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My dad grew up in the 50s & 60s. During COVID he purchased my daughters' the, I quote, "shittiest briefcase record players" he could find. Both girls listen to
by thechao 10mo ago
My dad grew up in the 50s & 60s. During COVID he purchased my daughters' the, I quote, "shittiest briefcase record players" he could find. Both girls listen to their music on their devices, but also buy vinyl. The other day, my eldest came down from her room complaining that her vinyl "sounded awful". I told her to bring it up with their Grampy. His response: "you can't appreciate good playback until you've heard awful playback on shitty record players like I had to.". My eldest is now plotting a complete hifi system, and is learning all about how to transfer "vinyl" to "digital" without losing the parts of the vinyl she likes.
This was a 5 year play by my dad. Shout out.
- colechristensen 10mo ago“There should be a science of discontent. People need hard times and oppression to develop psychic muscles.” Sometimes I wonder how much INTENTIONAL engineering people's discontent for good or ill happens across the spectrum of human activity. One thing is for sure, people don't talk about it much. I can think of many examples.
- HPsquared 10mo agoNobody would work if housing and food were super cheap, for instance.
- nkrisc 10mo agoThere’s an equilibrium. If no one worked, housing and food would not be super cheap.
- kingkawn 10mo agoOr people would do things they were genuinely interested in rather than from desperation
- I-M-S 10mo agoSaving the economy by turning water into a luxury item. The op-eds basically write themselves.
- robocat 10mo agoYour cynicism is too close to the truth. Liquid Death, CocaCola branded water, and household water filtration are unbelievable luxuries. Manufactured status for the masses. And my examines are truly luxuries: they are unnecessary for drinking water in developed countries. Pools and green lawns have higher status when water is more expensive/scarcer. I don't hang out with extremely high-status people, or the extremely wealthy, but I'm sure both of those groups have some surprisingly luxury water. Luxury is a human concept that is completely disconnected from the underlying product. Provenance, Branding, Myth, Environmental, Science all matter for status.
- toomuchtodo 10mo agoThere are overwhelming examples of people who continue to work when all of their basic needs are met. Some work because they love to, some work because they have to; we, collectively, should be trying as hard as possible to make work optional (automation, etc), because the point of life is to live, not to work. Some combination of Abundance [1], Solarpunk [2], etc. The entire planet will eventually be in population decline [3] (with most of the world already below fertility replacement rate), so optimizing for endless growth is unnecessary. So keep spinning up flywheels towards these ends if we want to optimize for the human experience, art, creativity, and innovation (to distribute opportunity to parity with talent). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_(Klein_and_Thompson_book) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_(Klein_and_Thompson_... [2] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/nov/12/supply-boom-in-cheaper-renewables-will-seal-end-of-fossil-fuel-era-says-iea https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/nov/12/supply-b... [3] https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~jesusfv/Slides_London.pdf https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~jesusfv/Slides_London.pdf (think in systems)
- kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 10mo ago> the point of life is to live, not to work I'd love to learn how you came to this definitive conclusion. At no point in human history have humans not worked (I'm sure there are some limited exceptions, none of which have been sustainable). Perhaps you meant to say the point of life is to survive, but you have to work to make that happen.
- toomuchtodo 10mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Top_Five_Regrets_of_the_Dying https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Top_Five_Regrets_of_the_Dy... https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ralph_Waldo_Emerson https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ralph_Waldo_Emerson “Art is the proper task of life” -- Nietzsche "Art is to console those who are broken by life." -- Vincent van Gogh Broadly speaking, creation is the meaning of life, not work, although some creation could be considered work. Survival is table stakes to achieve self actualization and a chance at finding meaning and contributing to the commons during a lifetime.
- 10mo ago
- greekrich92 10mo agoIf people were broadly socialized for collaboration and collective good, people could and would achieve as much with many fewer hours of work, and with the many more hours available for personal creative pursuit and play. There is no innate human nature that prevents this, only a prevailing social order which reinforces individualism and competition at the expense of the many.
- kbelder 10mo agoThe Fremen.
- ResisBey 10mo agoThis! If you just care sound quality it becomes "product", no more an experience where you feel it. You tell me your story with your dad, all started by he buying his children "shittiest briefcase record players". An elderly woman gifted me a Brockhaus encyclopedia, making me see the stark contrast between Google's billion-dollar presence and the noiseless authority of the printed word.
- bob1029 10mo ago480i content, CRTs, analog signal chains, non-digital transports, film grain, et. al., provide opportunity for our imagination to step in and produce a better interpolation than the ground truth might otherwise provide.
- justincormack 10mo agoThere is the old quote "I like radio, the pictures are better"
- mrob 10mo agoMusic doesn't need so much support from imagination. You could argue that 24 fps film is a good thing (I disagree), because special effects are expensive and the bad motion quality obscures the flaws, but the same doesn't apply with music. Every major city has an orchestra full of skilled musicians and a concert hall with good acoustics. Just record it as it sounds in the room and put it on CD. You can apply the same philosophy to popular music genres too. CD quality is good enough for this to work. The only imagination needed is to pretend that stereo audio is the full surround sound experience, and that's not difficult when you're sitting in the right position.
- xboxnolifes 10mo agoAt least with CRTs, it's not just the imagination. It's the actual analogue interpolation creating a different image than the raw pixel-perfect without blurring/smoothing. This video and timestamp comes to mind: https://youtu.be/2sxKJeYSBmI?si=ikuOuZl-Ho5_VK4k&t=1613 https://youtu.be/2sxKJeYSBmI?si=ikuOuZl-Ho5_VK4k&t=1613
- numpad0 10mo agoobligatory supplement: everyone used CRTs for monitors back then, albeit of different resolutions for PCs and for watching TVs. It's not like devs had to mentally simulate the effect.
- disqard 10mo agoYou reminded me of how Marshall McLuhan called TV a "cool" (as opposed to "hot") medium. My interpretation is that back in his day, TV was grayscale, grainy, and interlaced, and therefore demanded that the viewer exert their imagination to "complete the picture". I imagine that if he were to see today's 4k full-color 120Hz panels, he would call TV a "hot" medium.
- microtonal 10mo agoI was going to ask, when are the youngsters going to discover CDs? Much less prone to degradation to vinyl, lossless ripping, superior quality.
- stefanfisk 10mo agoBut sadly often horrible mastering.
- jonhohle 10mo agoThat’s not the mediums fault. I’m sure during the 70s and 80s there were equally horrible vinyl masterings.
- greekrich92 10mo agoI have a record collection and a cd collection. It was not the same. So many CDs of older music sound bad on CD. Recordings made during the CD era sound fine though, but I'm not an audiophile. Maybe the "loudness wars" are a complaint for some.
- hunter2_ 10mo agoThe loudness war (in the usual sense of the phrase) on CDs was to not seem weak against other releases. The loudness war (if I may use that phrase very liberally now) on analog media is to not seem weak against hiss and surface noise. The desire to compress and limit dynamic range does exist for both, but for these different reasons. However, a huge difference is that on CDs you're up against a fixed maximum (0 dBFS) so all peaks are equal, which is fatiguing; on vinyl you're up against the adjacent groove, so your maximum amplitude any given moment depends on the amplitude of things in the recent past and near future! Ways to optimize for this are prevalent, amazingly, and the result is less fatiguing.
- antod 10mo agoThere was a stretch of time between when specific mastering for CDs started and before the loudness war kicked in. Plenty of time for good recordings to happen.
- starky 10mo ago>"you can't appreciate good playback until you've heard awful playback on shitty record players like I had to.". My eldest is now plotting a complete hifi system This has strong energy of "Teach your kids how to play Magic, they won't have money for drugs."
- DonHopkins 10mo ago"Teach your kids how to grow weed, they won't need money for drugs."
- seg_lol 10mo agoI got into hydroponics first because I wanted to research closed loop food production.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- ryukoposting 10mo agoIs this a metaphor for me learning how to fix old AV equipment in my basement when I was a kid?
- eudamoniac 10mo agoThis is fine, but I'd encourage anyone to test all new audio setups with a blind triangle test at least, because most people can't distinguish most differences. If you can't tell a difference, using cheap equipment is great!
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- chamomeal 10mo agoAlso a lot of the fun of audio is that it comes down to taste more often than you’d think. There are full setups for a few hundred dollars that I love, and fancy expensive setups that I don’t care for. For me the most fun part is hunting for under appreciated equipment in thrift stores. It’s amazing what you can find without much looking
- bongripper 10mo ago[dead]
- Imustaskforhelp 10mo agoReminds me of one other comment on a different thread about a person trying an old CP/M machine and seeing some restriction like I think it was 50x70 pixel restriction or similar. The point I am trying to make is that nostalgia can seem really good as that comment also pointed that, we often only remember the good parts of the system. It's only when we recounter them that the bad parts resurface again. Now instead of taking the fair criticism and perhaps doing something about it if possible, your dad tried to use the old technique of "back in my day ..." And I will tell you kids ABSOLUTELY hate this. It's more so, Gramps you were forced to deal with this thing, we got digital and you aren't willing to understand my problem so why should I be stuck with the problem or the countless other examples. I don't know much about vinyl but if it's the record players, perhaps your father can buy them a good one which could help them solve the issue they are facing.
- utopcell 10mo agorespect
- xnx 10mo agoEvery child should start the technological hedonic treadmill at a low level and rapidly progress.