With all the EMF in the average home, with AC wires in every wall and appliances always running, and as little power as a calculator or wristwatch uses, why they need batteries? It seems like a coil and a rectifier circut should be enough.
I'd probably know why if I were an electrical engineer.
You need to have very high end equipment to notice the difference between vinyl and a CD played on a 10 dollar player.
Yes, that's true.
And even then that's only going to be true for about a dozen plays.
With a high end turntable you have very little pressure on the stylus, and you can get a whole lot of plays out of a record. Cheap turntables will ruin a record quickly; it's the difference betwween 1/4 gram of pressure with a good turntable, and 20 grams of pressure with a cheap one.
If you are dumb enough to fall for one of the oldest fraud methods in existence, you deserve to lose you money, but not your freedom.
Just because the scam is old doesn't mean everyone has heard of it. Ignorance and stupidity are two different things. Nobody deserves to be drfrauded, burglarized, robbed, or cheated.
These Nigerian government asshats sound like some of the asshats running our governments here when it comes to prostitution. It's like using a steak to defraud a starving man. Some of these girls will pick up vulnerable elderly widowers and drain their bank accounts dry, yet the governmet asshats paint the whores as victims. What is it about people who want to go into politics worldwide that make them think like that?
You are sadly misinformed, as was nearly everyone else at the time. I had this very same discussion with a guy I was stationed with in the Air Force in 1971, and when he heard my cassette deck he agreed that there was no discernable difference between my cassette and his eight track. In fact he bought a cassette deck that very same day after hearing mine!
I have a copy of Deep Purple's Machine Head that I bought when it first came out (1971), and it still sounds very good. There is more tape hiss on my vinyl copy of Aerosmith's first album than on my cassette of Machine Head.
Chrome and dolby made cassettes rival CDs, if you have a good enough cassette deck.
The main advantage that an 8-trak had over cassette for cars is that it was continuous play -- that is, before auto-reversing cassette players were invented.
I had an auto-reverse cassette deck in my car in 1974. But I never considered it an advantage, since there was no reason to want to hear the same album over and over. Cassettes did have the disadvantage of having "dead air" on the shorter of the two sides. Having to turn the tape over never bothered anyone, since everyone had to turn records over since their inception.
They don't just loathe the concept, MPAA honcho Jack Valenti said "there's no such thing as fair use". It's like the music industry in the 1980s, when LPs would say on their covers that any copying was a federal felony, despite the fact that the Audio Home Recording Act of 1978 specifically said that recording those LPs to tape was LEGAL.
These bozos don't give a rat's ass about the law. As far as they're concerned, what they say is the law is the law. Considering their army of lawyers, lobbyists, and campaign bribes; er, 'scuse me, "campaign contributions", they may well be right.
Same thing is happening on technology, television gets digitalized and all standards starts to be changed every 3-5 years.
This is the first change in TV's format in its entire history (not counting the switch to color, which was backwards compatible and phased in very slowly). My 77 year old dad bitches about the format change constantly.
Is it really so that old medias actually stored the data better way because it could be used longer?
Pretty much yes. Vinyl could concievably last forever if kept flat and covered in a cool place. Tape lasts, but the oxide will flake off and magnetic fields can weaken the signal. Acid-free paper can last and has lasted for thousands of years barring, like vinyl, unfortunate accidents (like hordes of visigoths torching your library, or a flood washing it all away). CDs and DVDs have pretty limited lives because of the way they're manufactured; they must be done in layers, and the pits that store the bits are incredibly small.
The partners aimed at a playing time of 60 minutes with a disc diameter of 100 mm (Sony) or 115 mm (Philips).[8] Sony vice-president Norio Ohga suggested extending the capacity to 74 minutes to accommodate Wilhelm Furtwängler's 1951 performance of Beethoven's 9th Symphony at the Bayreuth Festival.[9] [10]
The extra 14 minute playing time subsequently required changing to a 120 mm disc. Kees Immink, Philips' chief engineer, however, denies this, claiming that the increase was motivated by technical considerations, and that even after the increase in size, the Furtwängler recording was not able to fit onto the earliest CDs.[3][8] According to a Sunday Tribune interview,[11] the story is slightly more involved. At that time (1979) Philips owned Polygram, one of the world's largest distributors of music. Polygram had set up a large experimental CD plant in Hanover, Germany, which could produce huge numbers of CDs having, of course, a diameter of 115 mm. Sony did not yet have such a facility. If Sony had agreed on the 115 mm disc, Philips would have had a significant competitive edge in the market. Sony decided that something had to be done. The long playing time of Beethoven's Ninth imposed by Ohga was used to push Philips to accept 120 mm, so that Philips' Polygram lost its edge on disc fabrication.[11]
A few years ago someone at worked asked me what the last Rush album was that came out on vinyl and after some poking around I found out that they all had up to the latest (Vapor Trails, IIRC).
Buying new vinyl is a waste. The masters are digital, so you get the worst of both worlds, the disadvantages of both analog and digital and the advantages of neither.
If you're buying anything recorded after ~ 1980, the CD will have the best fidelity. Before that an LP will, provided your turntable is good enough. With analog, the quality input device is paramount.
Yeah, if you're one of the small percentage of all people over the age of 17 who can really hear the difference. Otherwise you're probably only fooling yourself.
If you don't have a really good turntable you're right. But with a good turntable and a well engineered recording, provided the signal was analog from the original to the LP's cutter, vinyl beats digital hands down, and anyone should be able to hear the difference.
The 8-track tape This sorry piece of crap is proof positive of American stupidity. The cassette - the (now obsolete) four track, two-spindle, 1/8th inch, 1/78 IPS shirt pocket sized tape cassette was produced before the 8-track. The four track cassette was originally made as a dictation device, but advances in tape manufacture and head design soon gave them a frequency response that came close to human hearing's limit, signal to noise ratio low enough that you had to turn it up very loud to hear the hiss, and inaudible harmonic distortion which made them ideal for music.
Nevertheless, the 8-track was born anyway. With its transport speed at twice the 4-track cassette's speed, it should have been audibly superior. However, the "powers that be" decided that 8-tracks were going to be for automobiles, which at the time were not as well insulated from outside sounds and wind as today's cars, and with the auto's horrible acoustics, it was OK for a car's music to sound like effluent.
But the deliberately bad sound wasn't bad enough. The eight track tape had a single spindle, a very clever design where the tape fed from the center of the spindle, around a capstain roller inside the housing and back to the outside of the roll of tape. This made for an expensive setup, and one that was prone to wow and flutter, as well as having the tape get "eaten" by the tape player. And unlike a cassette, if your 8-track got ate, you might as well throw it in the trash.
But wait, there's more! This thing was deemed to be for the car, while cassettes were going to be (by about 1970 or so) for the home.
This made no sense whatever, since the "portable" eight track took up as much space as four cassettes, without being able to play any longer than a cassette. In fact, you could buy a longer playing cassette than 8-track.
But the one thing more than anything else that made 8-tracks suck like a Hoover was the fact that it had to change tracks four times during an album. This usually necessitated at least one song and usually more being interrupted in the middle!
Folks finally, after about ten years, started figuring this stuff out for themselves and replaced their 8-track cartriges with 4 track cassettes. Me? I never had an 8-track, although all my friends did. I, the geek, used the far more logical cassettes since about 1966 or 7. Hah! The geek gets the last laugh again!
You are giving way too much credit to a city government that did absolutely dick shit to save their own people.
Did you actually READ the comment??? I said government ON ALL LEVELS broke down in New Orleans, unlike Springfield when we were hit by two tornados in one night. MY city government worked well.
Must be my thick midwestern accent that threw you. =/
Actually I was thinking of my own basement. I own a two story basement; the upper story of my basement is above ground, but I know there's at least one printer lurking down in my basement's basement.
NO's problems stemmed from a combination of local, state, and federal government ineptness. When two tornados trashed my neighborhood in 2006, I was very impressed with the city government's response. Although there were few utility poles standing in my especially hard-hit neighborhood the next morning, as well as a lot of other neighborhoods, the city-owned utility had power back on to everyone within a week. It contrasted dramatically to another tornado that hit Cahokia, a hundred miles south (I grew up in Cahokia) three months later with far less damage and folks were without power for a month (corporate-owned Amerin).
I was less impressed with the Illinois Emergency Management Authority. However, compared to FEMA's response to our tornado, the IEMA was stellar. FEMA is a joke under the Bush administration.
Slashdot Mirror
With all the EMF in the average home, with AC wires in every wall and appliances always running, and as little power as a calculator or wristwatch uses, why they need batteries? It seems like a coil and a rectifier circut should be enough.
I'd probably know why if I were an electrical engineer.
My point was that dialup isn't competition.
You need to have very high end equipment to notice the difference between vinyl and a CD played on a 10 dollar player.
Yes, that's true.
And even then that's only going to be true for about a dozen plays.
With a high end turntable you have very little pressure on the stylus, and you can get a whole lot of plays out of a record. Cheap turntables will ruin a record quickly; it's the difference betwween 1/4 gram of pressure with a good turntable, and 20 grams of pressure with a cheap one.
"It's immoral to let a sucker keep his money." - Canada Bill Jones, 19th century poker player
Yeah, take a lesson in morality from a man with no morals, that's real smart!
I guess it's the same reason people fall for all scams: they let their greed get in the way of their common sense.
I think more often it's not greed, but hunger. The rich don't usually fall for those scams.
If you are dumb enough to fall for one of the oldest fraud methods in existence, you deserve to lose you money, but not your freedom.
Just because the scam is old doesn't mean everyone has heard of it. Ignorance and stupidity are two different things. Nobody deserves to be drfrauded, burglarized, robbed, or cheated.
These Nigerian government asshats sound like some of the asshats running our governments here when it comes to prostitution. It's like using a steak to defraud a starving man. Some of these girls will pick up vulnerable elderly widowers and drain their bank accounts dry, yet the governmet asshats paint the whores as victims. What is it about people who want to go into politics worldwide that make them think like that?
What competitors? Here in Springfield we have Comcast, DSL, dialup, and satellite. Not mush of a real choice, is it?
Thus the popularity of vinyl in DJ circles
That, and you can't make a CD go "VOOP!"
Isn't JT on a collision course with disbarment?
I thought it was pretty much a done deal, but disbarrment won't stop him from being an anti-gamer gadfly.
How could I not? =)
You are sadly misinformed, as was nearly everyone else at the time. I had this very same discussion with a guy I was stationed with in the Air Force in 1971, and when he heard my cassette deck he agreed that there was no discernable difference between my cassette and his eight track. In fact he bought a cassette deck that very same day after hearing mine!
I have a copy of Deep Purple's Machine Head that I bought when it first came out (1971), and it still sounds very good. There is more tape hiss on my vinyl copy of Aerosmith's first album than on my cassette of Machine Head.
Chrome and dolby made cassettes rival CDs, if you have a good enough cassette deck.
The main advantage that an 8-trak had over cassette for cars is that it was continuous play -- that is, before auto-reversing cassette players were invented.
I had an auto-reverse cassette deck in my car in 1974. But I never considered it an advantage, since there was no reason to want to hear the same album over and over. Cassettes did have the disadvantage of having "dead air" on the shorter of the two sides. Having to turn the tape over never bothered anyone, since everyone had to turn records over since their inception.
The best uses of CDs now is Skeet targets
Tie them to a string and hang them in your garden and they'll chase the birds away. CDs terrifty birds.
Amen to that. You can almost fit Led Zeppelin's entire catalog, from Led Zeppelin 1 to CODA on a single CD if the tunes are in MP3 format.
I wish minidisks of MP3s would play in car stereos!
A fight between this Kenneth Doroshow (who wikipedia has no entry on) and Jack Thompson? Somebody get the popcorn, this is going to be hilarious!
They don't just loathe the concept, MPAA honcho Jack Valenti said "there's no such thing as fair use". It's like the music industry in the 1980s, when LPs would say on their covers that any copying was a federal felony, despite the fact that the Audio Home Recording Act of 1978 specifically said that recording those LPs to tape was LEGAL.
These bozos don't give a rat's ass about the law. As far as they're concerned, what they say is the law is the law. Considering their army of lawyers, lobbyists, and campaign bribes; er, 'scuse me, "campaign contributions", they may well be right.
You must be new here! :P
Ewe muss bee knew hear! ;)
Same thing is happening on technology, television gets digitalized and all standards starts to be changed every 3-5 years.
This is the first change in TV's format in its entire history (not counting the switch to color, which was backwards compatible and phased in very slowly). My 77 year old dad bitches about the format change constantly.
Is it really so that old medias actually stored the data better way because it could be used longer?
Pretty much yes. Vinyl could concievably last forever if kept flat and covered in a cool place. Tape lasts, but the oxide will flake off and magnetic fields can weaken the signal. Acid-free paper can last and has lasted for thousands of years barring, like vinyl, unfortunate accidents (like hordes of visigoths torching your library, or a flood washing it all away). CDs and DVDs have pretty limited lives because of the way they're manufactured; they must be done in layers, and the pits that store the bits are incredibly small.
Wikipedia is your friend
A few years ago someone at worked asked me what the last Rush album was that came out on vinyl and after some poking around I found out that they all had up to the latest (Vapor Trails, IIRC).
Buying new vinyl is a waste. The masters are digital, so you get the worst of both worlds, the disadvantages of both analog and digital and the advantages of neither.
If you're buying anything recorded after ~ 1980, the CD will have the best fidelity. Before that an LP will, provided your turntable is good enough. With analog, the quality input device is paramount.
Yeah, if you're one of the small percentage of all people over the age of 17 who can really hear the difference. Otherwise you're probably only fooling yourself.
If you don't have a really good turntable you're right. But with a good turntable and a well engineered recording, provided the signal was analog from the original to the LP's cutter, vinyl beats digital hands down, and anyone should be able to hear the difference.
Who the hell celebrates a "26th" anniversary?
I celebrated my 26th anniversary. Got divorced the following year though...
Forget not the humble 8-track tape!
The eight track is a format best forgotten, as I said in Good Riddance to Bad Tech a few years ago.
Oh, btw I am old!
You are giving way too much credit to a city government that did absolutely dick shit to save their own people.
Did you actually READ the comment??? I said government ON ALL LEVELS broke down in New Orleans, unlike Springfield when we were hit by two tornados in one night. MY city government worked well.
Must be my thick midwestern accent that threw you. =/
Actually I was thinking of my own basement. I own a two story basement; the upper story of my basement is above ground, but I know there's at least one printer lurking down in my basement's basement.
NO's problems stemmed from a combination of local, state, and federal government ineptness. When two tornados trashed my neighborhood in 2006, I was very impressed with the city government's response. Although there were few utility poles standing in my especially hard-hit neighborhood the next morning, as well as a lot of other neighborhoods, the city-owned utility had power back on to everyone within a week. It contrasted dramatically to another tornado that hit Cahokia, a hundred miles south (I grew up in Cahokia) three months later with far less damage and folks were without power for a month (corporate-owned Amerin).
I was less impressed with the Illinois Emergency Management Authority. However, compared to FEMA's response to our tornado, the IEMA was stellar. FEMA is a joke under the Bush administration.