You know you are getting old when:

[Worf]

Interesting... I have to drive toe Pittsburgh on Sunday and I'll be there till Thursday (any Loungers in the area wanna meet just let a fellah know). I'm renting a full size for the drive. Seems all these new fangled auto-mobiles have auxillary jacks in them for digital devices of all sorts. Welp, I decided that since I'm gonna be behind the wheel of over 7 hours, access to my music is essentiall. I don't do MP3's I prefer my music lossless I still own a turntable, but I must admit that since ripping all my music to my computers Harddrive I stream it rather than fiddle with CD's or records. I think that was the first step on my road to perdition. To make a long story short... I bought a used Galaxy Player (basically a Samsung phone with everything on it BUT the phone) and have spent the last two days converting my Wav files to MP3's for the trip. Sigh... I held out long as I could... but the basterds got me in the end.

Worf

 

[LizzieMaine]

Sounds about right. In my case my parents (born in 1928 and 29) were a little bit older than those of my friends and had just missed Rock n' Roll. Also as a young kid I wasn't around kids my age that much because almost all of my cousins were much older than me (my oldest cousin just turned 70! :eeek. And the friends of my parents either didn't have any kids or if they did they were like my cousins much older than me. A couple years age difference between kids is often like a 15-20 year age difference among adults.

My mother was precisely the right age to be of the first rock-n-roll generation -- she was born in 1939, graduated high school in 1957, shooby doo wop and all that crap. But she absolutely *loathed* Elvis and all the rest of it -- her favorite musical artist as a teen was Liberace, she was an avid viewer of Lawrence Welk, and the record albums we had around the house when I was growing up were Welk, Sammy Kaye, Billy Vaughn, and Mitch Miller and his Sing-a-Long Gang. And a pile of Arthur Godfrey 78s.

The only childhood awareness of rock was when somebody like Herman's Hermits would appear on the Ed Sullivan show and my grandfather would yell at him to get a g-d haircut. The only awareness I had of the Beatles was as cartoon characters -- I saw "Yellow Submarine" on the bottom half of a double feature headed by a Dean Jones Disney comedy at the local drive-in when I was seven, and it scared me to death.

 

[HudsonHawk]

The record companies force you to listen?!

They limit my choices.

 

[HudsonHawk]

Interesting... I have to drive toe Pittsburgh on Sunday and I'll be there till Thursday (any Loungers in the area wanna meet just let a fellah know). I'm renting a full size for the drive. Seems all these new fangled auto-mobiles have auxillary jacks in them for digital devices of all sorts. Welp, I decided that since I'm gonna be behind the wheel of over 7 hours, access to my music is essentiall. I don't do MP3's I prefer my music lossless I still own a turntable, but I must admit that since ripping all my music to my computers Harddrive I stream it rather than fiddle with CD's or records. I think that was the first step on my road to perdition. To make a long story short... I bought a used Galaxy Player (basically a Samsung phone with everything on it BUT the phone) and have spent the last two days converting my Wav files to MP3's for the trip. Sigh... I held out long as I could... but the basterds got me in the end.

Worf

As I'm sure you know, there are other digital formats besides MP3, including those that are lossless.

 

[jamespowers]

Yeah, but it's the body odor that really puts me off. :faint2:

uke:

 

[jamespowers]

They limit my choices.

Poor baby. :rofl: They limit just you eh?

 

[jamespowers]

As I'm sure you know, there are other digital formats besides MP3, including those that are lossless.

Name one that sounds as good as the original.

 

[Worf]

As I'm sure you know, there are other digital formats besides MP3, including those that are lossless.

Yah... I'm hip to flac... And this player'll do that... but my entire stream has to be flac capable... I'd have to get a new converter program... I'll think on it though...

Worf

 

[HudsonHawk]

Yah... I'm hip to flac... And this player'll do that... but my entire stream has to be flac capable... I'd have to get a new converter program... I'll think on it though...

Worf

If you use iTunes, you can rip your CDs directly into a lossless format, and can play them back in lossless on your iPod. I'm not sure about other players, but I'm guessing they're out there.

 

[HudsonHawk]

Name one that sounds as good as the original.

Unless you are using six-figure audio equipment, I guarantee you that you cannot tell the difference between lossy and lossless playback.

 

[LizzieMaine]

I do all my listening on 1930's radios with a top end audio response of about 8000 cycles, so I don't much care about losses from compression. My beef with the mp3 "Old Time Radio" stuff on the internet is that it's ineptly transferred and even less eptly encoded, often corrupted by some tin-eared adolescent's idea of "noise reduction" to where it sounds like it was broadcast from the bottom of an oil barrel.

I know what actual radio transcriptions sound like. At their best, they sound as good as a modern LP record. They don't sound like a hissy thirtieth-generation cassette dub of a slow-speed quarter-track reel equalized to remove "hiss and scratch" to the point where everything over 2000 cycles has been nulled out, and then encoded to mp3 at 24 kbps.

In the tape-based days of radio program collecting you soon learned who cared about sound quality and who knew how to properly master their recordings, and if you yourself cared about such things, you dealt only with those people. Since the mp3 takeover in the late '90s, the idea seems to be once a program has been encoded, that's all that needs to be done -- no matter how poorly-done the transfer, no matter how utterly inept the encode, that's the version that's "in circulation," and you can take it or leave it. Only for some of the most common, most popular programs has any effort been made to get rid of the dross -- for those whose interests run to the more obscure material, you can take what they have or leave it. The result is a generation of "OTR enthusiasts" who think the crappier the sound, the more "authentic to the actual 1930s-40s listening experience" it actually is, because they've never actually heard a proper transfer.

MP3 has its place -- I use I-Tunes to power my own private low-power broadcasting setup. But wherever possible I avoid the mass-circulated OTR downloads, and transfer my own material from my own transcriptions and tapes.

 

[HudsonHawk]

I'm not an OTR enthusiast, but I'd reckon that many people think of broadcasts from the 1930's as naturally scratchy and hissy because that's what they've seen or heard on some old radio or on TV/movie. Without ever considering the listening device and any loss associated with the analog format, they simply think "well, I guess that's what broadcast technology in those days sounded like". Only if you were 800 miles from the signal tuning in on a crappy radio.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Broadcast technology in the 1930s generally had a response from 20 to 12000 cycles on the studio end, and 30 to 8000 on the receiver end. The quality of network broadcasts varied depending on where along the network you were listening -- a network broadcast would generally top out around 5000 cycles due to the telephone lines carrying the broadcast to the affiliates, but if you were listening in the city of origination you'd hear a much better quality of sound. Even with the issues introduced by network lines, radios were engineered to make the broadcast sound even better than it was -- even a cheap tabletop radio produced a rich, room-filling sound.

Moderns whose idea of AM radio is a cheap plastic transistor set topping out at 3000 cycles don't have any idea what they're missing.

 

[Stanley Doble]

Another factor was, most radio broadcasts were live. The musician's union had a ban on recorded music but I don't know if this was 100% or only for certain shows.

This eliminates all the quibbling about recording quality and leaves only the quality of the broadcasting and receiving equipment, if you really want to talk about the quality of radio in the golden era.

 

[jamespowers]

I do all my listening on 1930's radios with a top end audio response of about 8000 cycles, so I don't much care about losses from compression. My beef with the mp3 "Old Time Radio" stuff on the internet is that it's ineptly transferred and even less eptly encoded, often corrupted by some tin-eared adolescent's idea of "noise reduction" to where it sounds like it was broadcast from the bottom of an oil barrel.

I know what actual radio transcriptions sound like. At their best, they sound as good as a modern LP record. They don't sound like a hissy thirtieth-generation cassette dub of a slow-speed quarter-track reel equalized to remove "hiss and scratch" to the point where everything over 2000 cycles has been nulled out, and then encoded to mp3 at 24 kbps.

In the tape-based days of radio program collecting you soon learned who cared about sound quality and who knew how to properly master their recordings, and if you yourself cared about such things, you dealt only with those people. Since the mp3 takeover in the late '90s, the idea seems to be once a program has been encoded, that's all that needs to be done -- no matter how poorly-done the transfer, no matter how utterly inept the encode, that's the version that's "in circulation," and you can take it or leave it. Only for some of the most common, most popular programs has any effort been made to get rid of the dross -- for those whose interests run to the more obscure material, you can take what they have or leave it. The result is a generation of "OTR enthusiasts" who think the crappier the sound, the more "authentic to the actual 1930s-40s listening experience" it actually is, because they've never actually heard a proper transfer.

MP3 has its place -- I use I-Tunes to power my own private low-power broadcasting setup. But wherever possible I avoid the mass-circulated OTR downloads, and transfer my own material from my own transcriptions and tapes.

Now this is my problem with all the current OTR stuff. It sounds absolutely awful! If this is what modern technology can do for us then forgetaboutit.
Noise reduction is EVIL.

 

[GHT]

Yah... I'm hip to flac... And this player'll do that... but my entire stream has to be flac capable... I'd have to get a new converter program... I'll think on it though...

Worf

Whisky Tango Foxtrot?

 

[HudsonHawk]

Whisky Tango Foxtrot?

FLAC = Free Lossless Audio Codec. It's one of several lossless audio file compression formats. "Lossless" means that all of the original file data are preserved in the compressed file, as opposed to "lossy", in which parts of the data are omitted to give a close approximation, though not an exact copy, of the original. MP3, MP4, AAC (which is the default for iPods, YouTube, etc) are lossy.

 

[Gregg Axley]

FLAC = Free Lossless Audio Codec. It's one of several lossless audio file compression formats. "Lossless" means that all of the original file data are preserved in the compressed file, as opposed to "lossy", in which parts of the data are omitted to give a close approximation, though not an exact copy, of the original. MP3, MP4, AAC (which is the default for iPods, YouTube, etc) are lossy.

:nerd:
GHT I didn't know you spoke police language.

 

[Zombie_61]

FLAC = Free Lossless Audio Codec. It's one of several lossless audio file compression formats. "Lossless" means that all of the original file data are preserved in the compressed file, as opposed to "lossy", in which parts of the data are omitted to give a close approximation, though not an exact copy, of the original. MP3, MP4, AAC (which is the default for iPods, YouTube, etc) are lossy.

You know you're getting old when all of this technobabble goes right over your head, and you're fine with that.

 

[Stearmen]

You know you're getting old when all of this technobabble goes right over your head, and you're fine with that.

:roll: