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>How can someone think [VHS Video is] superior to modern alternatives? There are two camps of people in the legacy-media market, collectors/nostalgists, archiv

>How can someone think [VHS Video is] superior to modern alternatives? There are two camps of people in the legacy-media market, collectors/nostalgists, archivist. There are many nostaligists who enjoy vinyl for the warm feeling it psycologically imparts and similarly so for VHS video. Where the legacy-media market splits is when it comes to archivist. There are many archivist who prefer the vinyl medium over digital because of media-rot issues. The robustness of vinyl is exceptional compared to other medium [1] If you want to play back a CD you are reliant on a CD player and all of it's integrated circuits working properly to extract the information. With vinyl all you really need is something that rotates and a thin nail. This is attractive to archivists. The closest equivalent of vinyl in the video domain is film: super low tech play back (heck you can even look at it) it's longevity is worse than vinyl though. [1]probably due to it's low information density and how the data is sequenced. I.e. one aberrant perturbation of the medium or read head doesn't cause large chunks of the data to be lost or unreadable.

DougWebb 10y ago
Vinyl's robustness comes from being purely mechanical and analog. That's film's advantage too. To play back a CD, you need the physical electronics to read the data (even moreso for magnetic media formats) but you also need the algorithms needed to turn the physical data into information. With vinyl the wiggles in the medium are directly related to wiggles in the sound waves the medium is encoding; all you have to do is amplify them. Even if you had no idea what a record is, you could stumble across the playback mechanism by accident.
pipio21 10y ago
"With vinyl all you really need is something that rotates and a thin nail." All you need something that rotates and a thin nail? It is really hard to make something that rotates well enough to play vinyl discs. I know because I made my own DIY vinyl player as a young engineering student. In the end it was way simpler and it did sound better to make a contactless(optical) head with air blowing to remove the dust. Even then it did not sound as well as the real thing. It takes a couple millions of dollars to replicate an old vynil player with similar quality. Those plates are balanced and big. The head needs micromachined components. Companies spent an enormous amount of capital in order to do it right, and every unit is expensive to make. It is way simpler to read a CD today than to read a Vinyl. Normal players also destroy the discs over time. How many optical Vinyl players you see? How much them cost? Reading CDs is super simple. They are pots or no pots, zeros or ones. We could do it with simple step motors today and cheap lasers. One aberrant [and multiple] perturbation on the medium in digital is easily fixed with CRC checking. Also with digital there are millions of disc with the exact same information. For archivists this makes incredible simple to restore all the information. It is in analog where you lose data. First, every disc, or film or tape is different from the others, you can only guess what is original and what is noise, degradation and so on. In Vinyl, if the head jumps too fast your sound saturates and you lose everything in between. Dust , scratches, a hair, everything could harm you.
mc32 10y ago
You are right, the video analogue to vinyl is film. I can see the appeal of 35mm film, I can see people imagining it as more natural (being analogue) and having certain human/warm qualities --but I can't see that in VHS. VHS is very utilitarian, I can only guess it's the "vernacular" aspect of it. It was the every man or woman's medium, it was not classy, not professional, so maybe that, the vernacular, the pedestrian appeal. Like the Bic pen or the cheap Dutch bikes, acetate eyeglasses frames, polyester, etc.

DougWebb 10y ago

Vinyl's robustness comes from being purely mechanical and analog. That's film's advantage too. To play back a CD, you need the physical electronics to read the data (even moreso for magnetic media formats) but you also need the algorithms needed to turn the physical data into information. With vinyl the wiggles in the medium are directly related to wiggles in the sound waves the medium is encoding; all you have to do is amplify them. Even if you had no idea what a record is, you could stumble across the playback mechanism by accident.

pipio21 10y ago

"With vinyl all you really need is something that rotates and a thin nail." All you need something that rotates and a thin nail? It is really hard to make something that rotates well enough to play vinyl discs. I know because I made my own DIY vinyl player as a young engineering student. In the end it was way simpler and it did sound better to make a contactless(optical) head with air blowing to remove the dust. Even then it did not sound as well as the real thing. It takes a couple millions of dollars to replicate an old vynil player with similar quality. Those plates are balanced and big. The head needs micromachined components. Companies spent an enormous amount of capital in order to do it right, and every unit is expensive to make. It is way simpler to read a CD today than to read a Vinyl. Normal players also destroy the discs over time. How many optical Vinyl players you see? How much them cost? Reading CDs is super simple. They are pots or no pots, zeros or ones. We could do it with simple step motors today and cheap lasers. One aberrant [and multiple] perturbation on the medium in digital is easily fixed with CRC checking. Also with digital there are millions of disc with the exact same information. For archivists this makes incredible simple to restore all the information. It is in analog where you lose data. First, every disc, or film or tape is different from the others, you can only guess what is original and what is noise, degradation and so on. In Vinyl, if the head jumps too fast your sound saturates and you lose everything in between. Dust , scratches, a hair, everything could harm you.

mc32 10y ago

You are right, the video analogue to vinyl is film. I can see the appeal of 35mm film, I can see people imagining it as more natural (being analogue) and having certain human/warm qualities --but I can't see that in VHS. VHS is very utilitarian, I can only guess it's the "vernacular" aspect of it. It was the every man or woman's medium, it was not classy, not professional, so maybe that, the vernacular, the pedestrian appeal. Like the Bic pen or the cheap Dutch bikes, acetate eyeglasses frames, polyester, etc.