The Last Audio Cassette Factory [video]
youtube.com
youtube.com
Retro has its own appeal... for a game, a vintage automobile, a manual transmission, a paper photograph, 35mm film, a watch without a microprocessor, a softer audio sound, or the scrape of a needle over vinyl. Someone will love it on nostalgia alone even if the world has "moved on".
Most people drive that way, it isn't odd, retro, or hipster. It is the norm, the US is the oddity. CVTs might change that a little as we go more hybrid/electric, but as of 2015, manual remains the norm.
In general many couldn't understand why you would manage your own gears when you have traction control, highly efficient automatics, and tiptronic options in most cars now. Agreed, probably not a solid part of that list yet, but not far from it with electric vehicles on the rise as well.
I beg to differ, the best selling automobile is an F-150. Which hasn't offered a manual since ~2009 and only in a v6 (v8 trucks are more popular in this class anyway).
The top 3 autos in the US are all trucks.[1] The next up is the Camry which doesn't offer a manual.
Not to mention many car manufacturers are switching to CVT transmissions for their base models. Audi even uses them along with GM, Honda, Nissan etc.
Its hard to even find new BMWs with manuals. Have a friend with a manual x3 and the dealer said its one of the only ones in the US.
These Quora responses indicate it's more of a price issue in Europe than a preference. Most auto's are about $2000 more with a manual.[2]
[1]http://autocontentexp.com/20-best-selling-vehicles-in-americ...
[2]http://www.quora.com/Why-do-the-majority-of-cars-in-Europe-h...
True, it's great in traffic and highway, but on mountain or even moderately hilly roads I drive much worse with it. The brake pedal is too sensitive, so I end up being always either too slow or too fast. I drive on these roads only a few times a year, but I wouldn't recommend it at all to someone who does not live in an absolutely flat area.
> I beg to differ, the best selling automobile is an F-150.
That doesn't really differ from what I said. There are much bigger things on US roads than the F-150, and most of them are manual. I'm talking big rigs, delivery vans, buses/coaches, etc.
The F-150 started out as a small commercial vehicle aimed at contractors, builders, and other similar jobs. It has since morphed into a consumer truck that starts at only $26K. As you say it is one of the best selling vehicles in the US, and it only reached that milestone by being a consumer vehicle.
All reminding us that the F-150 is automatic and takes regular unleaded (as opposed to diesel like most commercial and or bigger vehicles) does is remind us of how consumer-focused it is, rather than disproving that most commercial vehicles are manual in the US.
PS - Quora is a source now? And you're ignoring eight out of nine answers and citing the one answer that you like.
You didn't say anything about commercial vehicles. If you said commercial vehicles I would've agreed. Regardless, most vehicles bigger than minivans do not have manuals.
If you look at Audi, BMW and Benz, then you are going to be hard to find manuals with most models in the US (I'm assuming its similar in EU with the pricier models, who drives a manual 5 series or E class?).
Quroa...I did cherry pick but I was looking for real people in Europe thoughts on the subject. So, I thought it was appropriate (and I was busy at work). If you really looked at what some people were saying about car manufacturing in Europe in the 70s it did make some sense.
Just to be clear: When I say bigger I mean literally, not figuratively. I am talking about commercial vehicles and other large things like trucks, vans, and coaches.
Audi, BMW and Benz, aren't typically physically larger than a minivan. A F-150 might be (but considering Ford's minivan uses the same base as the F-150, I'd argue they're similarly sized).
I'll agree with you on most commercial vehicles larger than minivans have manuals.
True, but I think we'd value (and use) semi-automatic shifting much more than the average US buyer. I definitely would have loved it if all hybrids had the software semi-automatic shift of the Lexus RX450h.
Then I broke my ankle playing pick up soccer and had to drive myself to the hospital, with a broken left ankle no less. Since then, I swore to myself, never again would I own a manual transmission. Now that my playing days are over, I've been thinking of going back to a manual.
You are correct though, the US is a total oddity. Most of the guys I play hockey with are Scandinavian or European and thought it was weird I drove an automatic. It as if I was the weird one.
You can throw it directly into your backpack or pocket, no delicate fiddliness like a CD.
It has enough physical substance to be meaningfully comparable to its contents, in contrast to a USB thumb drive, plus it has a finite amount of storage.
The limited storage is important in the context of mixtapes. That was a currency back in the 80's and 90's, a very meaningful and thoughtful gift to give or receive. Like a love letter.
You only got 20 or so songs, and that's it. Giving someone a subset of your torrent library is not the same.
Edit: I bet that's what people older than me thought when I was buying vinyl in 1999.
Eventually when CDs are no longer widely produced (44.1kHz sample rate isn't ideal for the high end) and everyone has switched over to 96kHz or 192kHz at 24 or 32 bits or whatever the 4K TV equivalent in audio is, the next generation will wax nostalgic over CDs and the horrendous loudness wars that made everything sound "better" through dynamic range compression.
I mean, I wouldn't bet THAT much money on it. But it definitely seems like the next cycle of the trend.
I'm surprised tape is, since it's more limited than vinyl. Vinyl can theoretically encode higher quality audio than CDs in it's own analog way.. of course, it'll all vary with the actual precision it was cut with as well as the precision of the turntable needle. On top of this, some inherit restrictions in Vinyl actually made the loudness wars impossible. I don't recall the exact thing that causes it, but apparently if the signal is poorly mastered for vinyl (ie, too loud), the needle can literally jump out of the groove of the record.
But if you really like some "historic" band that your elders got to listen to on the radio and go to their shows as they were coming up, and listen to their albums as they were released, you're never going to be able to have those experiences. But you can listen to them on the same format that they originally released their work. It might be argued that the band, producer, studio, mastering guys, etc would have optimized the album for the media it was originally released on, but I suspect that the differences are fairly small. As your ability to reproduce sound gets better, no information is lost. It's lost during mastering for a lower fidelity medium, not in the transfer from a lower fidelity medium to a higher one.
This is a psychological phenomena not a technical one.
It looks like the grooves on a record are a few tens of micrometers tall. If we say they have 65µm of potential variation, then you'd need to be able to resolve features down to a single nanometer to match a 16-bit digital source. I don't think a needle can get anywhere close to that, and I don't even know if the molecules would be that small.
These machines exist, but they are NOT cheap. http://elpj.com/ltfeaturesandspecs/
Not even close to the truth. It captures the presence of the signal, but only through blind luck does it capture the correct amplitude of the signal. Why? The phase angle of the signal versus the phase angle of the sampler actually matter as you approach the Nyquist frequency.
Why is this? You have a sine wave. You sample it once at the top, and once at the bottom, which is just in line with Nyquist. Perfect. This is because your sampling phase angle and your signal phase angle are aligned so that you get accurate amplitude. But what if you then shift the relative phase angles by 90 degrees? Suddenly your signal is gone completely! Because you happen to be sampling when the sine wave is crossing zero. This is the inaccurate amplitude I talked about earlier. The range of amplitudes is between 0 and the real amplitude.
But if you 2x oversample instead of using the Nyquist frequency, what's the worst-case scenario? You sample at 45, 135, 215 and 305 degrees and don't quite capture the full amplitude of the signal. But at this point you're off by at most 30% or so. And of course it might be spot on, but the max error is 30%.
Now what happens when you 4x oversample? The max possible error goes down again.
People who suggest that 192kHz audio is worse than 44.1kHz or 48kHz need further education in actual signal processing. Also using equipment that was designed to properly low-pass the 192kHz DAC output properly (you don't really need to do this with 44.1!) would eliminate the theoretical problems that are outlined in the article.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyquist%E2%80%93Shannon_sampli...
Read page 3. It completely validates what I'm saying. Monty might be a really smart guy, and he might be worthy of lots of praise for a great many things. But in this particular very limited instance, he is not as correct as he could be.
If all you can do is link me to the Wikipedia page about this, you're way out of your depth. I took multiple classes on this in college and I raised exactly this issue with my professors. They said that technically I was right, but in practice nobody samples at exactly the Nyquist rate (or even that close to it!) and it's really more of a guideline for the slowest sample rate you could possibly get away with, not the sample rate you should pick once you know your frequency content. Both Shannon and Nyquist were very smart and they've made a gigantic contribution to DSP. But knowing the phrases "Nyquist rate" and "2x the highest frequency" doesn't a signal processing expert make.
You can read plenty more here too if you'd like to get more educated. http://www.wescottdesign.com/articles/Sampling/sampling.pdf
Here's a snippet: "The theme of this paper can be summed up to this: the Nyquist rate isn’t a line in the sand that you can toe up to with complete safety. It is more like an electric fence or a hot poker; something that won’t hurt you if you keep your distance, but never something you want to saunter up to and lean against."
I totally understand if you just want to argue on the internet and given that I don't have the same credentials or reputation that Monty does, feel free to disregard what I'm saying. But that doesn't make me wrong one iota. The truth isn't dictated with the folks with the proper credentials, the truth is and you have to try and figure out what it is.
The symbol T = 1/fs is customarily used to represent the interval between samples and is called the sample period or sampling interval. And the samples of function x(t) are commonly denoted by x[n] = x(nT) (alternatively "xn" in older signal processing literature), for all integer values of n. The mathematically ideal way to interpolate the sequence involves the use of sinc functions, like those shown in Fig 2. Each sample in the sequence is replaced by a sinc function, centered on the time axis at the original location of the sample, nT, with the amplitude of the sinc function scaled to the sample value, x[n]. Subsequently, the sinc functions are summed into a continuous function. A mathematically equivalent method is to convolve one sinc function with a series of Dirac delta pulses, weighted by the sample values. Neither method is numerically practical. Instead, some type of approximation of the sinc functions, finite in length, is used. The imperfections attributable to the approximation are known as interpolation error.
You'll notice that it says "imperfections" and "interpolation error" both of which should lead you to recognize that this is an approximation, not perfection. Why? Because truly perfect reconstruction requires a sinc function, which is infinite in time. Want to play a CD back? OK, but first just wait forever for the sound to be reconstructed. Or instead you could build a non-causal system (causality means that it honors the arrow of time, non-causal systems do not) which has infinite, perfect knowledge of the future. With this handy device, you can then perfectly reconstruct the sampled signal. Oh, you don't have one? Bummer.
Another snippet:
Practical digital-to-analog converters produce neither scaled and delayed sinc functions, nor ideal Dirac pulses. Instead they produce a piecewise-constant sequence of scaled and delayed rectangular pulses (the zero-order hold), usually followed by an "anti-imaging filter" to clean up spurious high-frequency content.
And there you go! Real life is approximations of theoretical perfection, not the equivalent. This is why people who do real work on real signals like to oversample.
The real problem is cars made in the few years after CDs completely took over but before the iPod did. A lot of those only do CD and radio and there's nothing good to hook in to for other audio sources, besides using an FM transmitter, or jacking directly into the FM antenna. I owned a car like this and I wished it had tape player!
edit: spelling
Early on CD's were more expensive but you have completely different fabrication process and royalties to deal with, but today nope. So it is nothing more than an "indie" thing and like many comments on YT said thank the hipsters and they are kinda right.
I also wonder if there are any bands that do analogue recording since i don't think a single studio exists that isn't digital these days and if it does then considering the price of that rare gear and the expertise needed to operate it it would also be much much more expensive than traditional recording.
I played drums on a record in 2010 that was partially analog. The drums, and the initial guitar and bass were analog, The additional guitars, and vocals were digital.
Then the whole mix was bounced down to tape, and was mastered via analog.
The only way we could afford it was that our guitar player was a tattoo artist, and traded.
The guy at the studio was super excited that he got to use his reel to reel.
Grabbing a BR drive, in particular if it is a burner, is basically about covering ones behind.