photography

[robinlandseadel at comcast.net]

--- robinlandseadel at comcast.net wrote:
 
> "Interestingly, all formats seem to follow the
> same path. I always say that it's easier to
> encode than to decode. It's only recently that
> we've been truly able to get off the disc
> everything that was on there. And there's still
> a lot of that going on with digital. . . ." 
> Michael Hobson, Absolute Sound February 2007,
> pg 160

             Dave Monroe:
             Thanks!  Of course, the same is true, and perhaps even
             more so of analog, as there's rather less control over
             just what gets encoded in the first place, and there's
             a certain ... "degradtion," or, at any rate, altering
             of what was encoded with each "decoding" (needle,

What is stranger still (I'm putting my audio engineer/audiophile cap on now),
is thst the more easily degradable a format is, the more "soul" is seems
to capture. I don't know if you've ever listened to an "acoustic"
78 played back on an acoustic machine, but there is a sense of the 
"prescence" of the performer that is degraded by the more controllable
"electrical" recording systems. Although the electrical recording systems 
allowed for greater bandwidth and dynamics, there was a great deal of 
controversy at the time (1926-1930's) within the record collecting community
as to the virtues of the new sound encoding system, with the "Luddites" on
one side (pine needles and acoustic recording/playback) espousing 
the greater "humanity" of the acoustic system and the propeller-heads on the 
other side of the fence arguing for "control". The very same controversies 
re-appeared in the early eighties as sound encoding/reproduction went to 
digits. Part of the controversy had to do with the ubiquitious Sony 1610/1630 
encode/decode system. You had to run your recordings through these 
processors in order to make your recording into a CD: the only way you 
could get all the "Flags"---track numbers, track titles, index numbers---on
your CD was to use the 1610 or 1630, whose anti-aliasing low pass
filters consisted of 10 (count em!) l/c filters in 10 separate op-amps 
in SERIES (which is kinda like running your signal through ten cheap-ass
amp stages, one into the other) which absolutely guarenteed that your 
original signal was gonna come out sounding weird. So digitiphopia
set in early. Not that there's anything wrong with that. . . .

This is gonna come up again later, as we go to a seance that has a 
steampunk "Spiritual Recording Device".