4 ms·

> It’s not just aesthetic. The mountains feel more like massive objects on these older cameras than they do on modern iPhone cameras. Can you post a representa

> It’s not just aesthetic. The mountains feel more like massive objects on these older cameras than they do on modern iPhone cameras. Can you post a representative mountain photo from each camera? I'm very curious what generates this feeling for you.

SirFatty 2y ago
It's probably along the same line as how vinyl records supposedly sound better.
- superultra 2y ago
  I get that you're saying this as if to point out the hipster-ness of vinyl. I work in the music industry and have personally overseen the manufacturing of 100's of thousands of records, so I'm as much an expert as anyone on this topic. Yes, vinyl is technically an inferior sound quality to FLACs. I'm happy to rant all day about the flaws of vinyl. I personally prefer high quality digital. However on a good pressing there is an undeniable difference to a good vinyl pressing. It's not dissimilar from why I said that my kids frame the shots on digital cameras in ways that are different using an iphone. The processes that surround vinyl are different (better?) than those we use for digital mastering. Engineers pay more attention to vinyl mastering than they do digital. While there's a lot of shitty USB turntables, even those are often far better than how most people listen to music digitally which is often on iphones and shitty laptop speakers. The physicality of vinyl manufacturing incurs requisite different attention and processes that sometimes (emphasis on sometimes) results in a "better" listening experience. Could you get the same "better" listening experience with lossless digital? Yes. but most don't. So vinyl is "better."
  - tekla 2y ago
    > The processes that surround vinyl are different (better?) than those we use for digital mastering. Engineers pay more attention to vinyl mastering than they do digital. I call BS. I know people who work in music mastering, and I've asked about this. They use the same digital masters for the digital release and for vinyl. They know people will buy vinyls if they want to no matter what if they want to, so it doesn't matter if the digital master isn't perfectly attuned to the vinyl medium
    - superultra 2y ago
      > They use the same digital masters for the digital release and for vinyl. With all due respect, you don't know what you're talking about. If the engineers you know do that, you don't know good engineers. edit: I can't reply to tekla's comment, so I'm editing here. It's frustrating on Hacker News for an expert - like myself, who has sat in on dozens of mastering sessions - to be disputed by someone who "knows some people." I'll clarify further. Do some engineers use the same mixes for vinyl as they do for digital? Sure. They're not good engineers. Or the customer hasn't paid enough (it's usually about $60-$100 per song to master per format). Vinyl is a drastically different medium than digital - of course - and any decent engineer will 100% mix differently and accordingly. If there are artists reading this and your engineer is using the same mix, fire them. You're paying a lot to press to vinyl so do the followthrough and get vinyl-specific mastering. Here's a good article from an engineer I have worked with many times on why mastering for vinyl is different: https://www.oregonlive.com/music/2014/11/does_vinyl_really_sound_better.html https://www.oregonlive.com/music/2014/11/does_vinyl_really_s...
      - tekla 2y ago
        /shrug. He said/she said standoff is always fun, with a mix of insults. People who are the type to buy vinyls will buy them no matter what, as long as its not obviously a bad press. Why would any sound engineer bother to do extra work for such a low volume, high chance of losing money, PITA to work with medium, unless they were some sort of super artist.
      - unvs 2y ago
        I'm a good engineer. I've done tons of mixes for records released both digitally and on vinyl or even tape. I never create different mixes for the formats - but I work with great mastering engineers and cutters who will create different masters for each format.
        superultra 2y ago
        Thanks for commenting. I'm curious why you wouldn't master specifically to the format. There are so many nuances to vinyl with mistakes that can deeply impact sales when the job isn't done right. For my own part, we had to recut the lacquers on a vinyl release five times to get it right, because the nature of the mix created a middling sound that bounced the needle around and caused intense surface sound. Once we solved that problem, the pressings sounded great. Obviously with cassettes the profit margin isn't there to justify the additional expense of mastering, and to my ears cassette mastering rarely sounds different than the digital master (maybe some slightly different leveling). I believe NAC actually has a mastering guide to master to cassettes kicking around. But...not sure anyone follows it. Just to be honest, I don't doubt you're a great engineer. But if you weren't mastering specific to format...I wouldn't hire you. Increasingly we've gone to vinyl-exclusive engineers on bigger projects, because it's so crucial to get the sound right at the start and poor vinyl mastering can cause problems months down the manufacturing line that are costly.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- louthy 2y ago
  Vinyl is technically worse in that the low-end and high-end frequencies need to be rolled off to cut. It's also technically worse in that it can't do low-end stereo without the needle jumping out of the groove. The reasons that people might prefer it (subjectively) are: * The notion that it's 'warmer' - all this means is the high-end frequencies have been rolled off * The subtle distortion effect you get from feedback through the needle. The needle, as well as picking up the groove, acts like a microphone for any sound nearby (i.e. the speakers playing the record). This then feeds back through the same loop, creating a subtle chorus effect (very subtle). I've played in enough large nightclubs with massive sound-systems to know that my records sound completely different in them. The feedback is more extreme, so the chorus effect is more pronounced. This often turns into bigger low end at higher volumes. It can also be problematic if you have a record that's been cut too quietly. You need to turn the gain up on the mixer, picking up more of the club speakers, eventually creating audible feedback hum. But, by having the same 'effect' on every record played, there then seems to be a consistency of sound from one record to the next. Creating something that's more 'glued' together. It absolutely comes across. If you know what you're listening for then you understand, but most people just feel it. It's technically distortion, but humans like distortion. Anything too clean is boring to the human ear. So, vinyl, is not technically better. But, it has some artefacts that are pleasing to the human ear. And, I suspect, that's what people pick up on subliminally (if they're not just trying to be boring hipsters).
  - turbojet1321 2y ago
    If the general consensus is that vinyl sounds better, and the improvement is largely from rolling off highs and mono-ing lows - why don't the digital masters use the same technique? ie, why isn't there only a vinyl-ready master? I'm not disagreeing - just interested. I actually roll off the highs via EQ for almost all my headphones and speakers.
    - louthy 2y ago
      Making lows mono doesn't sound better (although sometimes it can make the bass seem less muddy, but if you have muddy stereo bass you'd normally fix that too). Some of the highs and lows come back in the pressing. You cut more in the vinyl master only for them to be recovered somewhat in the pressing. You don't get it all back, so the effect I guess has an element of the unknown. Thought I'd just clarify that. The distortion and chorusing are definitely aspects of 'warmth' too. So, it's not just about the highs and lows. Producers absolutely try to 'warm up' their digital sound sources, stems, and masters with harmonic distortion. I guess you'll always get a bit more with vinyl. I think some of this is the culture of the industry itself. The major recording studios, engineers, etc. were on a 'war against distortion and noise' from the early 50s. Then digital came along and suddenly it was possible to have low-noise floors and pretty much zero distortion through digital sound sources (plugins). Because digital was deemed to be 'cold', there has been a bit of a backlash against that in the past decade or so: * Major mixing console manufacturers, like SSL, after decades of trying to make their mixers as clean as possible are now releasing desks like the Origin [1] which are throwbacks to their late 70s desks. Every classic compressor, EQ, delay, flanger, phaser... from the 50s onwards, still exists either in original form or cloned-form. People are still buying the equipment of the past to make music. And digital plugin manufacturers are stil releasing plugins that try to emulate the old gear. * New genres appeared like 'lo-fi' [2] that actively does what you say. It tries to degrade the sound for digital too. * The fact that vinyl isn't just still here, but resurgent, is I guess more evidence of that. But I still think, to a certain extent, that professionals in the industry want to use the full range and accept that some of it will be lost with a vinyl press. Brighter music is perceived to be louder, so on a radio or something like that, it will cut through better and be more likely to be noticed. I think the recent end of the 'loudness wars' [3] may well see some changes toward releases with different EQ curves. I own over 10,000 records. I don't buy them because they're 'warmer', I buy them for the UX! I have a terrible memory, but I remember the sleeve of every record I own. I don't know what they're called, just "it's the green one"! I think the warmth argument is slightly overplayed, but I also understand why subliminally people might feel that records are subjectively better because of it. [1] https://solidstatelogic.com/products/origin https://solidstatelogic.com/products/origin [2] https://www.masterclass.com/articles/what-is-lofi-explained https://www.masterclass.com/articles/what-is-lofi-explained [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war
- tivert 2y ago
  > It's probably along the same line as how vinyl records supposedly sound better. I'm not an audiophile, but that's actually probably objectively true, but for non-obvious reasons that are not clear if you're just looking at technical specs. Digital music can sound better, but opens up the technical possibility of prioritizing other things, which are in fact prioritized. IIRC, it was the "loudness war." Digital audio capable of a much wider dynamic range than vinyl, but the record companies choose to throw most of that away in order to make the music sound "louder." Technical limitations of vinyl prevent those shenanigans (I believe the grooves would be too wide or something), which forces the music to be mastered in a better way than sounds better.
- alexjplant 2y ago
  Vinyl is technically lower-performance than well-designed digital but albums that came out in the heyday of the LP sound better on that medium because they were generally mastered with more range. Vinyl has less practical dynamic range than 16-bit PCM but in that era they only had hardware limiters which meant that your mastering engineer couldn't just slap Ozone or L3 on the two-track and brickwall it to within an inch of its life via transient shaping and other DSP tricks. This is also why early CD releases of these albums often sound quieter (and better with a slight turn of the volume knob) than the remasters. Don't get me wrong... some older releases were mastered hot (presumably to stand out on a jukebox in a crowded bar) but even Motown's best attempts can't hold a candle to the nihilistic tidal wave of digital crunch that is possible with modern pop and rock mastering. For this reason buying modern albums on vinyl doesn't make much sense to me besides for collectibility and sentimentality. I have a few hundred LPs sitting in my closet behind me but it's for those reasons, not because I have any delusions about a non-existent inherent sonic advantage of the medium.
superultra 2y ago
Here are two examples: https://postimg.cc/gallery/g8kzGHB https://postimg.cc/gallery/g8kzGHB https://postimg.cc/gallery/ChSgbdd https://postimg.cc/gallery/ChSgbdd
- crazygringo 2y ago
  Thanks! Which is which? Are you saying you prefer the bottom ones?
  - superultra 2y ago
    In the mountain photos, IMG_1187 and IMAGE 2024-12-03 08:31:09 are the iphone photos. I think they're fine. But the alternate images (which are by a Canon PowerShot S50) convey better the lighting of how the scene actually looked IRL.
    - bitcurious 2y ago
      The Canon shots are also more zoomed in, shot with a longer focal length on the lens. The obvious effect of focal length is zoom, but it’s the change in foreground-background distortion that makes the photos look weird or good. Flat, wide lenses like the one used for the iPhone photo exaggerate the foreground and shrink the background. As you lengthen the lens you shrink the distortion and pretty soon you hit a point where it matches the distortion of your eyes’ lenses. That’s when photos look most natural.
    - pdpi 2y ago
      The iPhone photo of the mountain has a really nicely balanced dynamic range. The Canon one has blown out highlights where the clouds meet the peaks, and really dark shadows with almost no discernible detail. From a purely technical point of view, the iPhone picture is a "better" photo, but this serves as a perfect example of how "technically better" and "artistically better" are not the same thing. Ultimately, photography is less about the quality of the equipment, and more about what you do with it (cliché, I know), and phone cameras are pretty high quality but clip your wings by taking all control away from you. Your kids might benefit from an entry-level Sony a6000 or a6100 (the a6000 is ancient but shockingly capable) or equivalent, and some practice with raw processing software (Lightroom Classic is the default choice here, but Darktable is great if you don't want to give Adobe your money. Apple Photos is a pretty damn decent beginner option too).

SirFatty 2y ago

It's probably along the same line as how vinyl records supposedly sound better.

superultra 2y ago
I get that you're saying this as if to point out the hipster-ness of vinyl. I work in the music industry and have personally overseen the manufacturing of 100's of thousands of records, so I'm as much an expert as anyone on this topic. Yes, vinyl is technically an inferior sound quality to FLACs. I'm happy to rant all day about the flaws of vinyl. I personally prefer high quality digital. However on a good pressing there is an undeniable difference to a good vinyl pressing. It's not dissimilar from why I said that my kids frame the shots on digital cameras in ways that are different using an iphone. The processes that surround vinyl are different (better?) than those we use for digital mastering. Engineers pay more attention to vinyl mastering than they do digital. While there's a lot of shitty USB turntables, even those are often far better than how most people listen to music digitally which is often on iphones and shitty laptop speakers. The physicality of vinyl manufacturing incurs requisite different attention and processes that sometimes (emphasis on sometimes) results in a "better" listening experience. Could you get the same "better" listening experience with lossless digital? Yes. but most don't. So vinyl is "better."
- tekla 2y ago
  > The processes that surround vinyl are different (better?) than those we use for digital mastering. Engineers pay more attention to vinyl mastering than they do digital. I call BS. I know people who work in music mastering, and I've asked about this. They use the same digital masters for the digital release and for vinyl. They know people will buy vinyls if they want to no matter what if they want to, so it doesn't matter if the digital master isn't perfectly attuned to the vinyl medium
  - superultra 2y ago
    > They use the same digital masters for the digital release and for vinyl. With all due respect, you don't know what you're talking about. If the engineers you know do that, you don't know good engineers. edit: I can't reply to tekla's comment, so I'm editing here. It's frustrating on Hacker News for an expert - like myself, who has sat in on dozens of mastering sessions - to be disputed by someone who "knows some people." I'll clarify further. Do some engineers use the same mixes for vinyl as they do for digital? Sure. They're not good engineers. Or the customer hasn't paid enough (it's usually about $60-$100 per song to master per format). Vinyl is a drastically different medium than digital - of course - and any decent engineer will 100% mix differently and accordingly. If there are artists reading this and your engineer is using the same mix, fire them. You're paying a lot to press to vinyl so do the followthrough and get vinyl-specific mastering. Here's a good article from an engineer I have worked with many times on why mastering for vinyl is different: https://www.oregonlive.com/music/2014/11/does_vinyl_really_sound_better.html https://www.oregonlive.com/music/2014/11/does_vinyl_really_s...
    - tekla 2y ago
      /shrug. He said/she said standoff is always fun, with a mix of insults. People who are the type to buy vinyls will buy them no matter what, as long as its not obviously a bad press. Why would any sound engineer bother to do extra work for such a low volume, high chance of losing money, PITA to work with medium, unless they were some sort of super artist.
    - unvs 2y ago
      I'm a good engineer. I've done tons of mixes for records released both digitally and on vinyl or even tape. I never create different mixes for the formats - but I work with great mastering engineers and cutters who will create different masters for each format.
      - superultra 2y ago
        Thanks for commenting. I'm curious why you wouldn't master specifically to the format. There are so many nuances to vinyl with mistakes that can deeply impact sales when the job isn't done right. For my own part, we had to recut the lacquers on a vinyl release five times to get it right, because the nature of the mix created a middling sound that bounced the needle around and caused intense surface sound. Once we solved that problem, the pressings sounded great. Obviously with cassettes the profit margin isn't there to justify the additional expense of mastering, and to my ears cassette mastering rarely sounds different than the digital master (maybe some slightly different leveling). I believe NAC actually has a mastering guide to master to cassettes kicking around. But...not sure anyone follows it. Just to be honest, I don't doubt you're a great engineer. But if you weren't mastering specific to format...I wouldn't hire you. Increasingly we've gone to vinyl-exclusive engineers on bigger projects, because it's so crucial to get the sound right at the start and poor vinyl mastering can cause problems months down the manufacturing line that are costly.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
louthy 2y ago
Vinyl is technically worse in that the low-end and high-end frequencies need to be rolled off to cut. It's also technically worse in that it can't do low-end stereo without the needle jumping out of the groove. The reasons that people might prefer it (subjectively) are: * The notion that it's 'warmer' - all this means is the high-end frequencies have been rolled off * The subtle distortion effect you get from feedback through the needle. The needle, as well as picking up the groove, acts like a microphone for any sound nearby (i.e. the speakers playing the record). This then feeds back through the same loop, creating a subtle chorus effect (very subtle). I've played in enough large nightclubs with massive sound-systems to know that my records sound completely different in them. The feedback is more extreme, so the chorus effect is more pronounced. This often turns into bigger low end at higher volumes. It can also be problematic if you have a record that's been cut too quietly. You need to turn the gain up on the mixer, picking up more of the club speakers, eventually creating audible feedback hum. But, by having the same 'effect' on every record played, there then seems to be a consistency of sound from one record to the next. Creating something that's more 'glued' together. It absolutely comes across. If you know what you're listening for then you understand, but most people just feel it. It's technically distortion, but humans like distortion. Anything too clean is boring to the human ear. So, vinyl, is not technically better. But, it has some artefacts that are pleasing to the human ear. And, I suspect, that's what people pick up on subliminally (if they're not just trying to be boring hipsters).
- turbojet1321 2y ago
  If the general consensus is that vinyl sounds better, and the improvement is largely from rolling off highs and mono-ing lows - why don't the digital masters use the same technique? ie, why isn't there only a vinyl-ready master? I'm not disagreeing - just interested. I actually roll off the highs via EQ for almost all my headphones and speakers.
  - louthy 2y ago
    Making lows mono doesn't sound better (although sometimes it can make the bass seem less muddy, but if you have muddy stereo bass you'd normally fix that too). Some of the highs and lows come back in the pressing. You cut more in the vinyl master only for them to be recovered somewhat in the pressing. You don't get it all back, so the effect I guess has an element of the unknown. Thought I'd just clarify that. The distortion and chorusing are definitely aspects of 'warmth' too. So, it's not just about the highs and lows. Producers absolutely try to 'warm up' their digital sound sources, stems, and masters with harmonic distortion. I guess you'll always get a bit more with vinyl. I think some of this is the culture of the industry itself. The major recording studios, engineers, etc. were on a 'war against distortion and noise' from the early 50s. Then digital came along and suddenly it was possible to have low-noise floors and pretty much zero distortion through digital sound sources (plugins). Because digital was deemed to be 'cold', there has been a bit of a backlash against that in the past decade or so: * Major mixing console manufacturers, like SSL, after decades of trying to make their mixers as clean as possible are now releasing desks like the Origin [1] which are throwbacks to their late 70s desks. Every classic compressor, EQ, delay, flanger, phaser... from the 50s onwards, still exists either in original form or cloned-form. People are still buying the equipment of the past to make music. And digital plugin manufacturers are stil releasing plugins that try to emulate the old gear. * New genres appeared like 'lo-fi' [2] that actively does what you say. It tries to degrade the sound for digital too. * The fact that vinyl isn't just still here, but resurgent, is I guess more evidence of that. But I still think, to a certain extent, that professionals in the industry want to use the full range and accept that some of it will be lost with a vinyl press. Brighter music is perceived to be louder, so on a radio or something like that, it will cut through better and be more likely to be noticed. I think the recent end of the 'loudness wars' [3] may well see some changes toward releases with different EQ curves. I own over 10,000 records. I don't buy them because they're 'warmer', I buy them for the UX! I have a terrible memory, but I remember the sleeve of every record I own. I don't know what they're called, just "it's the green one"! I think the warmth argument is slightly overplayed, but I also understand why subliminally people might feel that records are subjectively better because of it. [1] https://solidstatelogic.com/products/origin https://solidstatelogic.com/products/origin [2] https://www.masterclass.com/articles/what-is-lofi-explained https://www.masterclass.com/articles/what-is-lofi-explained [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war
tivert 2y ago
> It's probably along the same line as how vinyl records supposedly sound better. I'm not an audiophile, but that's actually probably objectively true, but for non-obvious reasons that are not clear if you're just looking at technical specs. Digital music can sound better, but opens up the technical possibility of prioritizing other things, which are in fact prioritized. IIRC, it was the "loudness war." Digital audio capable of a much wider dynamic range than vinyl, but the record companies choose to throw most of that away in order to make the music sound "louder." Technical limitations of vinyl prevent those shenanigans (I believe the grooves would be too wide or something), which forces the music to be mastered in a better way than sounds better.
alexjplant 2y ago
Vinyl is technically lower-performance than well-designed digital but albums that came out in the heyday of the LP sound better on that medium because they were generally mastered with more range. Vinyl has less practical dynamic range than 16-bit PCM but in that era they only had hardware limiters which meant that your mastering engineer couldn't just slap Ozone or L3 on the two-track and brickwall it to within an inch of its life via transient shaping and other DSP tricks. This is also why early CD releases of these albums often sound quieter (and better with a slight turn of the volume knob) than the remasters. Don't get me wrong... some older releases were mastered hot (presumably to stand out on a jukebox in a crowded bar) but even Motown's best attempts can't hold a candle to the nihilistic tidal wave of digital crunch that is possible with modern pop and rock mastering. For this reason buying modern albums on vinyl doesn't make much sense to me besides for collectibility and sentimentality. I have a few hundred LPs sitting in my closet behind me but it's for those reasons, not because I have any delusions about a non-existent inherent sonic advantage of the medium.

superultra 2y ago

Here are two examples: https://postimg.cc/gallery/g8kzGHB https://postimg.cc/gallery/g8kzGHB https://postimg.cc/gallery/ChSgbdd https://postimg.cc/gallery/ChSgbdd

crazygringo 2y ago
Thanks! Which is which? Are you saying you prefer the bottom ones?
- superultra 2y ago
  In the mountain photos, IMG_1187 and IMAGE 2024-12-03 08:31:09 are the iphone photos. I think they're fine. But the alternate images (which are by a Canon PowerShot S50) convey better the lighting of how the scene actually looked IRL.
  - bitcurious 2y ago
    The Canon shots are also more zoomed in, shot with a longer focal length on the lens. The obvious effect of focal length is zoom, but it’s the change in foreground-background distortion that makes the photos look weird or good. Flat, wide lenses like the one used for the iPhone photo exaggerate the foreground and shrink the background. As you lengthen the lens you shrink the distortion and pretty soon you hit a point where it matches the distortion of your eyes’ lenses. That’s when photos look most natural.
  - pdpi 2y ago
    The iPhone photo of the mountain has a really nicely balanced dynamic range. The Canon one has blown out highlights where the clouds meet the peaks, and really dark shadows with almost no discernible detail. From a purely technical point of view, the iPhone picture is a "better" photo, but this serves as a perfect example of how "technically better" and "artistically better" are not the same thing. Ultimately, photography is less about the quality of the equipment, and more about what you do with it (cliché, I know), and phone cameras are pretty high quality but clip your wings by taking all control away from you. Your kids might benefit from an entry-level Sony a6000 or a6100 (the a6000 is ancient but shockingly capable) or equivalent, and some practice with raw processing software (Lightroom Classic is the default choice here, but Darktable is great if you don't want to give Adobe your money. Apple Photos is a pretty damn decent beginner option too).