[HN Gopher] Vintage technology and why some people still use it
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Vintage technology and why some people still use it
Author : open-source-ux
Score : 30 points
Date : 2021-03-12 19:20 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bbc.co.uk)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bbc.co.uk)
| jjav wrote:
| I use a lot of technology I guess some would consider vintage. It
| is not due to any specific preference for vintage or as a vintage
| hobby. It's just that a lot of the older products are so much
| better for the consumer.
|
| It makes me sad because we have the technology and resources as
| an industry to make so much better products than ever before, but
| we just don't focus on quality for the consumer anymore. Can we
| collectively care to do better?
|
| Today main product design drivers are collecting usage data and
| selling it to advertisers, enforcing dependency on cloud
| services, preventing repairability and ownership (vs. ongoing
| licensing). All these factors improve recurring revenue for the
| producing company but all of them are anti-features for the
| consumer.
|
| All my cars are older and will forever be. No TV screen on the
| dash to go bad, no integrated CAN bus making diagnostics and
| repair a nightmare, no fly by wire nonsense. No phone-home
| spyware or OTA update horrors. If a relay goes bad it's a
| physical relay I can swap, easy. And so on, everything is
| fixable.
|
| I unpacked my old Wii to play with my son. All the games are on
| DVD, so I own them, they won't disappear from the cloud, no
| dependency on internet connectivity, no subscriptions to pay.
|
| For music in the house I run many squeezebox devices. The server
| is self-hosted and open source, no dependency on anything
| external, no subscriptions or cloud service to be suddenly
| cancelled.
| cosmotic wrote:
| How can a lossy compressed minidisc be "cleaner" than a lossless
| CD or similarly lossy but higher bitrate and more efficiently
| compressed digital file?
| bayindirh wrote:
| MiniDisc user here. It's for a couple of reasons.
|
| First of al, ATRAC is a strange format. It's optimized for
| perception as far as I understood it. It doesn't color sound
| but can reproduce the dynamics and details very well. It's
| important to understand ATRAC has quality levels: SP, LP2, LP4.
| SP fits 80 minutes to a 80 minute MD. LP2 fits ~160 minutes,
| LP4 fits ~320. SP is extremely detailed and transparent. LP2 is
| really pretty good. LP4 is not good. Is not bad, but for
| listening on the move. It's not suitable for joy-listening on
| higher resolution systems. The deficiencies will be definitely
| heard.
|
| This sound quality has another reason. The DSP/DAC combo on MD
| players itself. Earlier versions were called _Type-R_ ,
| improved versions are called _Type-S_. Latter one can
| reconstruct sound very impressively. It can make SP and LP2
| sound really good. It also has a digital amplification section.
| So, It 's only converted to analog at the latest stage. Result
| is a very dynamic and clean sound. Especially if you convert to
| ATRAC from CD or any lossless source.
|
| My Hi-Fi (Sony CMT-HX3) also has a 35W version of that
| DSP/Amplifier combo. It really sounds fantastic* with CD, MP3
| and AC3. Didn't try ATRAC, but it won't disappoint I presume.
|
| Sony's higher end systems and DSPs are a work of art. They
| sound clean, crisp and detailed. They can sing through a pair
| of good headphones or through 2x85W behemoths. This is why
| they're timeless and regarded highly. With just Bass & Treble
| settings, it beats a lot of presumably higher end portable
| players.
|
| A similar sound quality was present in Creative's Muvo^2. It
| was plain enjoyable to listen. Apple's iPods famously use Burr
| Brown DACs but, the sound was too flat and dull in the earlier
| versions, lacking punch and energy. They fixed it after iPhone
| 5.
|
| TL;DR: Sony's DSP/DAC/Amp stuff makes any well designed audio
| codec shine. ATRAC can store dynamics very well. This is why
| being a Hi-Fi company pays in the portable space.
|
| *: I have a more conventional, but vastly higher powered
| system. This small guy is not a match for it, but for a small
| hi-fi it really hits above its league. If you scale this design
| up (to 80+ watts) with proper speakers, I'm sure that it'll
| make a lot of more expensive systems sweat.
| cosmotic wrote:
| The DAC isn't part of the format; although I respect the
| desire for a good DAC. I believe all lossy compression codecs
| from the past 20 or 30 years are perception based; ATRAC may
| have been one of the first ones, but it sure doesn't beat a
| CD which has no loss at all, unless ATRAC/minidisc regularly
| used higher bit depths than are supported by CDs. The sample
| rate is already "perfect" (in that humans could never hear a
| difference)
| bayindirh wrote:
| You're right however, the DAC can make or break the
| resulting sound. If the DAC wouldn't be important, we
| wouldn't have Wolfson, TI Burr Brown or other extremely
| expensive units. Sony's DAC in this pipeline is like a
| polish. It doesn't blemish the sound after all that
| meticulous reconstruction.
|
| On the paper and spectrogram, an SP ATRAC track is not a
| match for WAV or FLAC, however it has all the ingredients
| to saturate a high-resolution system and create an
| enjoyable listening experience. Also it had enough
| resolution to handle higher-end amateur mastering (in SP
| mode) and general recording needs (in SP and LP2 mode).
|
| While 44.1KHz is perfect mathematically, 48KHz and 96KHz
| can create a smoother sound. That needs higher end
| equipment to hear clearly, but the smoothness is definitely
| there.
| jandrese wrote:
| It was mastered from a higher quality source? There could also
| be errors in the CD mastering, like setting the gain too high
| and chopping off the top of the song just to make the whole
| thing "louder". The digital files may have been taken from the
| CD since nobody can be bothered to go back and find the masters
| anymore.
| cosmotic wrote:
| The two issues you referenced are also applicable to
| minidisc.
| bayindirh wrote:
| MiniDisc doesn't brick-wall-compress the sound. Instead, it
| uses automatic gain to prevent clipping while recording
| from line-in. ATRAC encoding is also devoid of any
| compression.
|
| MD players generally have VU meters, and you can observe
| your music, since they generally have recording
| functionality and used in studio and/or interviews, getting
| sound as transparent as possible is the aim.
|
| Fun fact: Portable MD players are generally called
| "Portable MD Deck" by Sony to signal it's not a mere player
| but an audio equipment. Most MD decks contain indexing and
| primary tools for chopping a record to tracks and tagging
| them.
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| > The digital files may have been taken from the CD since
| nobody can be bothered to go back and find the masters
| anymore.
|
| All my music collection is FLAC files, bit-perfectly ripped
| from my CD collection. So, sure, they're digital files,
| compressed, but lossless. It is, for all practical purposes,
| just as good as a CD (as long as my external DAC is as good
| as the CD players' built-in DAC).
|
| The original CD may have been badly engineered but that's
| another topic.
|
| 3 000 CDs fits in more or less 1 TB in lossless (but
| compressed) CD quality (just to give an idea of how tiny it
| is using modern storage standards).
|
| Some people only use FLAC as archives but these files are so
| tiny in this day and age that I don't bother converting the
| FLAC to mp3s: I sent directly the bitperfectly ripped FLAC
| files to my DAC / stereo setup.
| [deleted]
| css wrote:
| Vintage technology is often far more repairable than modern. My
| turntable and all the equipment I use with it included schematics
| and booklets with information about how they operate. Even cars
| used to be like this, but that has mostly been lost in the
| interest of operational simplicity.
|
| Almost all of my old household appliances included schematics,
| but new stuff only includes operational instructions. It makes me
| sad we have lost this culture of tinkering.
| bangonkeyboard wrote:
| I maintain a clutch of pre-iOS 7 devices to remind myself what
| good design was.
| hc-taway wrote:
| Agreed that iOS7 was a big UX downgrade. It went from being the
| only OS I'd be halfway-comfortable turning older tech-
| illiterate relatives loose on, to yet another OS that would
| leave them confused and lost much of the time. Discoverability
| and intuitiveness plummeted with 7.
| 0xdeadbeefbabe wrote:
| Physicists still use those vintage laws of motion. I still use
| this vintage keyboard layout.
| jjav wrote:
| And these vintage A/C outlets and power cords.
|
| Imagine if we had to rewire the house and all appliances with
| the frequency of USB connector changes!
| madaxe_again wrote:
| It's really hard to see an MP3 player from 2010 as "vintage
| technology in use" when there are PDP-11s still in use in nuclear
| power plants. Hell, I seem to recall there's some plumbing
| company in the US that still uses a 1940s IBM electromechanical
| tabulator for their accounts.
| neuralRiot wrote:
| >there's some plumbing company in the US that still uses a
| 1940s IBM.
|
| Maybe not to that extreme but you'd be surprised how many
| industrial machines still running on early OSes and even with
| CRT monitors. If it's not broken don't fix it.
| rbanffy wrote:
| I was thinking about it the other day. We got a C64 Maxi (a full-
| sized C64 emulator) and my 8yo daughter loves some of the C64
| games and was exploring a little bit the BASIC environment and
| realizing she can make a machine do her bidding by telling it
| what to do. I feel that screen time on it is far less worrying
| than on YouTube or Roblox.
| prionassembly wrote:
| I thought Roblox was a Minecraft-like with building aspects to
| it?
| jandrese wrote:
| Roblox games tend to be stuffed full of microtransactions,
| which is really annoying as a parent because kids eat that
| stuff up.
| sokoloff wrote:
| It's an open game similar in some ways to Minecraft, but the
| amount of pre-canned games means it's more likely for a kid
| to lazily consume rather than work towards creating. (In a
| way that's slightly worse than Minecraft, IMO.)
| mhh__ wrote:
| Its hard to explain, but minecraft is more like an oliver
| postgate program like Bagpuss or the Clangers compared to one
| of the newer kids animated TV shows were stuff is exploding
| all the time.
| chaostheory wrote:
| It does. While it is more powerful than Minecraft's creation
| side (and your child programming in Lua has an
| entrepreneurial motivation for Roblox bucks which translates
| to real dollars), the downside is that it feels more separate
| from Minecraft's creative side, which is baked into the
| gameplay itself
| Aldipower wrote:
| Similar thing here. I even got a real C64C with games on
| floppies. My young daughter loves Giana Sisters, like me back
| in the days. Now a got another one. But with the fire button on
| port II defective. I repaired it on my own by replacing the
| according chip. What a great feeling. And the living retro
| scene is helping a lot! C64 forever!
| clcaev wrote:
| Do they have corresponding books where you can type in the
| programs, building it progressively?
| WalterBright wrote:
| I still run my Carver stereo and Dahlquist speakers all day every
| day I bought back in 1981 or so. Connected to it is my Technics
| SLQ2 turntable I bought new in the disco era. But the only time I
| use that is to rip a vinyl, snap crackle pop and all. The stereo
| gets its signal from a LAN music server.
| unkoman wrote:
| I can now afford the high end tech of a bygone era which is leads
| to high end products that do not break as they have survived for
| over 30 years.
| MarkusWandel wrote:
| I love older high-end technology. For a couple of decades my
| stereo receiver was a Sony STR-7800SD. Absolute top of the line
| from the late 1970s, built like a tank, and component level
| repairable (the one time it needed fixing - a custom Sony part
| no less) parts were still available two decades after the thing
| was new.
|
| Got it at a garage sale for a song in the early 1990s.
|
| Given away since. I don't do stereo components any more, just
| listen with bluetooth headphones from a smartphone like
| everyone else.
| rootsudo wrote:
| I've been buying older macbook pros and am pleasantly surprised
| how easy they were to repair and service.
|
| They still are great machines today if your main usage is an ide,
| browser and video.
|
| Don't get me wrong, I love my new mbp, but, I don't see any true
| difference in daily usage besides weight, and screen resolution.
| taylodl wrote:
| If it works and fits your needs then why not continue using it?
| grishka wrote:
| Imagine the world if most software developers were thinking
| like that in regard to their technology choices. That would've
| been a good world. A world where software uses hardware to its
| full potential.
| bayindirh wrote:
| I agree. After seeing demoscene and high performance
| computing, I refuse to accept "hardware is cheap, network is
| reliable" mentality, and using the latest and coolest stuff.
|
| Even a small amount of extra effort in the correct places
| makes a lot of difference.
|
| I still use Eclipse, btw.
| DubiousPusher wrote:
| One of my personal favorites. Practically a prehistoric "IoT"
| censor at this point. It needs access to your wifi and an email
| address. No apps, no flows, no unsupported platform nonsense.
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Zircon-Leak-Alert-Contactor-Pack/dp/B...
| schnevets wrote:
| When lockdown-related stresses got to me, I found a lot of
| comfort in my old Nintendo DS Lite. I never saw the appeal of
| retro game collecting, but that combination of comfortable
| design, good battery life, and gentle screen display was exactly
| what I needed to ignore the doom scrolling and stresses triggered
| my more modern technology.
|
| I have been tempted to get an emulator console, but they all have
| brighter, higher resolution screens and shorter battery lives, so
| I don't actually know if I'll get in the same "flow". Maybe I'll
| reassess after I finish this stack of JRPGs (which may take a
| decade).
|
| Once everything became "connected" (around 2010), obsolescence
| became inevitable. That Psion5 or Zen Stone can remain timeless
| because they will never sync a contact list or download a patch.
| The owners know what they do, and seem confident that they will
| not fail.
| illwrks wrote:
| I picked up a WiiU in 2018 but never really gave it much
| attention until lockdown. Wii Sports was a good bit of
| entertainment at times with my family, but I spent many nights
| playing Mario kart online with strangers, or playing Zelda
| Breath of the Wild and a few others. Being in lockdown is
| frustrating but the opportunity to explore a digital world and
| engage with other people online is a good distraction.
| T-hawk wrote:
| I've been doing what you describe with emulator consoles during
| the lockdown as well. I got the NES and SNES classic versions,
| and they do indeed have that same effect for me. I use them on
| a TV with no other computer or cable hookups, and it's
| perfectly comfortable to get into the flow of the game with no
| doom-scrolling temptations or other distractions.
| uncledave wrote:
| I have quite a lot of vintage test and radio equipment. It's
| cheap, completely dangerous and unreliable and fun to fix. I
| couldn't be happier playing with it.
| the_only_law wrote:
| I have a lot of retro telecom equipment (mostly WAN line
| analyzers tbf) and I guess you could call a lot of it cheap,
| but a lot of it is curiously expensive too.
| uncledave wrote:
| Very cool. There's some of that curiously expensive stuff in
| here too. My oscilloscope and plug-ins cost about $70k new. I
| paid $200 for it :). It's amazing that stuff I couldn't
| afford I can now
| WalterBright wrote:
| I found my analog oscilloscope at a pawn shop for $40.
| pm215 wrote:
| I think that's about what I paid for my analogue storage
| scope (it works by long-persistence phosphor on the tube,
| it's very neat though obviously not very practical these
| days; has a handful of valves in it as well as the CRT
| proper).
| mhh__ wrote:
| I'm always jealous of Americans, you just don't get
| scopes in the skip here (UK).
| uncledave wrote:
| UK here. Mostly cancelled this year but best place to get
| scopes are radio rallies
| https://rsgb.org/main/news/rallies/
| bullen wrote:
| How you can write an article about old hardware without
| mentioning the C64 is beyond me.
|
| Today there are more scene releases for C64 than for any other
| device, including PC.
|
| AFAIC Apple 1 & 2 where just prototypes for the final 8-bit
| computer with SID (audio) and VIC2 (graphics) chips that blew
| everything else away until 16-bit!
| rchaud wrote:
| The best thing about old school tech was a feeling of permanence.
| Pop a cassette out of the walkman, and it'll pick up where you
| left off.
|
| If you wanted to make a mixtape, you had to record each song one
| by one in your CD-Cassette combo boombox. The last Walkman I
| owned was in 2001. After that it was all discman players and non-
| iPod MP3 players.
|
| I still have relatively strong memories attached to each of them
| as they were permanent fixture on my person prior to smartphones
| arriving. I've tried to recapture it on my Neocities page here:
| https://bad-mood-rising.neocities.org/mp3.html
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