I think the point is that the formats have basically been unified into fully digital formats. Though we still use Bluetooth speakers to replace boomboxes and audio stacks.
They all played music but they didn’t serve the same purpose, thus why I had all three. The CD player was for listening in my room, the boombox could be brought anywhere, and the Walkman was for privately listening on the go.
You jest, but the industry was pretty close to having something like that. VHS-C format tapes are the key, as they were used in lightweight camcorders back in the 90's. The viewfinder used an active screen, so this could be used for playback anywhere.
I could think of a lot of things I could use a little pocket guy for. Getting my phone when it falls through the crack between the cushion and the arm in the easy chair, for example.
As one of seemingly very few people that still buys CDs, they have become extremely difficult to find. Personally, I have to drive 90+ miles to the nearest store that sells them and pay a 25% markup when I get there, or order them off Amazon, in which case they always arrive with a broken case. I'm not counting Walmart because they only sell kpop and NOW cds. Target only sells kpop and Taylor Swift.
you're probably lying or this is kind of placebo effect .
opus, with some exceptions, can reach transparency at even 150kbps (and of course you can and should go higer)
if the difference does exist it will never be "clear" to a human
Is ogg lossless? Just because you have limited hearing doesn't mean there aren't people who can hear differences. There are women who can see more colors than normal people (tetrachromacy). Assuming someone is lying because they aren't hearing damaged is absurd. Also young kids have better hearing(less damage) than adults, hearing damaged from work or life conditions like traffic with windows down.
well if you need both recordings and an audio spectrometer to even notice the difference, it might as well not exist. good lossy compression is indistinguishable from lossless
<0.1% non-perceptible audio quality "difference" is not worth 500% the storage space usage, unless you're archiving/preserving the audio and absolutely need the original bit-for-bit representation
if you're just listening to it use opus, or in the worst case ogg vorbis
I've done the blind test before and 128k sounds the same as 320k, but flac and wav sounds clear and clean to me. IDK how people can tell the difference between 128k 320k (unless it was back in the day when encoding took longer and they used bad quality to save time)
Yes, i actually can't listen to Spotify (even their HD) because the quality is so bad (sounds noticably bad to me). I pay for lossless streaming even though some indie music is not available on the lossless service so i go look for it on lossy services.
I've done this test before, a zip folder with all 4 sources all same file size and you can listen to them and note how each sounds then you can read which one is which later from another source
Sometimes I wonder, are we truly better off? Yes, it's really cool that I have one device that does it all; but am I really happier? Is my life really any better because of it?
GPS used to come in standalone devices though, so it's not like it'd suddenly become uninvented because we ditch the idea of an all-in-one pocket computer.
You can still not answer your phone. You can put it in airplane mode or Do Not Disturb, or even turn it off. Nobody is entitled to your time. Leave people on seen.
There are elements to life that have drastically changed for the better, to name one example how about not just being able to hear your local radio stations, but radio from anywhere in the world.
The fact that I can tune in live to... say BBC Radio 6, and be listening along to the exact same thing they're listening to in a city like London, makes a measurable positive impact in my night-owl life. It emotionally makes me feel more connected to the outside world from where I am, and that's one station out of hundreds of thousands, if not millions. I can explore the world.
Another example is that I can now understand (to the extent that each step makes sense to me) the physics theories and laboratory experiments that have changed our paradigm of reality itself, thanks to a whole bunch of science content creators on YouTube; it is incredible what can now be explained in relatively (ahem) simple language, and it is, by people doing the explaining as a labor of love.
People have found ways to express in mostly non-technical language what a couple of decades ago felt like abstract numerical gibberish wherever one looked. I find this spectacular. And inspiring.
These new tools that have been put in our hands are astonishingly powerful and profound. Yet of course, they can be both either used or abused. Here, I am focusing solely on the "used" side.
I think people are misunderstanding my point. It's not the existance of the internet, or YouTube, phones, cameras, etc. It's the fact that we're connected 24/7 and people tend to treat you like a weirdo if you disconnect. My question is if we're truly better of with technology where one device does it all (creating the expectation of constant connectivity), or if we'd be better with having a phone that's just a phone, a camera that's just a camera, etc.
To be clear, I can see arguments both for and against it. If phones didn't come with cameras, then cameras wouldn't be as widespread. It's because of how widespread cameras are that people have become more aware of police brutality. Additionally, because phone cameras are so common, it makes it easy for people to get into photography or filmmaking as a hobby. So in that sense, having a camera in every pocket is a good thing.
On the other hand, people have this weird expectation that, because you have a smart phone, you should always be reachable. The result is that people get worried or weirded out when they can't reach you. They want to know why they went straight to voicemail, or why it took you a while to respond to their texts.
It's also a lot easier to get addicted to things like social media when stuff like that can follow you wherever you go. On the one hand, it's nice to have my friends in my pocket. On the other hand, my pocket rectangle regularly causes me anxiety due to the constant stream of news. I could disconnect, but then I'd be "living under a rock".
Another pro, on the other hand, is that my handheld minipc is able to stream music, movies, TV shows, etc wherever I have a cellphone internet connection. That's pretty awesome. I don't need an iPod to listen to music, a portable DVD player to watch a movie, or a laptop to watch YouTube.
So I mean, I'm not really opposed to having an all-in-one device that fits in my pocket; I'm just questioning if they're really that healthy. Like, is the trade-off worth it?
It is actually worse than that, all phones have an FM tuner built-in to receive emergency alerts from various nations. At one point, I forget who (possibly Sinclair?, iirc it was a large American broadcast company), attempted to pass legislation in the US to force the OEMs to allow access to the chips which somehow failed. I believe most androids that are rooted are able to access the FM radio irregardless, but I am unfamiliar of the minutia involved. I’d estimate 99% of iPhones in use have an FM radio chip, I believe only Sprint (a defunct American carrier) ever shipped with FM radio available.
Have that stuff looks like duplicatous audio reproduction technology and what's in my pocket doesn't sound nearly as good as that boom box likely does.
Also that thing in the right looks maybe like a radio and there are streaming emulators, but still no actual radios in most of our pockets unfortunately.
I had an Nokia, my last “featurephone” before I got my first smartphone, which actually had an FM tuner built-in. It used the headphone wire as an antenna as far as I recall. Quite neat, not that I ever really used it, but it was perfectly serviceable. And a great way of having music on the go in the days before streaming music was widely available.
One of my first smartphones could do that as well. I don't pay for streaming services and I don't have infinite data like most people seem to have, so I dearly miss that kind of feature. The corporate overlords have decided that free is bad.
One of my first smartphones, I don't remember the brand, but it was a Chinese knockoff, even had a TV tuner, with a built-in antenna that retracted into the case. I had to stay in the hospital for a few days and it was great. This was back around 2010.
Honestly you didn't miss much. I used the one in my phone for a couple weeks at work until I found out I could get way better reception out of just about any dedicated portable radio. I think the headphones as an antenna thing works best when you're fairly close to a transmitter.
I recall my last phone didn't need the headphones plugged in for the FM to work too bad it was super fragile causing the screen to shatter without getting dropped or touched durability aside I quite liked my old Motorola
That is cool if it worked without them. It’s too bad it’s not more common on phones. There is something cool about receiving radio waves and hearing what’s being said.
But last time I tried it, it was mostly commercials.
