A Tome of Forbidden Technologies
ecosophia.net
ecosophia.net
Were there CDs with lower sampling rates than the standard 44.1kHz? I could understand complaining about low quality DACs or something, but if 44kHz is not enough for you then you're either a child or a bat.
And I'd wager this guy cannot tell the difference between 44.1kHz and native 192kHz in a controlled double blind study.
In the beginning, it was extremely expensive to make analog low-pass filters that were steep enough to block frequencies over 22 kHz, but to pass those under 20 kHz.
So many audio-to-digital conversions used cheaper anti-aliasing filters, with a narrower pass-band, which could be significantly lower than the 20 kHz promised by the CD technology. The CDs mastered in this way had a worse quality than claimed.
Even today, such analog low-pass filters would be too expensive, which is why now everybody uses much higher sampling frequencies for audio, like 192 kHz.
If a 44.1 kHz digital stream is desired, it is obtained through digital filtering and decimation, which are free of the constructive problems of analog filters.
But higher sampling frequencies where impossible in the early years of CDs, when the existing 16-bit ADCs barely reached 44.1 kHz.
Moreover, 16-bit DACs were very expensive, so the cheaper CD players used DACs with a lower resolution, like 14-bit DACs, which further reduced the quality of playback.
So for some years in the beginning, typical CD quality was not as good as advertised and as demonstrated by using equipment much more expensive than what was typical for consumer players or even in the recording studios with smaller budgets.
That wouldn't result in "tinny" sound though as the article claims.
The change from cd to vinyl "sound" was largely about mastering, and cheap digital production technology being not that great. But you can find examples of the same master going to cd or vinyl, and there's no benefit to the vinyl.
And I say this as someone who enjoys the physical medium, huge art covers, and tube amps.
The 44.1 kHz sampling frequency is theoretically able to ensure a 20 kHz pass-band for audio signals.
But this does not mean that this is true for an actual recording.
A 44.1 kHz ADC cannot be used without being preceded by an analog low-pass filter.
An analog low-pass filter that blocks signals over 22 kHz and passes those under 20 kHz has always been and it would be even today very expensive.
That is why many early CD recordings may have used worse anti-aliasing filters, which could have reduced the pass-band to significantly less than 20 kHz, possibly also introducing audible artifacts due to a non-flat frequency characteristic at the high end of their pass-band.
Because of the great difficulty of making digital recordings when using a 44.1 kHz sampling frequency, as soon as faster ADCs became available, the standard method has become to use at least a double sampling frequency or even better a quadruple sampling frequency, and then use digital filtering and decimation for creating the CD audio.
However this became possible only many years later after the introduction of CDs.
I was there when the switch happened. I can't express how happy I was to get rid of vynils and cassette tapes and trade the whole thing for CDs.
I'm a "musicphile" and always disliked vynils for the noise, slowly degrading sound, pain the ass handling and care and, yes, audio quality. I always loved CD's pristine quality and everything else really.
Their unavoidable defect was that the quality degraded continuously with the number of times you played them.
When played on a cheaper turntable, even playing them only 3 or 4 times could be enough for a noticeable degradation of the quality.
That is why before CDs most audiophiles who were not too poor played their vinyls only once, to transfer them onto an open reel magnetic tape, which was played from then on, to avoid wearing the vinyl record.
The biggest common factor for the benefits of old electronic technology now considered obsolete is much lower latency. For nearly every modern digital technology that takes a noticeable amount of time, there's an older version that is less capable but also has a practically instant response to input. Telephony, television, keyboard input lag, sound amplification, the list goes on.
Many of us are alive solely because of technologies developed in the last 20-30 years, and (I at least) find such objectively false claims actually personally offensive.
If you think deepfakes and algorithmic social media are the main recent outcomes of technological progress, you’re simply not paying attention. Did we forget about cheap solar? LiFePo4 battery technology? Monoclonal antibodies? 4nm process node chips?
Like, wtf?
A really really tiny percentage of us is that. Make it 100 years and you got something. 150 years is even better.
No, they weren't actually. It's fine to enjoy vinyl. I have some myself, but the audiophiles were no more right about sampling rates than they were about paying for platinum-coated speaker cables.
> For that matter, if any Ford Motor Company executives happen to read this, I have a helpful suggestion for you, too. Cooperate with the mass pruning of regulations, and then get one of your factories turning out brand new copies of the 1966 Mustang fastback.
I'm going to be generous and call this cute, but... no one wants this. And even aside from there not being a massive market for 1966 Mustang fastbacks, tossing out environmental regulations wholesale just so we could build more cars gets us what exactly, as a society?
> Chemical pesticides got marketed using the same high-pressure tactics that made CDs popular
This is just conspiracy brain. Chemical pesticides are cheap, they massively increase yields, and they work.
> I’m going to focus here on one of the many branches of homeopathic medicine, partly because it’s the one I use and partly because it’s been sedulously ignored by the pseudoskeptics who like to assail anything that doesn’t make profits for Big Pharma.
Basically, if you disagree with him about his quack medicine, you're a "pseudo-skeptic" just looking out for Big Pharma's bottom line.
This post has a very simple response: there is no book of "forbidden" technologies. These technologies were abandoned mostly out of experience and demonstrated inferiority to alternatives. The fact that conspiratorial thinking is used to explain their failure suggests that the author is more committed to believing in their superiority than actually gathering evidence and making a rational choice.
The hallmark of the anti-intellectual is to attack your motivation instead of your evidence. This made it really clear to me that this is not a serious writer.
I.e. OP suggests FORD leave out all the modern safety improvements (air bags, crumple zones, ABS brakes) this is exactly the argument the GOP have about capitalism: regulations simply stand in the way of profits.
The whole article is narrow minded and short sighted IMHO.
Bring back older cars with poor safety and high energy costs? Seriously?
Distrust medicine and agriculture?
Wtf is this doing on HN?
This is the author :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Michael_Greer
> John Michael Greer (born 1962) is an American writer and druid who writes on religious, environmentalist, and occult topics.
The fact that this blog has such high readership is an indictment on our poor education system. Though, granted, it looks like a much older audience that is commenting.