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I think about this Brain Eno quote often. It’s always surprising when old worse formats resurface, yet it happens everytime. > Whatever you now find weird, ugl

I think about this Brain Eno quote often. It’s always surprising when old worse formats resurface, yet it happens everytime. > Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided.

jhbadger 2y ago
Absolutely. Like those terrible filters that are supposed to make video look like it was recorded on VHS. They always make the results far worse than VHS actually was in practice.
- ahartmetz 2y ago
  VHS didn't always look noisy and distorted, but it always looked blurry and had horrible color bleeding. I disliked it even though it was the "only" technology at the time and we didn't have it at home.
  - naoru 2y ago
    Nope, color bleeding was virtually non-issue with SECAM color encoding. I've grown up in a SECAM country, but we had a lot of PAL content. PAL always looked bad and smudgy in comparison. NTSC was just plain awful and intolerable even by my pre-teen standards.
    - ahartmetz 2y ago
      Are you sure that PAL reception/tapes and possibly "yeah we also do that" PAL implementations were good in your region? I'm from a PAL region and broadcast PAL looked just fine to me. Only VHS PAL looked blurry. VHS's very low horizontal color resolution was a VHS limitation, AFAIK not much to do with how color phase errors were averaged out across lines in PAL vs SECAM.
karel-3d 2y ago
In 30 years, people will be nostalgic for TikTok. Some people might even be nostalgic for Bing. (People are nostalgic for Clippy after all.) In other words.... you are not nostalgic for the thing itself. (The thing kind of sucks.) You are nostalgic for your childhood.
crazygringo 2y ago
What did he mean by CD distortion? I'm also not super clear on how digital video would have jitter in a way that analog video wouldn't? I totally agree with his overall sentiment, I'm just a bit confused on the specific examples.
- jcarrano 2y ago
  I read that, at least early on, many CDs were mastered with inadequate dithering, resulting in audible quantization noise.
- nayuki 2y ago
  Good questions. CD distortion include hard clipping from amplifying too much, whereas vacuum tubes and magnetic tape have soft saturation (still a distortion, just a different kind). Another distortion is that dynamic range compression is used, bringing up the volume of quiet parts of a song. As for digital video jitter, I can think of MPEG compression artifacts, both spatial (e.g. DCT mosquito noise) and temporal (e.g. motion compensation errors, periodic keyframe refreshes).
  - kevin_thibedeau 2y ago
    That is bad mastering, not an inherent property of CDs.
    - shiroiushi 2y ago
      It's not, but it's very, very common, basically the rule in fact, starting I think in the early 2000s.
- numpad0 2y ago
  There is something in CD that is noticeable by listening to vinyl, CD, and optionally mp3. I'd say CD makes everything sound like a harpsichord, but just ever so slightly. Maybe it's encoding or maybe it's decoding. Or something else. It's a first generation digital format, after all. Analog videos never stutter but digital formats tend to have non-constant processing cost and do stutter occasionally. Maybe he's referring to that?
jcarrano 2y ago
People are now corrupting mpeg video intentionally. They call it "datamoshing". And of course there is glitch art, and the "vhs look" filter being (over) used everywhere.
joenot443 2y ago
An account called Natspone plays with this idea in shortform vertical videos, I find it incredibly bizarre and unsettling. I should forewarn - you're probably not going to enjoy the style at all. https://www.instagram.com/p/C3HtsLXOgui/?hl=en https://www.instagram.com/p/C3HtsLXOgui/?hl=en
- lancesells 2y ago
  This is brilliant
- JKCalhoun 2y ago
  Lynch shit, for sure.
pimlottc 2y ago
This is a big thing for early synthesizers. Many of them tried quite hard to accurate emulate real instruments - pianos, horns, strings - but inevitably failed due to limitations of their time. But many of them became classics in their own rights, to the point that later synths emulated them. And now, of course, you can get software versions of the same synths which do an incredible job of reproducing every last detail of a hardware instrument that did a bad job of emulating an analog one!

jhbadger 2y ago

Absolutely. Like those terrible filters that are supposed to make video look like it was recorded on VHS. They always make the results far worse than VHS actually was in practice.

ahartmetz 2y ago
VHS didn't always look noisy and distorted, but it always looked blurry and had horrible color bleeding. I disliked it even though it was the "only" technology at the time and we didn't have it at home.
- naoru 2y ago
  Nope, color bleeding was virtually non-issue with SECAM color encoding. I've grown up in a SECAM country, but we had a lot of PAL content. PAL always looked bad and smudgy in comparison. NTSC was just plain awful and intolerable even by my pre-teen standards.
  - ahartmetz 2y ago
    Are you sure that PAL reception/tapes and possibly "yeah we also do that" PAL implementations were good in your region? I'm from a PAL region and broadcast PAL looked just fine to me. Only VHS PAL looked blurry. VHS's very low horizontal color resolution was a VHS limitation, AFAIK not much to do with how color phase errors were averaged out across lines in PAL vs SECAM.

karel-3d 2y ago

In 30 years, people will be nostalgic for TikTok. Some people might even be nostalgic for Bing. (People are nostalgic for Clippy after all.) In other words.... you are not nostalgic for the thing itself. (The thing kind of sucks.) You are nostalgic for your childhood.

crazygringo 2y ago

What did he mean by CD distortion? I'm also not super clear on how digital video would have jitter in a way that analog video wouldn't? I totally agree with his overall sentiment, I'm just a bit confused on the specific examples.

jcarrano 2y ago
I read that, at least early on, many CDs were mastered with inadequate dithering, resulting in audible quantization noise.
nayuki 2y ago
Good questions. CD distortion include hard clipping from amplifying too much, whereas vacuum tubes and magnetic tape have soft saturation (still a distortion, just a different kind). Another distortion is that dynamic range compression is used, bringing up the volume of quiet parts of a song. As for digital video jitter, I can think of MPEG compression artifacts, both spatial (e.g. DCT mosquito noise) and temporal (e.g. motion compensation errors, periodic keyframe refreshes).
- kevin_thibedeau 2y ago
  That is bad mastering, not an inherent property of CDs.
  - shiroiushi 2y ago
    It's not, but it's very, very common, basically the rule in fact, starting I think in the early 2000s.
numpad0 2y ago
There is something in CD that is noticeable by listening to vinyl, CD, and optionally mp3. I'd say CD makes everything sound like a harpsichord, but just ever so slightly. Maybe it's encoding or maybe it's decoding. Or something else. It's a first generation digital format, after all. Analog videos never stutter but digital formats tend to have non-constant processing cost and do stutter occasionally. Maybe he's referring to that?

jcarrano 2y ago

People are now corrupting mpeg video intentionally. They call it "datamoshing". And of course there is glitch art, and the "vhs look" filter being (over) used everywhere.

joenot443 2y ago

An account called Natspone plays with this idea in shortform vertical videos, I find it incredibly bizarre and unsettling. I should forewarn - you're probably not going to enjoy the style at all. https://www.instagram.com/p/C3HtsLXOgui/?hl=en https://www.instagram.com/p/C3HtsLXOgui/?hl=en

lancesells 2y ago
This is brilliant
JKCalhoun 2y ago
Lynch shit, for sure.

pimlottc 2y ago

This is a big thing for early synthesizers. Many of them tried quite hard to accurate emulate real instruments - pianos, horns, strings - but inevitably failed due to limitations of their time. But many of them became classics in their own rights, to the point that later synths emulated them. And now, of course, you can get software versions of the same synths which do an incredible job of reproducing every last detail of a hardware instrument that did a bad job of emulating an analog one!