paulo

Rain
 
I remember the first music tape I made using my little tape recorder (because my parents didn't have a tape deck, only an 8 tracks) - the album was KISS' Creatures of the Night that I'd borrowed from a friend. I had brought the living room's turntable speakers into my room, pressed record and closed the door behind me, ran back to the living room and then put on the vinyl. 
 

 
 

Rain
........... distributing copyrighted material without permission is theft, plain and simple. 
 
 
 ...........no matter who you are stealing from - it's theft. 
 
 

 

My ethics were those of a 11 years old country boy. ;) Not to mention that back then, a percentage of the sales of blank tapes was re-distributed to artists. But I'll be the first to agree that it was stealing music. I just didn't know better, nor did anyone in my entourage.
 
I've since bought 3 copies of that album, though, and KISS has made quite a bit of money with me, so I don't feel entirely bad about it. ;)

batsbrew
just read these:
 
http://xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html
 
http://mixonline.com/recording/mixing/audio_emperors_new_sampling/
 
 
if you go to the link at MIXONLINE....

you'll find this:

"But something is causing people to say they are hearing differences.
If a double-blind test can't confirm those differences, then what's going on?
For one possible reason, let's go back to Moorer's paper that I quoted earlier (called “New Audio Formats: A Time of Change and a Time of Opportunity,” which can be found on his Website, http://www.jamminpower.com).
Later in the paper, Moorer noted that humans can distinguish time delays — when they involve the difference between their two ears — of 15 microseconds or less. Do the math, and you can see that while the sampling interval at 48 kHz is longer than 15 µs, the sampling interval at 96 kHz is shorter. Therefore, he says, we prefer higher sampling rates because “probably [my emphasis] some kind of time-domain resolution between the left- and right-ear signals is more accurately preserved at 96 kHz.”
 
 
It's an interesting starting point for a discussion, but to my knowledge it's never gotten past that point — as a theory, it has never been expanded upon or tested.

i think there is more to it, and no one has really pursued it beyond the Meyer/Moran experiment
 

The reason it never got far is that the timing resolution of sampling is MUCH greater than 1/sample_rate, so the entire argument was based on a completely false premise.

It's funny how when we were kids and taping stuff off the radio, we instinctively knew that there was something about the sound which was vastly inferior to the "real" version, even if we knew nothing about compression, limiters or dynamics. It just sounded "flat" was all.

sharke
It's funny how when we were kids and taping stuff off the radio, we instinctively knew that there was something about the sound which was vastly inferior to the "real" version, even if we knew nothing about compression, limiters or dynamics. It just sounded "flat" was all.

Had it been pristine audio, I had no chance of knowing. Until the age of 12, besides my aging little radio shack tape recorder and the 3 tapes I owned, all I had was that tiny radio in my bedroom. 
 

 
Belonged to my grandma actually. Looked really cool but I can't even imagine how terrible it sounded. But I'd record tapes with that am radio as the source... My first copy of Mama by Genesis was lifted from there. 

I just had a little yellow plastic transistor just a bit bigger than a cigarette pack. I used to listen to Stans Record Review out of Shreveport Louisiana with a tiny earpiece after everyone else had gone to bed. Later on when I was thirteen and away at military academy I got my first real fold down portable record player. Then it was Katy Bar The Door.

I had a "Crystal Set" with an earplug when I was 10.
They were relatively cheap but flimsy especially if you fell asleep as you needed a thin copper wire to go out the window and attach to the water pipe that ran alongside the house for reception-from memory it had no batteries??
First song I remember hearing on it was Snoopy VS The Red Baron then the Beatles arrived and I upgraded to a very expensive portable transistor that chewed through batteries because I had to listen through the pillow as it would be confiscated if I was caught!
Fidelity just wasn`t an issue.....
 
PS:I bought a pair of the original Bose 901`s in the early 90`s and still use them with a neutral amp and hi-end cd player for checking mixes if I`m not sure.
my point is-folklore has it that good speakers "wear in".
not sure if that's true,i prefer to think you "learn" to hear your speakers,especially after 20 years in a static environment.??
  
 
 

Rain

sharke
It's funny how when we were kids and taping stuff off the radio, we instinctively knew that there was something about the sound which was vastly inferior to the "real" version, even if we knew nothing about compression, limiters or dynamics. It just sounded "flat" was all.

Had it been pristine audio, I had no chance of knowing. Until the age of 12, besides my aging little radio shack tape recorder and the 3 tapes I owned, all I had was that tiny radio in my bedroom. 
 

 
Belonged to my grandma actually. Looked really cool but I can't even imagine how terrible it sounded. But I'd record tapes with that am radio as the source... My first copy of Mama by Genesis was lifted from there. 

Before we had a VCR, my brother and I would tape the audio of our favorite comedy shows onto cassette by standing the cassette player in front of the TV and hitting record. We'd listen to them over and over until we forgot there were pictures to go with the audio. When the show came back on the TV for a second time, it was quite a shock to see what the real visuals were like as opposed to the images we'd created in our heads while listening to the tapes. 

I had one of those crystal sets as well. Not because we didn't have a real radio but because it came as part of an electronics construction set I had as a kid. Does anyone remember those? It was like a glorified bread board with bunch of electronic components and a ton of electronic projects in a manual which told you which of the numbered spring-wire terminals to connect. There was a crystal diode on it and a set of crappy ear plugs. It was a real buzz picking anything up on that. I think it was called "250 in 1" or something like that. Hours and hours of fun. 
 
EDIT: Let's look the damn thing up on the internet and post a photo here. Ah yes, "150 in 1." I think there were bigger versions though. I'm pretty sure this was the exact same one I had. 
 

 

sharke
 
 
Before we had a VCR, my brother and I would tape the audio of our favorite comedy shows onto cassette by standing the cassette player in front of the TV and hitting record. We'd listen to them over and over until we forgot there were pictures to go with the audio. When the show came back on the TV for a second time, it was quite a shock to see what the real visuals were like as opposed to the images we'd created in our heads while listening to the tapes. 

Oh the memories! I did that too - well into the second half of the 80s...:) In fact, the first thing I remember recording was an episode of Grendizer, a Japanese super robot anime I was crazy about.
 
Everything was so hard to find back then. Even just something as silly as a picture. Nowadays, you just google something and you get a gazillion pictures and transcripts and charts and videos and more than you can grasp. 
 
I remember when I was 6 or 7 drawing the cover of That's the Way it Is because I wanted a picture of Elvis to put in my room, cause he was my hero. I think it's the only time my father said something nice to me - or more precisely, he acquiesced when my mom said I had talent. :P
 
Same thing with Grendizer. I'd do my drawings, write stories, record them, do the sound fx, because other than that, all I had was one TV show a week and an occasional 1 page poster in a magazine my grandma used to buy.
 
More than the sound quality, I think that that's what's missing. That sort of deep commitment and involvement. Things are no longer appreciated based on how rare they are, but on how shocking they are.