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Gatchaman wrote:

Wow, I can't buy a decent buggy whip anywhere, my analog TV stopped working, and now this.

Help is at Hand

Alien wrote:

Bren wrote:

down. Hopefully maybe some alternative type of film is available to hobbyists and professionals, but I'm sure they'll assert that whatever the alternative is, it's not quite the same.

Velvia, mostly. Easier to process (E-6), and gives similarly vivs colour. Velvia was the first film to really hurt Kodachrome sales.

Jasoco wrote:

I'm surprised we're not still riding horses and buggies, and living by candlelight.

Or making oil paint pictures, for instance. Oh, wait.

.tsooJ

Silly Alien, only artists use oils. Real people use Photoshop.

Did  you  think I was being literal minded? In a sense, those who use buggy whips are also artists-- or  at least performers. The difference is that the buggy whip is still available, but kodachrome will not be.

avkills wrote:

Tallgeese wrote:

Digital TV is not superior to analog. Sorry, it just isn't.

Also, if an analog signal degrades, you get static in your picture/sound. If the digital signal degrades, you get nothing.

You are so wrong on this it isn't even funny.  But then again my definition of "digital video" is probably a lot different than yours.

Maybe my eyes are playing tricks, but it looks like 'Digital TV' was the phrase, not digital video- so yes, different.

Digital can have signal loss and still manage to give you 100% accuracy in the picture.

I believe we can subsume that under 'threshold values' and have done, after noting that signal strength likely varies in practice, like bandwidth. Cables degrade over time too, as well as companies perhaps being less able to deliver good signal stregth during peak usage hours, tho I'm less sure of the latter. What's sure is that the companies themselves cautioned a few months ago that their new digital signals weren't reaching as far, and perhaps 10% of their former viewing area might be lost in the switch. That might be conservative; they're unlikely to have erred to the neg side.

Digital video can survive generational copying way better than analog.

Duh.

(crappy video compression as used by Comcast, Dish and others does not accurately represent digital video)

A/V sync issues are cause by dumb ass cable companies who do not understand that their real time MPEG2/4/H264 video encoders cause a video delay; and the audio must be delayed appropriately.

There's the rub, tho. What's possible in theory is academic. What's really being served up by real companies is what's seen, heard, dealt with.

As far as analog vs. digital audio.  Jay Rose (award winning sound engineer) wrote an article for DV magazine proving that to be false.  Analog has the same stair-step as digital, but instead it is noise.  If digital audio was not better than analog; then they would still be mastering on analog, but they don't because 192Khz 24bit audio kicks analog into the dirt.

-mark

I followed the debate when it first arose, around '77 and the coming of CDs, with their 'perfect digital sound.' The argument then by the big companies was that the proposed 16 bit/44.1KHz standard produced sound that was indistinguishable from the real thing. Mathematical certainty... engineers like John Curl (likely before your time ) argued in audiophile and tech circles that, even if true, real-world implementations of the circuits needed- including filters that brickwalled at the needed 22,050 Hz (half of 44.1k) were almost impossible to design at the time without their own set of audible problems like ringing. It would make circuit design of real-world equipment difficult and the resulting sound 'imperfect' at best, as well as making digital mastering critically important and difficult- and it isn't easy to begin with, when there were substantial differences between the tape recorders originally used and those used for mastering CDs (head alignment and more).

But audio was in the doldrums. The economy wasn't good after the first OPEC embargo, and the industry's first crack at boosting sales- quadrophonic, making everyone buy more speakers, new electronics- was an epic fail. They needed a new gimmick, so pushed thru the new standard was. If they'd waited a year, the standard could've been frozen at a substantially higher, more fault-tolerant point, and everyone would've enjoyed the resulting better sound; but they didn't. There were stockholders needing appeasement. It was a done deal, and who in the front office really cared about music, sound, or the fact that an entire generation of audio equipment was compromised? Half the potential buyers were deafened by concerts, too stoned to care and/or conditioned to crap by growing up with super-compressed TV and radio sound. Hardly anyone even knew what live, unamplified music sounded like anymore. CDs sold, even tho the early ones tended to be pushed to the firewall for levels, aggravating things even more.

Yeah, 24/192 is much better, easier to master for, easier to design circuits for with available ICs. By odds it should work, over a quarter-century after digital audio commercially debuted. We haz fiber-optic cables and connectors; but some audiophiles and Steve Jobs still listen to their pricey analog stereos and collections of vinyl, despite iTunes. Ironic, innit?

(And on mastering, it also comes down partly to issues of cost and availability. Like film, I doubt much is available anymore in the way of tape, let 'lone 24+ track studio tape recorders. Vinyl LP output is likewise limited by a dearth of pressing plants; the few left are booked roughly thru eternity. Digital recording avoids A-D conversion issues in a world of mostly-digital playback devices, albeit used with way too many low-bitrate, lossy-format recordings. So it goes... and some time I'll tell you how I really feel. )

One of these days I really have to get my new speakers built... likely sometime after my new[er] system. Books and sturner are waiting for [s]defeat[/s] me to join them at L4D et al.


sp

Last edited by Bat (2009-06-28 3:00 am)

Bat wrote:

avkills wrote:

Tallgeese wrote:

Digital TV is not superior to analog. Sorry, it just isn't.

Also, if an analog signal degrades, you get static in your picture/sound. If the digital signal degrades, you get nothing.

You are so wrong on this it isn't even funny.  But then again my definition of "digital video" is probably a lot different than yours.

Maybe my eyes are playing tricks, but it looks like 'Digital TV' was the phrase, not digital video- so yes, different.

Digital can have signal loss and still manage to give you 100% accuracy in the picture.

I believe we can subsume that under 'threshold values' and have done, after noting that signal strength likely varies in practice, like bandwidth. Cables degrade over time too, as well as companies perhaps being less able to deliver good signal stregth during peak usage hours, tho I'm less sure of the latter. What's sure is that the companies themselves cautioned a few months ago that their new digital signals weren't reaching as far, and perhaps 10% of their former viewing area might be lost in the switch. That might be conservative; they're unlikely to have erred to the neg side.

Digital video can survive generational copying way better than analog.

Duh.

(crappy video compression as used by Comcast, Dish and others does not accurately represent digital video)

A/V sync issues are cause by dumb ass cable companies who do not understand that their real time MPEG2/4/H264 video encoders cause a video delay; and the audio must be delayed appropriately.

There's the rub, tho. What's possible in theory is academic. What's really being served up by real companies is what's seen, heard, dealt with.

As far as analog vs. digital audio.  Jay Rose (award winning sound engineer) wrote an article for DV magazine proving that to be false.  Analog has the same stair-step as digital, but instead it is noise.  If digital audio was not better than analog; then they would still be mastering on analog, but they don't because 192Khz 24bit audio kicks analog into the dirt.

-mark

I followed the debate when it first arose, around '77 and the coming of CDs, with their 'perfect digital sound.' The argument then by the big companies was that the proposed 16 bit/44.1KHz standard produced sound that was indistinguishable from the real thing. Mathematical certainty... engineers like John Curl (likely before your time ) argued in audiophile and tech circles that, even if true, real-world implementations of the circuits needed- including filters that brickwalled at the needed 22,050 Hz (half of 44.1k) were almost impossible to design at the time without their own set of audible problems like ringing. It would make circuit design of real-world equipment difficult and the resulting sound 'imperfect' at best, as well as making digital mastering critically important and difficult- and it isn't easy to begin with, when there were substantial differences between the tape recorders originally used and those used for mastering CDs (head alignment and more).

But audio was in the doldrums. The economy wasn't good after the first OPEC embargo, and the industry's first crack at boosting sales- quadrophonic, making everyone buy more speakers, new electronics- was an epic fail. They needed a new gimmick, so pushed thru the new standard was. If they'd waited a year, the standard could've been frozen at a substantially higher, more fault-tolerant point, and everyone would've enjoyed the resulting better sound; but they didn't. There were stockholders needing appeasement. It was a done deal, and who in the front office really cared about music, sound, or the fact that an entire generation of audio equipment was compromised? Half the potential buyers were deafened by concerts, too stoned to care and/or conditioned to crap by growing up with super-compressed TV and radio sound. Hardly anyone even knew what live, unamplified music sounded like anymore. CDs sold, even tho the early ones tended to be pushed to the firewall for levels, aggravating things even more.

Yeah, 24/192 is much better, easier to master for, easier to design circuits for with available ICs. By odds it should work, over a quarter-century after digital audio commercially debuted. We haz fiber-optic cables and connectors; but some audiophiles and Steve Jobs still listen to their pricey analog stereos and collections of vinyl, despite iTunes. Ironic, innit?

(And on mastering, it also comes down partly to issues of cost and availability. Like film, I doubt much is available anymore in the way of tape, let 'lone 24+ track studio tape recorders. Vinyl LP output is likewise limited by a dearth of pressing plants; the few left are booked roughly thru eternity. Digital recording avoids A-D conversion issues in a world of mostly-digital playback devices, albeit used with way too many low-bitrate, lossy-format recordings. So it goes... and some time I'll tell you how I really feel. )

One of these days I really have to get my new speakers built... likely sometime after my new[er] system. Books and sturner are waiting for [s]defeat[/s] me to join them at L4D et al.


sp

It's really a shame that optically scanned vinyl hasn't taken off. Vinyl records actually do a better job of recording audio information than CD's - the problem is that every time a record is played, the needle inadvertently damages the recording. Optical scanning eliminates that. You can use as high a resolution D/A as you like, since almost any D/A is likely to be less accurate than the laser/detector used to measure the groove.

The Smithsonian developed the technique to "play" broken records in their collection; and proved that the technique is not only viable, but preferable, to actually playing the record and recording the sound.

Kodachrome is (was?) a slide film.
Slides are pretty much only the realm pros now, the home slide projector has been a thing of the past for a very long time.

Some pros used kodachrome, though I suspect Ektachrome is suitable in most cases, and I don't think it is going away any time soon.