"Dave Liquorice" wrote in message
ll.co.uk...
On Mon, 28 Apr 2014 19:09:14 +0100, gremlin_95 wrote:

Presumably old age is having its normal affect on hearing and
sight
so you don't notice how crap downloads and/or streaming are
compared
to CD or Blu-Ray (or even DVD come to that). B-)

What worries *me* is that many teenagers are of the opinion that
downloads are better quality than CDs.

Even at my age, I can tell the difference, even on earbuds and
small
screens.

There must be something wrong with me then because I can't really tell
the difference

My threshold for detecting artefacts in audio is around 128 kbps for MP3: I
can distinguish that from anything higher, but I can't hear any difference
between (for example) 192 and 320 kbps.

The difference between analogue (especially vinyl) and digital (CD) is VERY
noticeable: vinyl suffers very badly from disc noise, even on a brand new
record from an expensive record label (ie not made on the cheap), whereas CD
sounds perfect. And dust and scratches are very hard to avoid.

As an aside, I've always wondered about people who say they prefer vinyl to
CD. Do they prefer the imperfections and signal processing that vinyl
introduces, I wonder? Do they find a live performance (mic, amplifier,
speakers) as bad as a CD, or do they find that the digitisation modifies the
signal - can they distinguish live electronic (all analogue) from CD?


Yeah but you are so young you've probably never seen or heard what
good systems fed with good signals are like or haven't had the
artifacts of the systems failings pointed out.

The population as a whole seem to think that Freeview DTTV is fine. I
find it almost unwatchable with all the artifacts the from lossy
compression that is applied to bring the 1 *Giga* bps plus out of the
back of a camera to around 2 *Mega* bps on Freeview. DSAT is better
but still has some problems but no where near as distracting. Both
DTV and DSAT, even in HD, are kicked into a cocked hat by Blu-Ray on
a decent "Full-HD" screen.

I hadn't realised that the output from a camera is as high as 1 Gbps. That
really is a LOT of compression to get it down to 1-2 Mbps.

I mainly watch TV (DTV) on my PC screen, sometimes in a window that only
occupies part of the screen, but then I am only a foot or so from the
screen. Mostly I'm not aware of compression artefacts of DTTV but there are
occasions on a very detailed picture when the camera pans and all detail is
lost or replaced with large blocks for a moment. But then I've seen some
DVDs where that happens.

Having said that, I am very conscious of the PAL artefacts (coloured fringes
around vertical edges, especially captions, and a fine dot pattern) on any
old programmes (eg repeats of 1970s or 80s programmes, or old news footage).


HD on DSat is a great disappointment. I remember watching the Opening and
Closing Ceremonies of the Olympics just after we got Sky and being very
aware of the compression artefacts.

The biggest problem with digital TV is that it doesn't handle overexposure
very gracefully. Drama is usually well graded and the picture is perfect,
but a lot of documentaries, especially fly-on-the-wall types, suffer from
horrendous featureless orange skin tones or other bleached colour. Tube
cameras had their faults (lag, smear) but somehow they managed to make
overexposure less objectionable.