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Comment by nyolfen | Hacker News Reader

“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. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.”

--Brian Eno

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2025 startup idea: an app that seeds your inbox with dubious pharmaceutical offerings and impassioned pleas from exiled Nigerian princes.

Are you predicting an end to spam in 10 years?

Personally, I haven't received spam (with Gmail) in years. My university outlook account still receives a lot though.

Please take some from my inbox. It's still most certainly a problem, even with Gmail.

As a teacher I've had the opposite problem: students whose email (sent from university email addresses) got caught in the SPAM filter. All of them had Russian names.

This. Gmail and co (Microsoft I an looking at you) have "solved" spam by classifying everything as spam until proven innocent.

Even if everybody moves to FLAC or other lossless music format, musicians will still likely add in MP3 compression artifact sounds. After all, like with vinyl, it makes the music sound warmer.

No it doesn't, that's BS. No one prefers the sound of MP3. Vinyl sounds better not because of some alleged "distortion", either.

If the artifacts of vinyl pressing and playback are not distortion, what are they?

I thought people prefer the sound of vinyl because it's analog and has a much wider range that digital music. (Not because it's distorted)

Exactly. And also that it can't be loudness-warred to death.

"Loudness wars" has everything to do with mastering and very little to do with the actual medium. Yes, the onset of the loudness wars coincided with the rise of digital distribution, but you can master a record to be just as loud as a CD. On the other hand, you can't master a record to have as much dynamic range as a CD. That's why classical music enthusiasts tend to prefer CDs.

No you can't. A record cut that hot would make the needle skip out of the groove.

Have you listened to any recently released records? They're loud as hell.

Vinyl in actual use has a much narrower range than CDs or MP3s. One things that is common, though, is for Vinyl to be mastered differently than the digital final result. So, it is entirely possible for the CD/MP3 release of a given song to have a much narrower dynamic range than a Vinyl release of a given song despite being released on demonstrably inferior technology.

Said differently, the limitations of a medium can lead to better decisions. What can be done with a limited toolset is often better than what can be done with an unlimited toolset.

In this specific case, it's not a result of the toolset, but a result of the consumer. The vinyl enthusiast is buying something they are a fan of at a higher price and expecting a quality product. The typical MP3 customer is buying it based on a 15 second sample. So, the 'loudness wars' still apply to many digital products, sadly.

The loudness wars aren't physically possible on vinyl, they aren't prevented by customer preference but instead by physics.

Photographing in black and white forces the photographer to concentrate on light, shadow, and texture.

There are several art forms where the artist picks a set of restrictions to work in and that exploration can create great things.

The demoscene creates mind-blowing works because they have to work in such a small data space.

If every organism survived and reproduced without any restriction, the sum of life would be pond scum.

The punishing negative feedback of restrictions drives creation – just as much as breaking those boundaries.

Less is more.

Worse is better.

Everything in moderation.

They could still just as easily take the existing digital master and dial down the amplitude a bit to work with vinyl. This would be especially easy considering how few vinyl records they sell vs digital. But, many people are paying a premium for vinyl and expecting better sound.

That is simply NOT TRUE.

Vinyl has been demonstrated to be able to cut and playback frequencies of up to 70khz, and many commercially released records from as far back as the 70s had data up to the mid 40khz range (and in fact this is required for quadraphonic playback).

Even if it's theoretically capable of doing that, I think the average cd player produces a better frequency range than the average record player. In any case, I thought the parent was talking about dynamic range, not frequency range.

http://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=Myths_(Vinyl)#Myt...

And FM radio can handle frequencies well beyond that.

Wider range of what?

Vinyl sounds nice to many people. It has likeable, some say 'musical', distortion.

A turntable with a nice amp and speakers is a novel treat to people who have grown up with low-bitrate mp3s and ear buds. Sounds different. And having to work a bit harder and paying attention means you tend to get more out of it.

Of course, a well-mastered CD and a nice pair of headphones also sounds great and might be a more accurate reproduction of what they heard in the studio.

I just like music every way :)

Α FLAC player with a nice amp and speakers is an even nicer way, and, about the working hard part, I could say the same for waiting tables to buy your music.

I don't know, this all sounds like rationalization to me. Saying "I grew up with vinyl so it sounds more familiar to me" is fine, I grew up with 8-bit graphics and I like them, but they're not objectively better. Trying to rationalize this preference with things like "bigger pixels are easier to see" is a bit disingenuous, though.

See: http://web.archive.org/web/20090804164014/http://i.gizmodo.c...

  Students were asked to judge the quality of a variety of
  compression methods randomly mixed with uncompressed 44.1 KHz
  audio. The music examples included both orchestral, jazz and
  rock music. When I first did this I was expecting to hear
  preferences for uncompressed audio and expecting to see MP3 (at
  128, 160 and 192 bit rates) well below other methods (including
  a proprietary wavelet-based approach and AAC). To my surprise,
  in the rock examples the MP3 at 128 was preferred. I repeated
  the experiment over 6 years and found the preference for MP3 -
  particularly in music with high energy (cymbal crashes, brass
  hits, etc) rising over time.

And from http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/03/the-sizzling-sound-of-music...

  ... each year the preference for music in MP3 format rises.
  In other words, students prefer the quality of that kind of
  sound over the sound of music of much higher quality. He said
  that they seemed to prefer “sizzle sounds” that MP3s bring to
  music. It is a sound they are familiar with.

Oh my god. I remember that "sizzle." That's the perfect way to put it!

... It is not missed.

This reminded me of Ludum Dare right now, because the rankings for the most recent jam are just in: the top 100 is almost exclusively comprised of faux 8bit games. I don't mind the graphics so much, usually, because they are only retro to a point, and they do tend to cheat in places that enable the end results to be pretty. But if you look at the top 100 of sound/music rankings, almost all of those are absolutely jarring cacophonies.

Yes, the same thing is present in Android games. It's "pixel art", but the "pixels" aren't all the same size - like some parts the art is clearly 4x compared to some other bits - and then it's intermixed with high-res effects (lighting, gradients, flares, etc.)

Great quote. "Too momentous for the medium" reminded me of the intensity created by Sleigh Bell's purposefully overblown beats: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XSHJjYwGJNA

That was something I thought of immediately as well. And Times New Viking: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQJvAXOohoU

Speaking of that 8-bit sound, check Rob Hubbard's outstanding composition for 'Monty on the Run' (1985) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4EcgruWlXnQ

A friend of mine composed a great list of chiptunes: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLtCIrnpefsWr_nJJENh9o...

Check out Tim Follin's N-channels-through-1-bit on the Spectrum's piezo-electric buzzer.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T42WuUpBuHE (AgentX) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9hPOUvgKTA (AgentX II)

> ... is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.

I think the reason is that the effort these limitations assign to us -- the imagination we need to activate in order to overcome them -- is what attaches us to them.

>CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video

Too bad for him that such things do not exist.

> jitteriness of digital video

Not the same thing, but "film grain" is a thing.

Some CDs are distorted because the mixers boost the volume until it clips. No doubt this could end up influencing a music style in the future.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war

This is how I feel every time I work on a decent-sized chunk of Javascript...designs so grand they break through mere weak typing and floating-point.

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