sony - it's their format, it's just supported by other people. Lots of people support the CD format but that doesn't make it any less Sony / Phillips' format.
You're not talking 44K vs 96K like you were with CD vs. DVD-Audio.
With DVD vs. HD-DVD / Blu-Ray you're talking lossy Dolby Digital (roughtly equivalent to a 96kbps mp3 per channel) vs. lossless 5 channel (either via LPCM, MLP, or the DTS and Dolby Digital lossless formats).
If you'd take your fanboy goggles off for even a minute you'd see that all 3 consoles bring something new to the table. Massive disc storage, downloadable games / content, note-perfect online capabilities, achievements, motion sensing controls, wireless everything, user chosen music, and hardware so advanced that it enables gameplay in ways that were previously limited by technology (i.e. massive streaming worlds, online coop throughout the entire game, complex physics).
Being pedantic about next-gen versus current-gen is indeed ridiculous. Assigning the title arbitrarily is even worse.
I usually only game about 3 or 4 hours per week. I got Mass Effect about 2 weeks ago and have already put in nearly 30 hours.
It's pretty rare that I bother to "savor" a game - but that's exactly what I'm doing. I know I'm about to go to the last planet, so I'm running around completely all the side quests first. They're definitely weaker than the core missions, but it's nice to have some extra bit of world to immerse yourself in.
I swear that this is exactly the same thing that Metal Gear: Portable Ops does. I haven't played it so I can't say for sure, but it sounds the same to me.
I've heard ghosting was a problem with the launch PSPs. The PSP I got in April doesn't have any ghosting at all.
Memory capacity isn't really a burden anymore either - I got a 4GB memory stick for $30 a few months ago. That's plenty of space for some high-bitrate movies.
Now the GTA games aren't very good for the PSP, but that's not really the PSP's fault.
In this scenario, they're responsible for all the marketing, recording, and distribution costs. In the scenario where they're getting $2/album they don't have to foot any of those bills.
I'm pretty sure that market forces drive companies in the opposite direction of what you're indicating... they drive companies to use the lowest quality components that they can get away with, while charging as much as the market will allow.
But, I'm going to go with the notion that your post is a joke. Otherwise my head would explode.
There's no sense in even trying to defend cables on Slashdot.
There's a lot of groupthink that goes on with both sides of the debate. Audiophiles are guilty of buying into a lot of silly myths, and using bad methodology to determine quality. But the anti-audiophile crowd is just as guilty, condemning the science on the whole because some bad companies sell snake oil, condemning audiophiles as a whole because some of them are ridiculous cartoons who buy $300 wooden knobs because they think their stereo will sound better.
Most of all they look at studies that ask the question, "Can everyone hear the difference?" and assume that they answer the question, "Can anyone hear the difference?" There's a big difference between those two questions.
The fact is that analog cables measurably influence the waveform that passes over them. PCM jitter measurably influences the waveform that the DAC produces (assuming the DAC doesn't reclock of course). Can everyone hear the differences between these things? Probably not. Can anyone? The answer is yes but it takes a trained ear.
It certainly doesn't help when people are insisting that HDMI cables can make a "huge" difference, or to have companies like Monster peddling overpriced lamp cable, or to have audiophiles perpetuating bad myths about themselves and their hobby. But to judge the hobby as a whole because of percentage of quacks is a compositional fallacy.
If you have a huge cavernous room, a satellite and sub setup isn't going to work for you. A small driver simply isn't physically capable of moving enough air to fill up that room with sound.
The sound of speakers varies greatly based on the size and shape of a room. If at all possible, do home trials of the speakers you're thinking about buying (most locally owned audio retailers will let you do this), or at least listen to them in a comparably sized room, at a similar distance to what you'll be listening to them in your home.
There's nothing even remotely "reference" level about anything suggested here. Their suggestion for speakers, as mentioned elsewhere, is very poor (Polk? Really?) given that there's much better stuff available from great companies like PSB, Paradigm, and NHT.
That they top it off with a $400 receiver, and completely dodge the notion of getting into separates (other than to say that it's complicated and they haven't really listened to anything), makes it lose all credibility. The cable and power conditioning sections are a joke - they steadfastly refuse to entertain any alternatives to Monster Cable (hint: almost all the alternatives are better values for the money; just because you can get Monster Cable on sale doesn't make it a good value - their markup tends to be 3x-4x that of other cable manufacturers).
I get the feeling that they've listened to a handful of mass market pieces and decided to just suggest whatever crap it was they bought. As mentioned elsewhere, they don't even touch on room acoustics and setup factors, which can greatly influence the end results.
In short these guys don't know anything more about setting up a reference level home theater than your average Best Buy salesperson. Given their selection of brands, that's probably what they are in fact.
For starters, a majority of movie reviewers use a 1-4 or 1-5 star rating. This is good because it gets rid of the silly micro-comparisons you see with games. "Oh you gave Halo 3 a 92 and Metroid Prime 3 an 89 - Halo 3 is obviously the better game!" On a 4 or 5 star system they get the same score.
More importantly is the author's contention that we're grading games as products, not art. How many movie reviewers give separate scores to the special effects, audio quality, and re-watchability of a movie? Sure there's some exceptions (usually formate-driven enthusiast sites) but the vast majority score the value of the piece, not the value of the package.
This is nonscientific listening, which is still listening - a lot more than a lot of the people who insist there's no difference have done.
Mostly it's from comparing the redbook cd side of a dualdisc to its DVD-audio counterpart, or comparing the SACD layer to the redbook layer on the same disc, or, most tellingly, downsampling my own recordings.
Obviously double blind tests are best, but those take a lot of time and energy and after this many years of comparative listening (including double blind tests) I trust my ears.
The problem with studies like the one you mention above is that they tend to use random people off the street. I'd be more interested in studies with people who have trained ears - I'm fully aware after seeing millions of people buy Bose and use the iPod earphones that your average Joe doesn't care about sound quality; the question isn't "can everyone hear the difference" it's "can anyone."
Snobbery aside, a 96k or 192k stereo recording sounds so much better than a redbook cd that it's patently obvious to almost any listener who cares to sit down and try it.
To my ear 96k and up recordings are indistinguishable from analog, this as someone with no vested interest in the different formats, who has spent a lot of time in the booth and listening to a wide array of high end stereos.
Why would MS ever splinter their user base by allowing games to come out in HD-DVD? It makes no business sense whatsoever and will never happen.
This model would be sold to home theater enthusiasts as an all-in-one solution for HD, gaming and downloadable content. Suggesting that the HD-DVD drive would be used for gaming is FUD plain and simple.
Without the label advertising for them, it's possible they will sell fewer copies. Nonetheless, any advertising costs will be incurred by the band itself, which comes out of their bottom line.
Plus they paid for the recording themselves, where normally the label will pay for the studio time.
They may gross more, but there's a lot more cost involved when you DIY.
In this case, they probably got away without advertising - the buzz generated by the news stories did that job for them (though the PR work of getting that message out probably wasn't free). That's why it was so clever that they announced the "Pay what you want" model so close to the release date. But that's not sustainable - for each ensuing release, it won't really be a news story anymore - and they'll probably need to incur an increasing amount of PR and advertising costs to get the word out.
Man, people are so hype sensitive
on
BioShock Review
·
· Score: 1
A game can't have any combination of hype, good reviews, and positive buzz without the droves of internet hardcore gamers getting sand in their collective vaginas about it and going off about how it's "overhyped".
Overhyped, underhyped - it's the same game when you're playing it.
If a game like Bioshock - and its subsequent success - doesn't make you glad to be a gamer, then nothing will. Whether or not you even enjoy the game, it's easy to see how most would - and it's exactly the kind of original, thought-provoking game that doesn't get made these days.
Slashdot Mirror
I learned that the kind of insane balkanization of consumer products that we see with gaming consoles is spreading to other areas. That the us vs. them rhetoric that was once only found in the realms of religion and politics is now bleeding into online flame wars about which corporate-backed digital movie format is better.
Every time there's an article about Blu-Ray someone always trots out the point that Blu-ray is not, in fact, Sony's, but is actually from a larger group of manufacturers and media companies.
Well, yes, there are a lot of members, but Blu-ray is still Sony's. They not only have the most invested in Blu-ray, they have the most to gain:
1) They developed the hardware platform entirely on their own and gain royalties from the format's sales
2) The success or failure of their gaming console is tied inexorably to the success or failure of the format
3) The decision to splinter off from the DVD Consortium, following the DVD Consortium's choice of HD-DVD as the next format (supposedly chosen because it would be ready sooner), was entirely theirs. Broader industry support came after that decision, and was reportedly driven by studio fear of Microsoft. Without Sony, there's no format war.
There's a very very good reason that people associate this format with Sony - it's their format, it's just supported by other people. Lots of people support the CD format but that doesn't make it any less Sony / Phillips' format.
If it turns out this letter is politically inconvenient for him later, he'll just claim it was ghost written.
You're not talking 44K vs 96K like you were with CD vs. DVD-Audio.
With DVD vs. HD-DVD / Blu-Ray you're talking lossy Dolby Digital (roughtly equivalent to a 96kbps mp3 per channel) vs. lossless 5 channel (either via LPCM, MLP, or the DTS and Dolby Digital lossless formats).
There's a huge difference there.
If you'd take your fanboy goggles off for even a minute you'd see that all 3 consoles bring something new to the table. Massive disc storage, downloadable games / content, note-perfect online capabilities, achievements, motion sensing controls, wireless everything, user chosen music, and hardware so advanced that it enables gameplay in ways that were previously limited by technology (i.e. massive streaming worlds, online coop throughout the entire game, complex physics).
Being pedantic about next-gen versus current-gen is indeed ridiculous. Assigning the title arbitrarily is even worse.
I usually only game about 3 or 4 hours per week. I got Mass Effect about 2 weeks ago and have already put in nearly 30 hours.
It's pretty rare that I bother to "savor" a game - but that's exactly what I'm doing. I know I'm about to go to the last planet, so I'm running around completely all the side quests first. They're definitely weaker than the core missions, but it's nice to have some extra bit of world to immerse yourself in.
I swear that this is exactly the same thing that Metal Gear: Portable Ops does. I haven't played it so I can't say for sure, but it sounds the same to me.
I've heard ghosting was a problem with the launch PSPs. The PSP I got in April doesn't have any ghosting at all.
Memory capacity isn't really a burden anymore either - I got a 4GB memory stick for $30 a few months ago. That's plenty of space for some high-bitrate movies.
Now the GTA games aren't very good for the PSP, but that's not really the PSP's fault.
Soap opera writers have been breaking away from the union and crossing the picket line.
The union's fight is not their fight - soap operas don't sell DVD's or get watched online.
Etymotics and the like are considered "in-ear monitors" not ear buds.
Very few high end cables have gold plated connectors. Most are silver or OFC copper.
I think you're confusing the reaction of the great unwashed with the high end audiophile.
He took intellectual property. I thought on Slashdot that wasn't considered theft?
If you like SRPG's then you should really check out Jeanne D'arc - it's a deeper Fire Emblem with a fantastic story.
Also, Disagea would probably be a no-brainer for you.
In this scenario, they're responsible for all the marketing, recording, and distribution costs. In the scenario where they're getting $2/album they don't have to foot any of those bills.
That's... a joke, right?
I'm pretty sure that market forces drive companies in the opposite direction of what you're indicating... they drive companies to use the lowest quality components that they can get away with, while charging as much as the market will allow.
But, I'm going to go with the notion that your post is a joke. Otherwise my head would explode.
There's no sense in even trying to defend cables on Slashdot.
There's a lot of groupthink that goes on with both sides of the debate. Audiophiles are guilty of buying into a lot of silly myths, and using bad methodology to determine quality. But the anti-audiophile crowd is just as guilty, condemning the science on the whole because some bad companies sell snake oil, condemning audiophiles as a whole because some of them are ridiculous cartoons who buy $300 wooden knobs because they think their stereo will sound better.
Most of all they look at studies that ask the question, "Can everyone hear the difference?" and assume that they answer the question, "Can anyone hear the difference?" There's a big difference between those two questions.
The fact is that analog cables measurably influence the waveform that passes over them. PCM jitter measurably influences the waveform that the DAC produces (assuming the DAC doesn't reclock of course). Can everyone hear the differences between these things? Probably not. Can anyone? The answer is yes but it takes a trained ear.
It certainly doesn't help when people are insisting that HDMI cables can make a "huge" difference, or to have companies like Monster peddling overpriced lamp cable, or to have audiophiles perpetuating bad myths about themselves and their hobby. But to judge the hobby as a whole because of percentage of quacks is a compositional fallacy.
As a smug audiophile, I can tell you that it costs a lot more than this to get.
If you have a huge cavernous room, a satellite and sub setup isn't going to work for you. A small driver simply isn't physically capable of moving enough air to fill up that room with sound.
The sound of speakers varies greatly based on the size and shape of a room. If at all possible, do home trials of the speakers you're thinking about buying (most locally owned audio retailers will let you do this), or at least listen to them in a comparably sized room, at a similar distance to what you'll be listening to them in your home.
There's nothing even remotely "reference" level about anything suggested here. Their suggestion for speakers, as mentioned elsewhere, is very poor (Polk? Really?) given that there's much better stuff available from great companies like PSB, Paradigm, and NHT.
That they top it off with a $400 receiver, and completely dodge the notion of getting into separates (other than to say that it's complicated and they haven't really listened to anything), makes it lose all credibility. The cable and power conditioning sections are a joke - they steadfastly refuse to entertain any alternatives to Monster Cable (hint: almost all the alternatives are better values for the money; just because you can get Monster Cable on sale doesn't make it a good value - their markup tends to be 3x-4x that of other cable manufacturers).
I get the feeling that they've listened to a handful of mass market pieces and decided to just suggest whatever crap it was they bought. As mentioned elsewhere, they don't even touch on room acoustics and setup factors, which can greatly influence the end results.
In short these guys don't know anything more about setting up a reference level home theater than your average Best Buy salesperson. Given their selection of brands, that's probably what they are in fact.
For starters, a majority of movie reviewers use a 1-4 or 1-5 star rating. This is good because it gets rid of the silly micro-comparisons you see with games. "Oh you gave Halo 3 a 92 and Metroid Prime 3 an 89 - Halo 3 is obviously the better game!" On a 4 or 5 star system they get the same score.
More importantly is the author's contention that we're grading games as products, not art. How many movie reviewers give separate scores to the special effects, audio quality, and re-watchability of a movie? Sure there's some exceptions (usually formate-driven enthusiast sites) but the vast majority score the value of the piece, not the value of the package.
This is nonscientific listening, which is still listening - a lot more than a lot of the people who insist there's no difference have done.
Mostly it's from comparing the redbook cd side of a dualdisc to its DVD-audio counterpart, or comparing the SACD layer to the redbook layer on the same disc, or, most tellingly, downsampling my own recordings.
Obviously double blind tests are best, but those take a lot of time and energy and after this many years of comparative listening (including double blind tests) I trust my ears.
The problem with studies like the one you mention above is that they tend to use random people off the street. I'd be more interested in studies with people who have trained ears - I'm fully aware after seeing millions of people buy Bose and use the iPod earphones that your average Joe doesn't care about sound quality; the question isn't "can everyone hear the difference" it's "can anyone."
Snobbery aside, a 96k or 192k stereo recording sounds so much better than a redbook cd that it's patently obvious to almost any listener who cares to sit down and try it.
To my ear 96k and up recordings are indistinguishable from analog, this as someone with no vested interest in the different formats, who has spent a lot of time in the booth and listening to a wide array of high end stereos.
Why would MS ever splinter their user base by allowing games to come out in HD-DVD? It makes no business sense whatsoever and will never happen.
This model would be sold to home theater enthusiasts as an all-in-one solution for HD, gaming and downloadable content. Suggesting that the HD-DVD drive would be used for gaming is FUD plain and simple.
Your very simple math is overly simple.
Without the label advertising for them, it's possible they will sell fewer copies. Nonetheless, any advertising costs will be incurred by the band itself, which comes out of their bottom line.
Plus they paid for the recording themselves, where normally the label will pay for the studio time.
They may gross more, but there's a lot more cost involved when you DIY.
In this case, they probably got away without advertising - the buzz generated by the news stories did that job for them (though the PR work of getting that message out probably wasn't free). That's why it was so clever that they announced the "Pay what you want" model so close to the release date. But that's not sustainable - for each ensuing release, it won't really be a news story anymore - and they'll probably need to incur an increasing amount of PR and advertising costs to get the word out.
A game can't have any combination of hype, good reviews, and positive buzz without the droves of internet hardcore gamers getting sand in their collective vaginas about it and going off about how it's "overhyped".
Overhyped, underhyped - it's the same game when you're playing it.
If a game like Bioshock - and its subsequent success - doesn't make you glad to be a gamer, then nothing will. Whether or not you even enjoy the game, it's easy to see how most would - and it's exactly the kind of original, thought-provoking game that doesn't get made these days.