"supply and demand works great, and a company wants to charge a customer their maximum they're willing to pay"
But supply and demand doesn't apply in a situation where there is infinite supply - and it costs AMS the same amount of bandwidth to upload ANY file of the same size.
Absolutely true. Hopefully, when we FINALLY switch over to the Euro it may become sensible for more of the world's internationally traded commodities to be priced in Euros, and we can finally start to turn the cheap-living tables on those damned Yankees. THE US economy is given an ENORMOUS boost by all of the foreign exchange others are forced to give it in exchange for the Dollars they need to buy stuff - it's time this shit stopped.
I say YOUR election because I'm British. Viewed from abroad, YOUR election looked like a completely undemocratic farce, we can never understand why you Americans show such exaggerated respect for your president, seemingly irrespective of the quality of HIS intellect or character. Bill Clinton, despite his understandable penchant for blowjobs from young women, didn't strike me as an alcoholic, oil rich draft dodging idiot son of a journeyman president - yet it seems he was crucified in the states for his character flaws while the US economy scaled heights never seen before. Pretty strange.
If that's true, it's not much of a preview, is it? Anyway, I live in the UK so I won't be using the AMS anyway - can't say I was much impressed with their selection, either (though the store seemed snappily responsive and nicely designed). I usually pay around £10 for my discs ($15?) and I don't consider that to be excessive - many retailers in the UK will, however, gladly charge you £15.99 for a disc if you're dumb enough to pay it.
but you get an UNCOMPRESSED version if you buy from Amazon you dolt. I listened to some of the previews at the AMS, I WASN'T impressed by the quality - my home ripped, 256kbps mp3s sound a hell of a lot better.
"Once upon a time, MS asked Apple to cede the authoring market for digital media in return for keeping playback."
It was the other way around - MS proposed that Apple could have authoring and MS would do playback - Apple told them to fuck off and MS has been trying to kill QT ever since.
obviously, headphones have a real weakness in that they are dependent on a good headphone amplifier to drive them, and these are rarer than hens' teeth. They also, of course, can suffer from poor 'staging' when compared with good loudspeakers, though Stax and - to a lesser extent - Sony have long tried to alleviate this problem a little by presenting their drivers 'forward' of the ear rather that 'straight at' the ear. Headphones have these massive advantages over 'speakers a) transient response - due to their very low mass and ultra low energy storage, not even electrostatic 'speakers compete b) phase coherence - again, electrostatics are the next best c) freqency response - not often flat, but 'phones can go places tweeters and woofers can't, and they don't rattle the furniture dooing it! d) cost - apart from our beloved Stax, and things like the Orpheus and Sony's mad wooden devices, good 'phones are cheap. i use a pair on Sony V500s at work (closed is a neccesity) and they give more information than my Genelecs by a factor of about 2:1.
"A DVD normally has 720 pixels horizontal by 480 vertical (interlaced)."...a 525/59.94 DVD, a 625/50 disc is 720x576
"If it is mastered with Academy Ratio (4:3) video, that means it has 720 * 3/4 = 540 lines of horizontal resolution."
what? The horizontal resolution is determined by a) the raster dimensions and b) whatever frequency space limiting was done in the encode stage. For non-interlaced content with no filtering, the addressable picture IS 720x480 (or 720x576).
"By comparison, VHS has about 240 lines of horizontal resolution. Note that the horizontal resolution is different for anamorphic widescreen DVDs when played on suitable equipment, because of the different aspect ratio."
No it isn't, because the raster size is the same. All video pixels are non-square.
Excellent post - but I have both Sony and Pioneer players that my retailer made region-free for a minimal cost (£10). It's time that the region system was abandoned by player manufacturers, it's a fucking sales millstone.
I tend to agree with this. In the UK we have an NVOD (near video on demand - starting every half an hour or something) service called Sky Box Office which let's you have a movie for 24hours for around £3 ($5). In many ways it beats going to the cinema, but the quality is inferior to DVD (it's MPEG2 and FHA, but the bitrate is too low and obvious quantisation artifacts often appear). It fills a gap, but it's certainly not a replacement for a disc. If the service were ramped up in quality at some time in the future, though - it could really challenge cinema going.
"left and right are flat down to 25Hz and will do 18 if I push them."
Either you're a lying idiot, or your house is the most beautifully damped and resonance-free structure ever built and you listen in a room that contains nothing but you and your speakers. Bottom-octave loudspeaker sound at home is a fucking nightmare and adds NOTHING to the appreciation of music.
that's really unfair - the Japanese make some fantastic loudspeakers. The difference is in approach - British & other Euro 'speakers use off the shelf components (with some notable exceptions) and usually go to great lengths to get good box, room and component "matching" to acheive well balanced sound. The Japs tend to throw all the technology in the world at a 'speaker to fulfill a set of measurement criteria they had set themselves - this approach can sometimes produce INCREDIBLY accurate transducers - some of Technics' designs with ultra-wide bandwidth and phase-coherent, material-coherent drive units sound wonderful.
Americans? Every Bose 'speaker I've ever heard sounded shite - though I've always LOVED the sound of Martin Logan's designs.
Headphones / earphones differ ENORMOUSLY in the way that they can reproduce sound, and the best are EASILY the best sound transducers available, HUGELY more accurate than any louydspeaker. I myself have several different pairs, Sony MDR-V77s for when I want a high quality closed pair outside, Stax Lambda Signatures for when I want to hear EVERYTHING at home and some expensive, open Sony fontopias from about 8 years ago that - under the right conditions - give quite the most amazing sound I've ever heard. Extremely light/rigid diaphragms, powerful magnets and well matched transmission line produes the best results - not surprising when you look at microphones and ears...
I really think it's sacrelige to mod a classic machine like that. There's someone who wants a Colour Classic out there for what it IS, not what computers are NOW. I mean, really, what's the point? Hacking up a Cube AND a CC is just trashing two really nice computers to make one Frankenstein - definitely a big shame.
I've still got one. It is a VERY slow computer, and was so when it was launched - Apple should have given it a decent amount of RAM, a 32Mhz CPU (and populated the FPU slot) and allowed a 640x480 display mode. Still, it's really cute and people just seem to adore it...
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"supply and demand works great, and a company wants to charge a customer their maximum they're willing to pay"
But supply and demand doesn't apply in a situation where there is infinite supply - and it costs AMS the same amount of bandwidth to upload ANY file of the same size.
He's a terrific salesman, Del.
Absolutely true. Hopefully, when we FINALLY switch over to the Euro it may become sensible for more of the world's internationally traded commodities to be priced in Euros, and we can finally start to turn the cheap-living tables on those damned Yankees. THE US economy is given an ENORMOUS boost by all of the foreign exchange others are forced to give it in exchange for the Dollars they need to buy stuff - it's time this shit stopped.
we ALL hate jokes that aren't actually funny
1Km is approximately 1.6 Miles? In what universe would THAT be?
" Also, sometimes NTSC video is sampled at only 640 pixels width in order to get square pixels."
By who?
so... you stole those ones then? :-]
you don't really know what QuickTime is, do you? Hint - it's not a FUCKING MOVIE PLAYER
I say YOUR election because I'm British. Viewed from abroad, YOUR election looked like a completely undemocratic farce, we can never understand why you Americans show such exaggerated respect for your president, seemingly irrespective of the quality of HIS intellect or character. Bill Clinton, despite his understandable penchant for blowjobs from young women, didn't strike me as an alcoholic, oil rich draft dodging idiot son of a journeyman president - yet it seems he was crucified in the states for his character flaws while the US economy scaled heights never seen before. Pretty strange.
If that's true, it's not much of a preview, is it? Anyway, I live in the UK so I won't be using the AMS anyway - can't say I was much impressed with their selection, either (though the store seemed snappily responsive and nicely designed). I usually pay around £10 for my discs ($15?) and I don't consider that to be excessive - many retailers in the UK will, however, gladly charge you £15.99 for a disc if you're dumb enough to pay it.
but you get an UNCOMPRESSED version if you buy from Amazon you dolt. I listened to some of the previews at the AMS, I WASN'T impressed by the quality - my home ripped, 256kbps mp3s sound a hell of a lot better.
"Secondly, you don't seem to be to compenent yourself"
that's TOO and COMPETENT you idle fucker
Jesus wept
are you suggesting that 100% of the eligible population actually voted in your ersatz election?
"Once upon a time, MS asked Apple to cede the authoring market for digital media in return for keeping playback."
It was the other way around - MS proposed that Apple could have authoring and MS would do playback - Apple told them to fuck off and MS has been trying to kill QT ever since.
well, kind of...
obviously, headphones have a real weakness in that they are dependent on a good headphone amplifier to drive them, and these are rarer than hens' teeth. They also, of course, can suffer from poor 'staging' when compared with good loudspeakers, though Stax and - to a lesser extent - Sony have long tried to alleviate this problem a little by presenting their drivers 'forward' of the ear rather that 'straight at' the ear. Headphones have these massive advantages over 'speakers a) transient response - due to their very low mass and ultra low energy storage, not even electrostatic 'speakers compete b) phase coherence - again, electrostatics are the next best c) freqency response - not often flat, but 'phones can go places tweeters and woofers can't, and they don't rattle the furniture dooing it! d) cost - apart from our beloved Stax, and things like the Orpheus and Sony's mad wooden devices, good 'phones are cheap. i use a pair on Sony V500s at work (closed is a neccesity) and they give more information than my Genelecs by a factor of about 2:1.
"A DVD normally has 720 pixels horizontal by 480 vertical (interlaced)." ...a 525/59.94 DVD, a 625/50 disc is 720x576
"If it is mastered with Academy Ratio (4:3) video, that means it has 720 * 3/4 = 540 lines of horizontal resolution."
what? The horizontal resolution is determined by a) the raster dimensions and b) whatever frequency space limiting was done in the encode stage. For non-interlaced content with no filtering, the addressable picture IS 720x480 (or 720x576).
"By comparison, VHS has about 240 lines of horizontal resolution. Note that the horizontal resolution is different for anamorphic widescreen DVDs when played on suitable equipment, because of the different aspect ratio."
No it isn't, because the raster size is the same. All video pixels are non-square.
Excellent post - but I have both Sony and Pioneer players that my retailer made region-free for a minimal cost (£10). It's time that the region system was abandoned by player manufacturers, it's a fucking sales millstone.
I tend to agree with this. In the UK we have an NVOD (near video on demand - starting every half an hour or something) service called Sky Box Office which let's you have a movie for 24hours for around £3 ($5). In many ways it beats going to the cinema, but the quality is inferior to DVD (it's MPEG2 and FHA, but the bitrate is too low and obvious quantisation artifacts often appear). It fills a gap, but it's certainly not a replacement for a disc. If the service were ramped up in quality at some time in the future, though - it could really challenge cinema going.
"left and right are flat down to 25Hz and will do 18 if I push them."
Either you're a lying idiot, or your house is the most beautifully damped and resonance-free structure ever built and you listen in a room that contains nothing but you and your speakers. Bottom-octave loudspeaker sound at home is a fucking nightmare and adds NOTHING to the appreciation of music.
Put on some headphones though...
that's really unfair - the Japanese make some fantastic loudspeakers. The difference is in approach - British & other Euro 'speakers use off the shelf components (with some notable exceptions) and usually go to great lengths to get good box, room and component "matching" to acheive well balanced sound. The Japs tend to throw all the technology in the world at a 'speaker to fulfill a set of measurement criteria they had set themselves - this approach can sometimes produce INCREDIBLY accurate transducers - some of Technics' designs with ultra-wide bandwidth and phase-coherent, material-coherent drive units sound wonderful.
Americans? Every Bose 'speaker I've ever heard sounded shite - though I've always LOVED the sound of Martin Logan's designs.
what a fucking moronic statement.
Headphones / earphones differ ENORMOUSLY in the way that they can reproduce sound, and the best are EASILY the best sound transducers available, HUGELY more accurate than any louydspeaker. I myself have several different pairs, Sony MDR-V77s for when I want a high quality closed pair outside, Stax Lambda Signatures for when I want to hear EVERYTHING at home and some expensive, open Sony fontopias from about 8 years ago that - under the right conditions - give quite the most amazing sound I've ever heard. Extremely light/rigid diaphragms, powerful magnets and well matched transmission line produes the best results - not surprising when you look at microphones and ears...
Au contraire! It took my 20 minutes of quality Q-Tip & RS Solvent Cleaner work last time I did one...
bollocks
if you can back any of that up, it'd be a miracle.
I really think it's sacrelige to mod a classic machine like that. There's someone who wants a Colour Classic out there for what it IS, not what computers are NOW. I mean, really, what's the point? Hacking up a Cube AND a CC is just trashing two really nice computers to make one Frankenstein - definitely a big shame.
I've still got one. It is a VERY slow computer, and was so when it was launched - Apple should have given it a decent amount of RAM, a 32Mhz CPU (and populated the FPU slot) and allowed a 640x480 display mode. Still, it's really cute and people just seem to adore it...