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A collection of some classic Lemmy memes for your enjoyment
The real obsolete media player.
The year is 1987, Christmas has just pasaed. This baby gets plugged in down in the finished basement. You and your older brother are sitting down on the carpet for the first time to check out this game, Super Mario Bros. Your only gaming experience so far has been the Atari 2600 and C64...
Now this is classy.
My grandma (who lived about a 12 hr. way) had one of these growing up and I always loved it. I was disappointed one year to find that it had been replaced since it quit working.
I'm also reminded of my mother who, no joke, brought one of these home from the landfill. It didn't work, but she gutted it and turned it into a bed for our little dog we had at the time. In hindsight, she's probably very lucky she didn't hurt or poison herself in the process.
I would love to get one of these to use in like a multi-purpose gaming setup. Like use this as the TV stand for the newer TV so I can play newer and older games in the same place.
In hindsight, she's probably very lucky she didn't hurt or poison herself in the process
How come? A tiny circuit board isn't anything like thin vials of mercury or the like.
CRT tvs have pretty big capacitors that zap you good and hard if you touch em funny.
Older boxes are probably long since dishcharged BUT many many tinkerers will plug it in first to see if it still works just for shits and grins and those caps will take juice given the chance….
That dog bed sounds adorable
Because VHS/CRT was such a fucking hassle even when it was the best possible format option for home media. The dawn of LCDs and DVD was a glorious thing.
Was, "Be kind, rewind" really that much of a hassle?
Yes. So much so they made completely seperate machines to rewind vhs tapes so your one vcr could continue to do other things at the same time.
Binging movies wasn't much of a thing back then; I can't remember a single time when I wanted to immediately put another video in after just finishing one. Plus it took like 5 minutes to rewind one - I'd usually run to the bathroom and grab a snack and it'd be done by the time I got back. It wasn't any longer than a commercial break, and we were all used to that back then. I remember I once mowed the lawn 5 minutes at a time during commercial breaks because I didn't want to miss the show I was watching, haha!
VHS cassettes were also relatively fragile and decay on use (technically so do vinyl records but they are more forgiving). Humans are also really good at ignoring minor flaws in audio, while visual noise and low graphic resolution is much harder to ignore (though CRT messed up the image in one of the best ways possible for the human brain to fill the gaps).
VHS wasn’t the best format even when it came out. VHS was specifically designed to be a middle ground between quality and affordability. That’s partly why it succeeded in the consumer market, both the tape and the player were cheaper than the other formats of the day. Beta and LaserDisc both had better picture and sound quality but both had their own drawbacks as well as cost. CEDs were cheaper than LaserDisc and predated VHS by several years but didn’t have the industry acceptance of the other formats and had similar drawbacks.
I had never heard of CED and researching it led me to the knowledge that laserdisc was originally called Discovision.
The dawn of LCD's sucked. They were inferior to CRT in most ways, they were bigger and lighter. They eventually got better and cheaper and that is when they took off.
DVD was a day 1 upgrade over vhs for watching movies.
I still have a tiny little monophonic CRT I found at a yard sale for like $2 that I use to watch my 1985 letterboxed Star Wars VHS tapes. It's just a different vibe
There's a weird debate about the audio quality on VHS. Under the right conditions (right tape, right player, right source) it could be shockingly good -- perhaps even better than CD audio, despite not being remembered terribly fondly.
If you really want to wow the ladies, be the one guy with a music collection on VHS.
Better than CD is a pretty bold claim. That format is near perfect for listening quality.
Agreed. Main issue is "better" is subjective and doesn't always mean the same thing to different people.
I have dabbled in other tape formats, and one thing stands out to me about the compact cassette (not VHS): most people used them in the car, where conditions were bad for cassette storage. Car cassette players also tended to have poorer quality mechanisms and heads. As a result, many people remember the format being bad, when in fact, it was more about their use case. A quality home cassette deck with a quality cassette (e.g. type II or chrome) stored in the right conditions is capable of extremely good results.
Not sure if there is something similar with VHS audio, though. Very different format. I just know there is a debate, but it could be entirely bogus.
The debate is basically bogus. There are very few analog audio formats that can reproduce an audio signal more accurately than a CD, and even then, that’s only because CDs use a 44.1KHz sampling rate and 16bit encoding. There is no analog audio format that can rival a 32bit 96KHz PCM recording, and that’s not even the best digital recording available. CD chose 44.1KHz and 16bit because it’s nearly perfect for the range and sensitivity of human hearing. It’s only when you need to record ultrasound or extremely low amplitude sound that you would use something better.
Fun fact: if you add some hisses and pops and a little bit of compression to CD audio before playing it, some people (me included) will say it sounds better.
Well this is going to be an interesting rabbit hole...
In I go!
A VHS physically can’t be better than CD audio. The tape would have to move faster than the VHS equipment is designed for. The Hi-Fi VHS audio system can come close to CD’s frequency range, but there is still about 70 dB signal-to-noise (compared to CD’s 98 dB), and there is always loss when writing to and reading from analog tape. CD is not destructively read, so any signal up to 22KHz will be reproducible the exact same way every time.
Hi-Fi VHS audio is nearly as good as CD audio (the best consumer analog audio format, in fact), but it’s not as good. The simple fact is that an appropriately comparably sampled digital PCM recording will always beat an analog recording. You can read about the Nyquist-Shannon theorem for an actual proof, but basically CD audio is near-perfect for almost every human’s hearing range (most people can’t hear above 20KHz).
Brb. Recording all my records into my vcr.
Don’t fret. In 20 years’ time future hipsters will romanticize bleeding colors, dogshit resolution and subpar color space and call it “so much nicer to watch”.
Because they weren't made as stylish. If you had that exact same tv, but with wood-style paneling and the occasional velvet lining, it would be exactly as charming. Nice style has been phased out over time, being reserved for extremely expensive versions of appliances instead of being the standard.
And like, that's not to say there's literally no nice style in anything these days, but the average product tends to look... bland and cheap.
Mhm but aren't suitcase vinyl record players pretty bad?
yeah, especially any made this century. complete shite.
Wanna come by my place later and check out my... Sony Trinitron?
Yes. I really do.
Don’t expect anything sexy or nothin’, I’m genuinely in this for the Trinitron. Do you have retro consoles or should I bring mine?
Records and their players are tangible. You don't need any electricity to play a record. It is a kind of magic the human mind can comprehend.
VHS tapes and cathode ray tubes on the other hand work with magnets and quantum physics and shit. Nobody knows how they fucking work.
You don’t need any electricity to play a record
Are we talking about the hand-cranked players from the olden days?
Yes, but you can also spin a modern player and just listen closely to the needle.
Don't do that - that's really bad for the vinyls and your stylus
My cheapo one has a short gap where it will start spinning before the speakers catch up and I can listen that way guilt free. You can also just turn the volume of the speakers all the way down, but that's not nearly as disorienting as hearing a half second of the audio all small and tiny and not coming from the right place.
Yeah, there's something about the physicality of a record player and records that changes the experience. At least for me it encourages more focus on the listening. Even if you just put something on while you do something else, you're going to be interacting with again before super long.
The record, the part you interact with, has size and weight. It's definitively a "thing". And choosing a record is a choice. You can't just press some buttons on a remote and change to whatever else (unless it's a full music system setup).
Plus the beautiful art on the sleeves, and the time it takes to get the record out forces you to spend at least a little time with that art.
With a CRT TV, you're using a remote and there's a lot more abstraction and layers between the physical object holding the content and your actual consumption of it.
VHS tapes are physical, but the moving parts that make it all work are hidden away in the VCR and the magnetic tape isn't really touchable. Playing one on most TVs required another device plugged into the TV and pressing some buttons on one or two remotes that could just as easily bring you other content without ever leaving your seat.
There is art on the VHS case, but it's not like it takes time to get the tape in and out, so you're not as likely to look at it for long.
Most importantly, people are still making new record players and records. There was a long while where it was a very niche thing, and there weren't a lot of new records coming out, but there were still new players coming out. And the technology is simple enough that the average person could at least keep a player in working order or fix the most common issues themselves. Enthusiasts could even "fix" an old machine with modern parts that are readily available, as long as they function the same. It's not like people are going to stop making electric motors anytime in the next century.
CRTs simply aren't manufactured anymore. Depending on the issue they aren't end user servicable for the average person, or even most enthusiasts. Maintenance is potentially dangerous to the person doing the work. The parts have limited lifespans with no replacements available for the main bits. If the electron guns start to go, you can potentially rejuvanate them with special equipment, or you can end up breaking a damaged one entirely (see 10:32 of this video about restoring an old arcade cabinet).
It's the same (sans danger to the person doing the repair) for VCRs. No new stock, specialized parts that can't be swapped for more readily availble modern components, you get the picture.
And that's also not considering the fucking weight of a good size CRT compared to a record player.
Don't get me wrong. I love CRTs. Pretty sure I still have my childhood one in my basement, complete with some discoloration from when my 8 year old self had some fun with magnets.
I was legitimately distraught when my wife talked me into only keeping one of the three CRT TVs we had gathering dust, and I think I still have one or two CRT monitors stashed away somewhere.
I spent multiple weekends years ago looking up and configuring the best CRT shader for emulators so it looked like an idealized version of that childhood TV.
But I entirely get why records and record players are such strong and well thought of "nostalgia bait" and CRTs and VHS tapes are not.
Metal Gear Solid ruined me.
I can't see the VIDEO text of the OSD without thinking of the HIDEO fourth wall break during the Psycho Mantis scrap.
VHS next to DVD on a CRT is why lol.
Good sound fidelity is easier to reach on a vinyl record than good video fidelity on magnetic tape. Hence why even old TV shows that were shot on film look great on modern TVs, but their tape counterparts look dated.
That all being said, VHS has inherently more sentimental value due to its widespread use for personal and home video. Anyone still using vinyl is either a hobbyist, collector, or moronic audiophile who can't cope with stuff like opus or even flac/wav.
Funny timing for me.
Just the other day I was at a hangout / arcade kind of place and saw some folks playing a PS3 driving game on a CRT and ngl it looked really damn good. I was across the room so the low resolution wasn't as apparent, but the quality of motion and contrast works at any distance.
I mean I think CRTs are going back into vogue as a nifty thing in many indie circles, including on YouTube where you see a lot of smaller creators embracing the aesthetic nowadays.
Meanwhile the hardcore smash community never left crt because latency.
Try playing Control with all the settings maxed out on 540p and have it be the most amazing looking game you've ever seen
Not old enough.
What if top panel guy is secretly into VHS?
To be fair, most CRT TVs are the equivalent of like a cheap not-classy record player. A nice big 1200p CRT computer monitor is a lot more classy
