Submitted by Most PCs tend to boot from a primary media storage, be it a hard disk drive, or a solid-state drive, perhaps from a network, or – if all else fails – the USB stick or the boot DVD comes to the rescue… Fun, eh? Boring! Why don’t we try to boot from a record player for a change?
I hope he’s using gold-plated triple-insulated Monster cables with diamond tips and uranium signal repeaters, because otherwise the superior quality of the vinyl will get lost. Would be a shame.
Great, I can double my PCs performance just by changing the size of the belt pulley!
Alas, my part of the world still runs on the old imperial 33-1/3!
cpcf,
Because it was all just audio modulation there were quite a few ways to transfer & load software. I never saw anything like this personally, but I’ve read that some TV programs back in the day would broadcast commodore code that could be input using the modem. Imagine downloading a game or demo from the TV!
Alfman
I’m embarrassed to say I might have actually tried the TV stuff for Commodore64, but as I recall it wasn’t FTA broadcast but a VHS tape and a stick style “code reader” that came as part of a game kit! I think they were trying to make Cluedo style games more interactive!
They did this in the UK. You’d record the last part of the TV program’s audio onto a cassette, then play it back on your cassette drive on your C64, Spectrum etc etc
I lol’ed hard at the Monster cables bit. Truly knowledgeable people know that the only advantage of vinyl (compared to CD) is that you typically get a master with much less “loudness boost”. And excessive “loudness boost” is very, very audible and annoying to the ear, hence the perceived “warmth” of vinyl. But this doesn’t stop the so-called audiophiles from claiming that the audio must always be heard from vinyl and never digitized otherwise it loses its “warmth”.
Recently, the practice of selling less “loudness boost” at a premium has moved to the “hi-rez” digital audio files. You see, the good ol’ CD format (44.1Khz/16-bit) is perfectly adequate for capturing all you can hear, so they’ve got to have something to push the idea that “premium” audio formats exist!
https://discuss.cakewalk.com/index.php?/topic/958-is-192khz-hi-res-audio-recording-in-studio-worth-it/&do=findComment&comment=7826
@Kurkosdr
On the audiophile stuff, my wife gave away my old Rotel valve amplifier, well effectively gave it away, sold for a pittance as part of a garage sale while I was travelling for business!
Sound hasn’t been the same since!
I think there’s websites where you can sell your wife. Might be worth looking into
Well, I suppose if I valued possessions more than people or if I thought a partner was a possession, that might apply.
This is why you should make it clear which things are exclusively yours and which are exclusively yours and valuable (aka not to be touched even for fun).
BTW amplifiers and speakers are a different beast altogether. This is where the real loss happens most of the time. Anyway, there are good transistorized amplifiers that emulate lamps fairly well, so you don’t have to mess around with lamps that burn out.
I’m the type that has an office like an 18th Century Natural Philosopher’s library, my wife could live on the sparse space station set from 2001: A Space Odyssey and still feel that somethings were in the way!
My hobby car was sold under the same circumstances, vintage wagon with a 357 Small Block Chevy and Turbo 400 Automatic I had fitted over the years, that I was ever so slowly(too slowly it seems) tinkering into a weekend ride. Valuable has nothing to do with it, some people do not see the value in anything and sooner or later everything becomes junk given enough time!
The Hi-fi industry cannot accept that a medium developed in the late ’70’s actually contains mostly everything a human hear can hear. Luckily for them the loudness war helped to spread the message that CD sounds bad so they can sell you 10k turntables and Vinyl luxury reprints of old album (most of them from a digital master).
My audiphile friend claims the best sound is produced with the master reels. but i do not know.
I agree but in the context that we are discussing a different level of equipment, the performance of which is not primarily related to the recording medium but the rest of the hardware attached to it and controlling it. Master reels for a period were replaced with a DAT like medium.
I have the very same debates with associates about Oscilloscopes, they wonder why I don’t throw out my old heavy inefficient clunky hardware, they don’t get it until they can’t solve a problem using a deluxe digital device and I wheel out the geriatric analogue kit and get it sorted in half an hour. Of course that doesn’t mean I refuse the digital, I use the latest and greatest too, but that doesn’t mean I’m silly enough to think one solution fits all!
The vinyl “warmth” isn’t completly a myth. You get it with records from the 50-70’s because of the equipment used in the studios at the time and the way the sound engineers worked back then…
larkin,
Yeah, it’s really two different concepts: 1) the ability of humans to perceive differences in mediums and 2) individual preferences for a specific (lossy) frequency response curve. Sometimes lossy reproductions can sound “warmer” even if they are less faithful to the original.
This is why a test comprising of “which do you think sounds better” is not really of good indication of audio fidelity. As far as digital audio fidelity goes, the best objective measure is to ignore what people say and perform double blind A/B testing where subjects can either consistently identify differences correctly or not.
Indeed. Vinyls that are released right now are digitally mastered and if you use a high end turntable so there’s no noise or hiss and do an A/B blind test between a vinyl a a flac file, I’m not sure those people would really detect the << warmth >>.