There was a stretch of time between when specific mastering for CDs started and before the loudness war kicked in. Plenty of time for good recordings to happen.
Sure the sound quality isn't great, but cassettes have a great user experience.
My kids listen to stories on CD and Cassette. With Cassettes you can just stop and continue later exactly where you were. On CD they have to remember the chapter and the number of minutes. Which they never do so they are less motivated to continue listening.
The same is true for VHS. One of the great benefits of Netflix is that you don't have to keep track of where you were in a series and can quickly continue. DVD or separate downloads never had this, with Netflix you can just continue. The same is true for VHS, you can just pop it back in and continue where you were.
Also, with both cassettes and VHS you could very easily record things. This was never easy with DVDs, so much so that it basically wasn't a feature. HDD recorders were also quite bad.
Quality of sound and image is just one part of the equation. I would never listen to a music album on cassette, but the medium, from a usability point of view, is great for specific use cases such as stories and creating your own mixes.
They are fragile, they sound terrible. Unless you had a very expensive player, they also introduced a wobble in the sound that drives me fucking crazy.
Yes, there is cover art, I miss decent cover art and the thought that some people put into it.
VHS can also fuck right off. Sure I loved the stuff that was on them as a kid, but I fucking hated them as a medium. A nice Humax from the early 2000s obliterated VHSs.
Don't get me wrong, everything else about digital media suck arse, the shitty player and bollocks practices. But the experience of the media it's self is far far better.
My daughter (16) and her friends are. She's asked for specific CDs as presents, and is now the guardian of my brother and mine CD stashes dragged out of the wardrobes and attics.
She'll trawl thrift shops for CDs too.
New CDs in shops now are much much cheaper than they used to be as well.
Giving up Spotify isn't on the cards yet though. I'll teach her how to rip songs next I reckon.
An ex lease Thinkpad T Series with Intel graphics is a good choice for value and compatibility. eg a T490 or T14 era machine.
Using hardware at least 6-12 months old is a good way to get better compatibility.
Generally Linux drivers only start development after the hardware is available and in the hands of devs, while Windows drivers usually get a head start before release. Brand new hardware on a LTS (long term support) distro with an older kernel is usually the worst compatibility combo.
I'm also noticing another trend with my 16yr old daughter and her friends. They are craving old school offline experiences. They have all dragged out the parents and relatives old music collections, cruising second hand shops for old CDs etc. when they visit others houses they are checking out each other's household book and music collections.
She recently got a cheap digital camera with no screen and just a shutter button and and plain old viewfinder. The idea is that like the old days you don't know what you took a photo of until (a bit like getting the film developed) you plug the SD card into a computer and have a look.
I think she'd get a kick out of ripping CDs and ditching Spotify. I can teach her all about files and filesystems then haha.
My 19yr old son doesn't follow the same old school stuff, but he kinda shunned social media from the beginning.
I cargo culted my way into AutoLISP in the R12 era knowing nothing about lisp or funtional programming (BASIC and a tiny bit of Pascal was all I'd done by then). Just using notepad without any assists like highlighting matching parentheses and no deeper theoretical knowledge was tough, but I could see vague outlines of a world of mathematical elegance just out of my grasp.
"Vague outlines of mathematical elegance just out of grasp" - that's exactly it. Notepad, no paren matching, just counting brackets by hand. The elegance was there, we just couldn't quite see it yet.
Whoa strong nostalgia hit from that photo. I seem to remember the R13 (the last version I used before shifting into tech) stack of manuals was even bigger.
The Office 4.3 set of manuals were large too, but didn't have the information density the AutoCAD ones did.
>Ask yourself why your parents still use windows and you'll have your response.
Because if they switch to Linux, I'll be on the hook for tech support. If they stay on windows, then it's mainly my brother's problem.
BTW Windows doesn't seem easy or make much sense to them at all either. Linux wouldn't be any harder for them aside from getting support from random places, or buying random bits of junk with no research expecting them to kinda work.
> BTW Windows doesn't seem easy or make much sense to them at all either
That's the thing that annoys me. People say Linux is "harder", but I really don't think that's true. People seem to just ignore all the weird awful bullshit in Windows that pops up and accept it as just part of the world, and when Linux has slightly different issues, OMG WHY IS IT SO HARD I'LL STICK WITH MY ADWARE MACHINE BECAUSE I LIKE HAVING UPDATES BREAK EVERYTINGGGG.
I think that is normal across most technologies or fields. Progress is an S curve (or series of curves), and it's easy to be amazed when looking at the steep bit. Early on progress is slow due to not much investment and going down lots of dead ends, while later progress faces increased complexity and no low hanging fruit left.
The middle bit is where the disadvantages of the early phase has gone, but the disadvantages of late phase hasn't kicked in yet.
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