Beck said:
One of the ironies here is that if digital technology is indeed advancing, recent mixing, mastering and broadcasting trends are masking these improvements.
yeah but this was happening well before digital recording took off. listen to stuff from the early 90's.......
Did anyone see that pbs special on Wal-Mart and China the other night?? (Wal Mart: Good for America?) They were first making the connection that Wal-Mart and other big warehouse type stores such as Target, sports authority, Best Buy, etc., but specifically Wal Mart's cost-driven model had driven 80% of their suppliers to manufacture in China. I believe this would have happened anyway but Wal Mart probably sped up the process. It then focused on the television industry. Since so many televisions were being manufactured in China, the only plant left in the US found a niche in constructing "High End" televisions. The big assed ones. But in one year, he lost 30% of his revenue (200 M) to China. So he sued China for dumping violations, citing poorer salaries and benefits, an intentional 30% devaluation of the currency, and government subsidies as creating an unfair advantage, and that China was selling these High End televisions below "fair market value". He won. The US increased tarriffs on the imports of high end televisions. (not that this solves the problems)
This in my opinion is very similar to Guitar Center and "Squire" guitars and $300 all-in-one "studios". The gear manufactures figured this out too because it seems there is more botique gear being sold than ever. But just recently we have products like "Chameleon Labs" making the same stuff in China but at a lower cost.
Anywayz this wasn't supposed to be a "is China good or bad?" debate, There's already a 30 page argument on that over at Gearslutz, but Where I was going is that I think that this phenomenom might have contributed to the decline in sound quality. One completely valid view might be that consumers standard of living has increased dramatically because they can buy inexpensive good quality televisions at wal mart. But they're not buying television stations at walmart to produce the shows.
Did anyone see the thread over at Tape-Op where in the classifieds this guy was selling his complete porno collection? Its definitely a classic. It went off on many, many jokes about the "analog quality" of VHS. There might be some truth in that.
I had jury duty on monday and they sat the potential jurors in a room and had us watch a DVD. mid-way through towards the end it crashed. not like, a tracking problem like on VHS and you get past the bad part and its ok again. More like, the screen went garbled and the DVD player froze. End of video.
That, to me, is probably the problem with digital that I hear. Its that the distortion is worse. Analog tape is far from linear. Every deck has a corrective eq added on to compensate for the fault in the process. But when it distorts it is not "end of video". When a digital system distorts (and I am not talking about digital overs, I am talking about any distortion in the process from timing errors or rounding errors, faulty data, whatever) the result is much less listenable. Just a guess. I think this is why digital masters sound better than digital multitracks. (less distortion adding up).
