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goddamnedtwisto
Dec 31, 2004

If you ask me about the mole people in the London Underground, I WILL be forced to kill you
Fun Shoe

KillHour posted:

These people actually exist?

Oh god yes they do. I used to work in a high-end camera dealer and we had a few (amateur) guys come in who'd insist on taking half a dozen shots of the building opposite (which had loads of parallels) with each lens we had in stock of whatever lens they were interested in, then they'd come in a week later with 30 identical pictures and show us that one of them was clearly superior because it had some invisibly small amount less aberration and would buy that one (they'd shoot the box with the serial number before each run).

Also they'd only buy batteries we kept in the fridge (with the pro-grade ultra-ISO film, which did actually need refrigeration) because They'd Read A Thing. Audiophile-type thinking exists everywhere people have way too much money to spend on a hobby.

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goddamnedtwisto
Dec 31, 2004

If you ask me about the mole people in the London Underground, I WILL be forced to kill you
Fun Shoe

DarkSol posted:

Electronic flashes take batteries though. :confused:

As do film cameras, and have done since like the 1950s. This was early 90s though, which was when autofocus SLRs first started coming onto the market - they're the reason why CR223s and similar are still the standard for DSLR batteries - they were in the first-gen and still work fine now (in fact a DSLR is way less power-hungry than, say, an EOS 1 despite having active displays and shitloads of processing power - no film advance and the motors (for AF) have become shitloads better.

This was also the time lithium batteries started coming onto the market (in fact without them the AF SLR boom could never have happened, because alkaline batteries were absolutely crushed by the power demands) and people treated them like witchcraft. Again there's a similarity to audiophile magical thinking there - because these cameras (unlike previous-gen SLRs) died if the battery went flat and because the venerable OM101 had a glitch where the AE mechanism went screwy as the battery lost charge, the good idea of putting in a fresh battery before starting work became "The quality of the battery determines the quality of your pictures", and the manufacturer hype about how stable lithium was at low temps compared to other chemistries became "FREEZE YOUR BATTERIES TO MAKE YOUR PICTURES SO REAL THAT IT WILL DESTROY YOUR BRAIN"

Wasabi the J posted:

Does he takes his pictures ~~in analogue~~ though?

There are still absolutely shitloads of people shooting in film - not just hipsters with their broken-rear end old ex-Soviet Jenas, there's a lot of people out there who talk about film - especially transparency - in the exact same way audiophiles talk about vinyl, insisting easily-measurable things like resolution, contrast and dynamic range are massively superior to digital, and that the measurements must be wrong when they disagree.

(To head off the derail - yes I'm aware that there are circumstances where film is still preferable)

goddamnedtwisto
Dec 31, 2004

If you ask me about the mole people in the London Underground, I WILL be forced to kill you
Fun Shoe

Nintendo Kid posted:

It's an exercise that has no meaning in the digital world, because the things you have to account for can become extremely different. Learning to print your own negatives makes you better at post production, not initial photography, and it makes you better at a form of it that doesn't translate to digital.

It's kinda like claiming that learning how to mix down a recording on analog tape makes you a better musician. Or for that matter, that learning how to set up a playback system makes you a better musician.

If anything the need to keep a lot of digital photo manipulation comprehensible to the film generation held it back quite a bit - even now an awful lot of it is just replicating stuff you can do with film, often inefficiently. In the Renaissance, painters had to know how to mix their own pigments, but the availability of modern dyes never held back Picasso.

Having said that every once in a while I dig out my old ME and shoot a couple of rolls of HP5 because there is something inherently pleasurable in the process - I wish I had the space for an enlarger because developing prints is even more fun (i just scan the negs in). I think it's been mentioned here before but a lot of people who are into vinyl have the same attitude - they don't pretend it's superior, just that it's more satisfying, which is a very different matter.

goddamnedtwisto
Dec 31, 2004

If you ask me about the mole people in the London Underground, I WILL be forced to kill you
Fun Shoe

Jerry Cotton posted:

I wonder what EU law says about this.

EU law says you can take it to any garage you want to get it repaired, and that third parties are free to make parts to fit it as long as they don't claim to be official, that fitting non-OE parts or taking it to a non-dealer garage doesn't invalidate the warranty, but that manufacturers can refuse to repair damage under warranty caused by those third party parts/garages.

None of this is of help to the poor beleaguered billionaires that own the limited Ferraris because the only way to get trained in Ferrari maintenance, or to get parts to make copies, is through Ferrari. Not that it matters because at that point it's basically a cult - nobody on the list would ever do anything to risk being cast out into the howling wilderness of Lamborghini ownership.

Funnily enough the one thing limited Ferraris aren't is garage queens - Enzo was so pissed off with people treating his cars as investments rather than as cars that one of the other conditions for getting on the list is that you actually drive the cars x miles a year. It's actually a sensible idea because let's face it, the main thing Ferrari are actually selling is the Ferrari brand, and an F50 or whatever is pretty much a rolling advertisement for that brand.

goddamnedtwisto
Dec 31, 2004

If you ask me about the mole people in the London Underground, I WILL be forced to kill you
Fun Shoe
Willing to bet it's some sort of mains-frequency-specific filter and if called out on it they can probably point to an oscilloscope showing it reduces the noise on the line. Still pointless but probably *just* this side of legal as far as claims go.

goddamnedtwisto
Dec 31, 2004

If you ask me about the mole people in the London Underground, I WILL be forced to kill you
Fun Shoe

Blue Footed Booby posted:

Every electric fan I've used is the same way. No idea why.

Edit: lol no they're mostly 321. Still asleep.

That one at least is fairly obvious, because you need the higher current to get the thing spinning and so you need to slide through the high-power area to get to the low-power one. Same with (some) gas cookers where maximum flow is the first setting next to the shutoff, to make sure they light.

I've never seen a switch like he's talking about, maybe he can post an example? The only thing I can think of is like a source selector where position 3 is position 1 plus position 2, then that layout makes sense from both a use standpoint and probably a wiring one.

goddamnedtwisto
Dec 31, 2004

If you ask me about the mole people in the London Underground, I WILL be forced to kill you
Fun Shoe

Nintendo Kid posted:

Yeah, that's what i brought up in the first place. This supposedly premium device has a screen that looks like the kind you'd call a ripoff back in the early 90s.

How much do you want to bet that type of screen was used on some "legendary" amp back in the day and they're just cargo-culting that?

goddamnedtwisto
Dec 31, 2004

If you ask me about the mole people in the London Underground, I WILL be forced to kill you
Fun Shoe

GWBBQ posted:


That's a whole lot off words for "lamp cord."

I'm having trouble finding it under all the modern stuff that comes up in search results, but I remember reading about an early secure phone system that used record players with identical records of white noise on each end to drown out what was being said if someone tapped the line and didn't have the right player and record to subtract the noise from the signal.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIGSALY

I wonder how much extra headroom and dynamics the analogue crypto has over digital?

e: To be clear, because the Wiki article doesn't actually state this, the first iteration of SIGSALY (Green Hornet) was the one that used the records - PCM was added into the system because of the impossibility of keeping the records synchronised over the length of the conversation, they continued to use the records that they'd already etched for Green Hornet as their noise mask

goddamnedtwisto fucked around with this message at 08:04 on Sep 13, 2015

goddamnedtwisto
Dec 31, 2004

If you ask me about the mole people in the London Underground, I WILL be forced to kill you
Fun Shoe

KozmoNaut posted:

Read this review of some analog optical signal cables, then look at the measurements later and the letters that resulted.

http://www.stereophile.com/cables/805harm/index.html#IJVjC0P2UDJw5DLe.97

Afterwards, reflect on just bad one of the foremost audio reviewers actually is at telling whether audio gear is good or bad.

So, anyone who actually has to use fibre will be :stonklol: at that whole cavalcade of bullshit, because there's literally no way whatsoever anything they're claiming can possibly be true, but it's fun how anyone even vaguely familiar with audio processing should also be able to see it's utter bullshit too - and yet a person who is paid money to review these things still managed to write this:

quote:

When you're powered up and ready to play music, you'll hear a very slight hiss coming from the speakers. If this freaks you out, no CyberLight cables for you.

"If you dislike the emperor's mighty imperial dong slapping in your face, maybe his new clothes just aren't for you!"

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goddamnedtwisto
Dec 31, 2004

If you ask me about the mole people in the London Underground, I WILL be forced to kill you
Fun Shoe

josh04 posted:

Nope; as you can see in the lower image here, there's power cables for the optical/electrical converters running alongside the fibre. You're actually just inserting a whole nother circuit into the equation.

Yeah, I mean if you were going to do it properly for noise isolation you'd have a DAC and an ADC at opposite ends of the cable, so there's two conversion steps for absolutely no good reason in your signal chain. The fact they talk about audible noise strongly suggests they're using cheap converters, but there's also references to it being analogue throughout which suggests they're doing analogue optical (more or less just wiring an LED into the signal and an LDR at the other end), and given how non-linear the response of both those components is the idea of using that for an audio signal is just absolutely hilarious.

e: Holy poo poo looking again at the images - these are just cheap media converters for data use. There's literally no way whatsoever this wouldn't completely destroy an analogue signal.

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