Right. Also, if you can't move the PC, move the microphone!
If you are actually serious about professional quality, you probably want the microphone in an isolated chamber anyway, otherwise you will lose a take every time your thermostat turns on your house's furnace and/or air conditioning. A G5 fan is nothing compared to the constant drone of your home's ventilation.
If you like to sit at the computer as you record, perhaps the way to go would be one of those Wireless keyboard and mouse sets that Apple sells.
Actually, frequent listening will make your brain better at filling in the data which isn't there. For example: watching DVDs use to bother the heck out of me whenever diffuse lighting created that "layered" effect. Now I hardly ever notice it unless it's ultra-obvious (as with 2001 or some film noir movies), or I'm actively watching for it. My mind usually just interprets it as light fading to darkness now.
The better you know a subject, the more clearly you can "see" it through a dirty window.
P.S. Most of Louis Armstrong's best stuff was recorded on very harsh-sounding "clay 78s." No matter what format you play his Hot Fives and Hot Sevens singles on, it's going to sound like mush. This is another example: People who listen to a lot of live jazz have no trouble listening through all the ticks, pops, scratches, microphone clipping, bad accoustics, etc. and in their "mind's ear" can hear just how brilliant and beautiful Armstrong's recordings are. Those who don't can barely make out a fuzzy-sounding trumpet in an echo-filled hall, and wonder what all the fuss is about.
I used to think the same way as your friend, because in the 80s and early 90s there did not seem to be any chance that digital sources could sound as good as my favorite LPs.
Then I heard what good CD players can sound like, and realized that the harshness of CD audio had nothing to do with resolution, and everything to do with component makers cutting corners. Your friend might make the same discovery, if he goes to a good listening room with an open mind.
The parent to this post was modded down for being rude to the grandparent, I suppose... but the point was correct. "The Digital Sound," as we used to call it back in the 80s, turned out to be the result of poor D/A conversion, poor error correction, and amplification hardware that was tweaked to compensate the shortcomings of LPs. Like I mentioned on another audio-related thread last week, a $300 Rotel CD player connected to a modern high-end stereo will sound as good or better when compared to a $3000 air-suspended, laser-guided turntable. (Especially after the LP has been played a few dozen times.)
There is a market for MMO games. Everquest has made Sony millions and millions of dollars.
The problem is, there is not a market for dozens of subscription-based MMO games. Once somebody has already bought the game, and is already paying a subscription fee on top of their monthly Internet expenses (and in the case of Phantasy Star Online, on top of their X-Box Live account, as well), they simply don't want to shell out another $15-$20 for yet another game. If you are only playing one of these games and enjoy it, you might feel like you are getting your money's worth. But if your free time is divided between four games like this, and you are paying for each, you are now paying four times as much money for the same ammount of free time spent gaming.
For this reason, even the "hard core" gamers tend to keep no more than one or two accounts open at a time. Add to this economic fact the emergence of free MMO alternatives (like EQEmu), and the companies who were counting on soaking their customers for $1000/year in addition to the price of the game are in for bad news. If I'm playing DAOC, I'm not getting SWG and playing it at the same time. If I'm playing SWG, I'm not going to bother with EQ2.
The market has reached a saturation point. Everybody who wants to play one of these sorts of games... already is. They have friends on the servers of whatever game they are playing, and won't jump ship unless you can convince them there's something new enough and different enough to get them to drop their current account and give your game a try. Millions will be spent on MMO gaming this year, but if you want a big enough slice of that pie, you had better offer either a vastly superior game or vastly superior marketing... preferably both.
Sooner or later, somebody is going to chop them all off at the knees by offering an satifying and addicting online experience which doesn't require giving up your satelite TV service to pay for it, nor your friends and family to play it. That game, whenever it comes, will probably be the real "EQ Killer."
Put me down for a dime on the logo to win. Clippy is a scrawny little wuss, and nothing that ever went up against the mighty Windows Logo ever won. Just ask Netscape.
Nah... They have prior art on use of the word. If I had a dollar for every time Windows XP had to be "reloaded" in my office, I would be as rich as a Microsoft board member.
The sad thing is, for killing an iPod, it was a wasted opportunity. Everybody already knew that they contained a battery, 32 MB of RAM, and a small HD.
If you are going to kill an iPod just to show how '1337 you are, please do something useful: Reverse engineer the iPod Docking Connector!
I really want to know what all the pin-outs are on that thing. For example, I'm convinced that some of them double the functions of the remote-control interface on the top of the iPod, but I don't want to send current through random pins on the base of my preciousssssss just to figure it out. A lot of us would like to build our own iPod accessories, but need the data from such an experiment to do it. (Apple will not tell you jack if you are not Belkin Technology, Inc. I'm far from the only one who has asked and been shot down.)
The reason is that Flash and a HD would be redundant.
Flash for fast access and portablity, HD for large volumes of data. Two purposes, two technologies. No redundancy there.
Furthermore, Microsoft has basically stated there will be no hard drive
If by "basically" you mean "not", then yes. They have implied that they are considering it, but all discussion of the specs of the new X-Box is pure speculation, beyond two things we know for sure: 1. ATI instead of nVidia. 2. IBM instead of Intel.
Third, manufacturers with lots more hardware to sell and smaller margins, such as Dell, do not have such restrictive policies.
Ahem. From Dell's web site (bold emphasis added by me):
All new hardware, accessories, parts, and unopened software still in its sealed package, excluding the products listed below, may be returned within thirty (30) days from the date on the packing slip or invoice. New n-series with FreeDOSTM products and PowerEdge SC servers purchased from the Small and Medium Business Sales Division may be returned within fourteen (14) days from the date on the packing slip or invoice. To return applications software or an operating system that has been installed by Dell, you must return the entire computer.
A different return policy applies to nondefective products purchased through Dell's Software and Peripherals division by customers of our Small and Medium Business divisions. Those products may be returned within thirty days from the date on the packing slip or invoice, but a fifteen percent (15%) return fee will be deducted from any refund or credit. The "Total Satisfaction" Return Policy and Software and Peripherals division return policy are not available for Dell/EMC storage products, EMC-branded products, Unisys-branded products, PowerVaultTM 160T tape libraries or enterprise software.
Timeshifting talk radio has got to be one of the dumbest ideas I've ever heard of anyway. The purpose of talk radio is to provide banter to avoid boredom while you are driving and don't feel like listening to music. Here's the thing, though... it's always on. Turn on a radio in any metro area at any time of the day, and you can hear some jackass talking. There isn't really even a difference between them anymore, because they all read the same stories off Drudge Report (if it's a political show) or News of the Weird (if it's a lighter show). The callers on these shows add no real insight either, because they just repeat whatever additional spin they recently picked up from Nightline or Newsweek Magazine as if it was their own thoughts and observations. The only exceptions are NPR and sports talk... neither of which are really worth recording.
Using a PVR for talk radio makes about as much sense as printing hard copies of Slashdot discussions.
What surprises me is that in all this hype and speculation, very few are even considering the possibility that the new X-Box will have flash memory and a hard drive.
The HD is one of the best things about the X-Box, and it will be an absolute requirement if M$ wants to use the new X-Box to get back into the PVR game, which they have occasionally indicated they want to do.
P.S. Yes, I abbreviated Microsoft with a dollar sign, in spite of loud howls about how l4m3 it is from a handful of dickwads on Slashdot in recent months. It was funny 10 years ago, and it's still funny now. Get over it, you astroturfing M$ zealots.
OS X was included as a promotional gift with the G4 at no additional cost. Your refund for $0.00 will automatically be transferred to your bank account. They don't even need your bank or routing number. Enjoy!
A large batch of iBooks from a while back had a chronic problem which frequently required a motherboard replacement after about 9-15 months. Mine failed with a month left on the standard warranty, but many iBook owners were not so lucky, and found themselves stuck with a repair bill that cost hundreds. (It usually made its presense felt as a problem with the video.)
Apple recently acknowledged that it was indeed a design flaw, and responded by extending the warranty on the motherboard only (not the whole system) for an additional two years, as well as offering to pay back those who replaced mobos out of their own pocket.
If you've purchased an iBook in recent weeks, it is probably not one of the models with this problem, and so does it have the extended coverage. You can just go on with your life (Although, at $300, the extended 3-Year AppleCare warrantee makes a lot of sense. Laptops can take a lot of abuse over a three-year period.)
Clipping is not a problem specific to the CD format. Clipping comes from the studio monkeys running the sound too hot for their own boards. This is not done by accident... songs that sound "louder" on the radio tend to sell better, so studios compress the hell out of the sound and cram as much of it near peak output as they possibly can. Rush's "Vapor Trails" album is a tragic example. Everything, including the vocals, sounds like it's being played through a 10W amplifier at full volume. (Too bad, because muscially, it's probably their best album in the last decade or so.)
The "problem" with CD's is the 44.1 K sample rate. A 22KHz sound wave only gets represented by two bits, and with many of the crappy early digital encoders from the 80s, it might not even be sampled from alternate peaks of the wave.
Of course, the typical American geek's hearing pretty much ends around 16 KHz (at best), so you could do as CD zealots do, and insist that anything above that frequency doesn't really matter... except it does, because of the way it colors overtones, which are what gives most sounds their timbre. If you put a typical music-lover in a booth and make them listen to a double-blind test between a live microphone feed of a singer with piano accompaniment, and the same live feed where everything above, oh... say 17 KHz is filtered out, they will spot the difference.
However, most of people's concerns about the compromise of "the digital sound" turned out to be unfounded. Early CD players (and some of the cheaper ones today) sounded too bright and tinny as a result of inferior D/A conversion algorhythms.
When an LP is "cut", the low-frequency waves are dialed way down in amplitude, because otherwise you would have a grove that moves outside the stylus's range of motion! A pre-amp in the turntable (based on an industry standard established by the RIAA) boosts the bass back up again. Unfortunately, this electronic equalization results in massive, boomy, slightly unnatrual bass. Through the 70s, the stereos which did the best job of tweaking LP sources to sound natural gained the reputation of being the best playback equipment. Listening to a good-condition LP on a top-notch 70s "hi-fi" stereo is an extremely rewarding experience.
When CD players arrived in the early 80s, the same stereos that played back LP recordings with a "warm, rich" sounded bright, harsh, and shrill when playing back the same recordings on CD.
Over the years, better logic, better error-correction, and better playback components (as well as better digital encoding in studios) have all resulted in CD's that sound every bit as good as LP's.
In the late 80s and early 90s I was a total LP bigot, but to not change my position these days would be ignoring the evidence given by my own ears. Hearing "Dark Side of the Moon" on a $300 Rotel CD player through high-quality speakers is every bit as satisfying as hearing the LP on a $4000 air-baring, laser-guided turntable, if not more so.
So yea, CD's are not a bad compromise at all.
However, 99% of the time I'm listening to music, it's either on a portable player, in my car, or at my computer desk. In those environments, AAC is not only good enough, it's very difficult to notice the difference between it and the CD.
The reason why separate leagues for women is the more popular option for almost every event is because the men who do not qualify for the best leagues don't like getting beat by women. Give them their own league, and crappy male players can have their "C" and "D" league tournaments without ever having to acknowledge that there are women out there who can show them up.
This sort of machismo is mostly absent from modern Western society, but has been slowest to evaporate in the world of sports. A good example is men's fastpitch softball: The sport is slowly dying in the US because of a lack of pitchers, but there are plenty of female former college players who throw well enough to play on C or B amateur softball league... However, bringing such pitchers on to teams is extremely rare, even though the rules do not prohibit it, largely because of the attitude that becoming a "co-ed" league rather than a "mens" league implies a lower level of competition.
Slashdot Mirror
If you are actually serious about professional quality, you probably want the microphone in an isolated chamber anyway, otherwise you will lose a take every time your thermostat turns on your house's furnace and/or air conditioning. A G5 fan is nothing compared to the constant drone of your home's ventilation.
If you like to sit at the computer as you record, perhaps the way to go would be one of those Wireless keyboard and mouse sets that Apple sells.
The better you know a subject, the more clearly you can "see" it through a dirty window.
P.S. Most of Louis Armstrong's best stuff was recorded on very harsh-sounding "clay 78s." No matter what format you play his Hot Fives and Hot Sevens singles on, it's going to sound like mush. This is another example: People who listen to a lot of live jazz have no trouble listening through all the ticks, pops, scratches, microphone clipping, bad accoustics, etc. and in their "mind's ear" can hear just how brilliant and beautiful Armstrong's recordings are. Those who don't can barely make out a fuzzy-sounding trumpet in an echo-filled hall, and wonder what all the fuss is about.
Then I heard what good CD players can sound like, and realized that the harshness of CD audio had nothing to do with resolution, and everything to do with component makers cutting corners. Your friend might make the same discovery, if he goes to a good listening room with an open mind.
The parent to this post was modded down for being rude to the grandparent, I suppose... but the point was correct. "The Digital Sound," as we used to call it back in the 80s, turned out to be the result of poor D/A conversion, poor error correction, and amplification hardware that was tweaked to compensate the shortcomings of LPs. Like I mentioned on another audio-related thread last week, a $300 Rotel CD player connected to a modern high-end stereo will sound as good or better when compared to a $3000 air-suspended, laser-guided turntable. (Especially after the LP has been played a few dozen times.)
Yea, but nobody knows how the fuck you're supposed to pronounce it!
The problem is, there is not a market for dozens of subscription-based MMO games. Once somebody has already bought the game, and is already paying a subscription fee on top of their monthly Internet expenses (and in the case of Phantasy Star Online, on top of their X-Box Live account, as well), they simply don't want to shell out another $15-$20 for yet another game. If you are only playing one of these games and enjoy it, you might feel like you are getting your money's worth. But if your free time is divided between four games like this, and you are paying for each, you are now paying four times as much money for the same ammount of free time spent gaming.
For this reason, even the "hard core" gamers tend to keep no more than one or two accounts open at a time. Add to this economic fact the emergence of free MMO alternatives (like EQEmu), and the companies who were counting on soaking their customers for $1000/year in addition to the price of the game are in for bad news. If I'm playing DAOC, I'm not getting SWG and playing it at the same time. If I'm playing SWG, I'm not going to bother with EQ2.
The market has reached a saturation point. Everybody who wants to play one of these sorts of games... already is. They have friends on the servers of whatever game they are playing, and won't jump ship unless you can convince them there's something new enough and different enough to get them to drop their current account and give your game a try. Millions will be spent on MMO gaming this year, but if you want a big enough slice of that pie, you had better offer either a vastly superior game or vastly superior marketing... preferably both.
Sooner or later, somebody is going to chop them all off at the knees by offering an satifying and addicting online experience which doesn't require giving up your satelite TV service to pay for it, nor your friends and family to play it. That game, whenever it comes, will probably be the real "EQ Killer."
Character assassination!? Dude, you need to lighten up.
And yes, that is the exact e-mail address I sent to.
Neither of those fights are over.
Put me down for a dime on the logo to win. Clippy is a scrawny little wuss, and nothing that ever went up against the mighty Windows Logo ever won. Just ask Netscape.
Nah... They have prior art on use of the word. If I had a dollar for every time Windows XP had to be "reloaded" in my office, I would be as rich as a Microsoft board member.
If you are going to kill an iPod just to show how '1337 you are, please do something useful: Reverse engineer the iPod Docking Connector!
I really want to know what all the pin-outs are on that thing. For example, I'm convinced that some of them double the functions of the remote-control interface on the top of the iPod, but I don't want to send current through random pins on the base of my preciousssssss just to figure it out. A lot of us would like to build our own iPod accessories, but need the data from such an experiment to do it. (Apple will not tell you jack if you are not Belkin Technology, Inc. I'm far from the only one who has asked and been shot down.)
My point, which is correct, is that you were full of crap when you said that other manufactures do not have restrictive policies at all.
Flash for fast access and portablity, HD for large volumes of data. Two purposes, two technologies. No redundancy there.
Furthermore, Microsoft has basically stated there will be no hard drive
If by "basically" you mean "not", then yes. They have implied that they are considering it, but all discussion of the specs of the new X-Box is pure speculation, beyond two things we know for sure: 1. ATI instead of nVidia. 2. IBM instead of Intel.
Ahem. From Dell's web site (bold emphasis added by me):
Using a PVR for talk radio makes about as much sense as printing hard copies of Slashdot discussions.
The HD is one of the best things about the X-Box, and it will be an absolute requirement if M$ wants to use the new X-Box to get back into the PVR game, which they have occasionally indicated they want to do.
P.S. Yes, I abbreviated Microsoft with a dollar sign, in spite of loud howls about how l4m3 it is from a handful of dickwads on Slashdot in recent months. It was funny 10 years ago, and it's still funny now. Get over it, you astroturfing M$ zealots.
Correct. However, since the fact that he voted for it is a matter of public record, there is no need for conclusions to be drawn.
OS X was included as a promotional gift with the G4 at no additional cost. Your refund for $0.00 will automatically be transferred to your bank account. They don't even need your bank or routing number. Enjoy!
Apple recently acknowledged that it was indeed a design flaw, and responded by extending the warranty on the motherboard only (not the whole system) for an additional two years, as well as offering to pay back those who replaced mobos out of their own pocket.
If you've purchased an iBook in recent weeks, it is probably not one of the models with this problem, and so does it have the extended coverage. You can just go on with your life (Although, at $300, the extended 3-Year AppleCare warrantee makes a lot of sense. Laptops can take a lot of abuse over a three-year period.)
All caught up now?
That article speaks speficically about the Rush album I referenced in my post, but is a pretty good indicator of the trend.
Ultra-compressed, clipped-at-the-pinout-level songs sometimes actually end up sounding quieter on playback systems which regulate the volume.
One notable exception: The follow-up to "Dead Or Alive 3" was named "Dead or Alive: eXtreme Beach Volleyball" and it was a masterpiece.
But then again, my opinion might be shaded by the fact that I'm a dirty old man.
The "problem" with CD's is the 44.1 K sample rate. A 22KHz sound wave only gets represented by two bits, and with many of the crappy early digital encoders from the 80s, it might not even be sampled from alternate peaks of the wave.
Of course, the typical American geek's hearing pretty much ends around 16 KHz (at best), so you could do as CD zealots do, and insist that anything above that frequency doesn't really matter... except it does, because of the way it colors overtones, which are what gives most sounds their timbre. If you put a typical music-lover in a booth and make them listen to a double-blind test between a live microphone feed of a singer with piano accompaniment, and the same live feed where everything above, oh... say 17 KHz is filtered out, they will spot the difference.
However, most of people's concerns about the compromise of "the digital sound" turned out to be unfounded. Early CD players (and some of the cheaper ones today) sounded too bright and tinny as a result of inferior D/A conversion algorhythms.
When an LP is "cut", the low-frequency waves are dialed way down in amplitude, because otherwise you would have a grove that moves outside the stylus's range of motion! A pre-amp in the turntable (based on an industry standard established by the RIAA) boosts the bass back up again. Unfortunately, this electronic equalization results in massive, boomy, slightly unnatrual bass. Through the 70s, the stereos which did the best job of tweaking LP sources to sound natural gained the reputation of being the best playback equipment. Listening to a good-condition LP on a top-notch 70s "hi-fi" stereo is an extremely rewarding experience.
When CD players arrived in the early 80s, the same stereos that played back LP recordings with a "warm, rich" sounded bright, harsh, and shrill when playing back the same recordings on CD.
Over the years, better logic, better error-correction, and better playback components (as well as better digital encoding in studios) have all resulted in CD's that sound every bit as good as LP's.
In the late 80s and early 90s I was a total LP bigot, but to not change my position these days would be ignoring the evidence given by my own ears. Hearing "Dark Side of the Moon" on a $300 Rotel CD player through high-quality speakers is every bit as satisfying as hearing the LP on a $4000 air-baring, laser-guided turntable, if not more so.
So yea, CD's are not a bad compromise at all.
However, 99% of the time I'm listening to music, it's either on a portable player, in my car, or at my computer desk. In those environments, AAC is not only good enough, it's very difficult to notice the difference between it and the CD.
This sort of machismo is mostly absent from modern Western society, but has been slowest to evaporate in the world of sports. A good example is men's fastpitch softball: The sport is slowly dying in the US because of a lack of pitchers, but there are plenty of female former college players who throw well enough to play on C or B amateur softball league... However, bringing such pitchers on to teams is extremely rare, even though the rules do not prohibit it, largely because of the attitude that becoming a "co-ed" league rather than a "mens" league implies a lower level of competition.