[Slowhand] Re: Enuf iz Enuf

[Almighty Geetarz]

I've just read the twaddle that born-again demi-deity, the person currently
known as the "God-Almighty Geekhurts" has just plastered on his apology for
a web-site.

Sorry for the plaster. I tried to use duck tape but it leaves a sticky residue on my monitor.

His history lesson falls short of mentioning the onslaught of compression,
(post Dolby). Why is it that we are quite happy watching a DVD with a JPEG
still every second and intermediate frames merely differences, when we throw
up our arms at a good old MP3 audio?
 
A-freaking-men.  Sorta.  MP3 isn't all that offensive at high bitrates, but the average chipmunk thinks 128k is a "high" bitrate.
 
And the ultimate enemy here is the compression.  MP3 is evil because with lossy audio, you lose so much ability to tweak stuff in the future.  So much is possible with audio editing today that wasn't even dreamt of a few years back - try that with something encoded to mp3 and you are in for a nasty shock. You are correct - lossy video is a stopgap measure at best, and will come back to haunt us in the future.  Meanwhile the studios do shoot in uncompressed formats so it is up to the marketplace to decide if customer demand will be there.  Given the fact that there are many people still reluctant to give up VHS ... I ain't optimistic. But as far as I am concerned, bring on my Blu-Ray baby, HD and beyond.

Ironically, we are now all trading "Satellite" broadcasts and "Digital
Radio" transmissions that are blatantly compressed. A example is this year's
wonderful Belfast concert. I have two versions of this, both of which have
abrupt high-frequency roll-off above 15kHz.
One of these is in fact the Mid Valley "Black Beauty" production supplied by
a kind soul on this digest. Another kind soul is sending me the complete
show, which he tells me is also short of a full shilling. Why are we
accepting this gross reduction in fidelity?


Preaching to the choir.  And Belfast sounds wonderful compared the hideous Crossroads Festival off the Sirius network.  Good grief.  On anything better than the factory stereo in an '83 Chevette the compression artifacts are just incredibly bad on that one.  The flanging alone is just amazing.  Coming soon to a network near you ... bandwidth compression as the content providers try to cram more and more channels into the same bandwidth.  Don't know about you but as a longtime satellite TV user, I've seen enormous quality loss as the providers have slammed the bandwidth for most channels to add new ones to the lineup, and the same is true I guess for satellite radio.


Furthermore, the GAG totally avoids mentioning the real way of sharing music
without the lulus, via Bit Torrent; why aren't we making more use of this
avenue?

Easy, because some of us don't have bandwidth - ANY access to bandwidth. Great that you do - I don't. Of course, you probably can't land a Cessna in your front yard so everything's a tradeoff in life! Now I don't have a Cessna, and I don't have bandwidth, so that doubly sucks. I'll settle for a VFR Super Cub at this point - or DSL.  But the Super Cub will be easier to get than DSL. Go figure.

 I've shared over 2500 copies of "Bluesbreaking!" on STG over the
last three months and it's still going strong, in spite of STG's downtime
during the last fortnight.


Amen, hubba hubba, and bully for you. Way to go. Of course it doesn't really matter because the you get these boneheads that download nice stuff from STG and then STILL manage to screw it up with TAO burns (you think I am kidding?).


So I put it to you Mr. Plastic/Weekend Hippy, if you love the music as much
as you say you do and you aren't just a groupie, (like the rest of us),  to
offer some evidence of your musical abilities in a band with renown
musicians. If it's visual, you could do worse than replace that screwed-up
toffee-paper "Oswald" graphic.


Renown musicians? Are you joking? I'm not just a groupie - I'm a guitar player.  A really, really BAD guitar player.  But I make up for my lack of talent the old fashioned way - with VOLUME.  And really good facial expressions.   But mainly with volume.  Just ask my neighbors.  They're a half mile away but they can still tell you just how bad I am - I promise.  But really, I'm much better at air guitar than with the real thing! Heck I am even better at it than this guy:

http://www.geetarz.org/reviews/clapton/air-guitar.jpg

and that is saying something.  Should we ever meet, hopefully in a pub, and certainly with alcohol present in our systems, I hereby challenge you to a duel - an air guitar duel. To be judged by Slowhanders.  I pick "Wonderful Tonight" as my anthem.  No, wait, I can't say that, I haven't been drinking yet. I'll pick something else.  ANYTHING else.


I'm pleased that the issue of geographical restriction has arisen, but
disappointed that a couple of genuine cases have given those cheap-skaters
an excuse for not paying an extra six-pence on the postage.

Thruppence and sixpence every day
Just to drive to my baby
Thruppence and sixpence each day
'cause i drive my baby every way

Cheers,

The Almighty

(and yes, Magic Bus is a GREAT air guitar anthem - not as good as Baba O'Riley tho)








PS: this communication has been checked for virii, spelling, but NOT for
taste.

TIC ;~)


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