[npunt]

Time to wheel out one of my favorite quotes about the signature of a medium:

"Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them." - Brian Eno

[harrall]

I don’t it’s the imperfections that are being chased. Most people don’t pay attention to technical details like that.

Instead it’s about chasing the era. For example, the 80s/90s seemed like a happier time, for both those who grew up in it and those who don’t, and imperfections like VHS artifacts put the viewer in that mindset.

[bruce511]

Nostalgia plays a part for sure.

For those born after an era it can be easy to romanticize an era. And for those who lived through it, it can be easy to remember the good, and forget the bad.

Growing up in the 80s with no cell phones meant it was much harder to co-ordinate schedules, events, social events etc. No "I'm outside, where are you?"

Ultimately each era is different. Some good, some bad. But in 20 years expect your kids to be idolizing the "20s". "Such a simpler time than now..."

"You got to stay home for a year? What fun...."

[pezezin]

> Growing up in the 80s with no cell phones meant it was much harder to co-ordinate schedules, events, social events etc. No "I'm outside, where are you?"

I disagree with this, the lack of cellphones meant that once people agreed to a plan, they stuck to the plan. "Meet next Saturday at 17:00 at the main square", and everybody would be there.

Nowadays people keep arguing and changing plans until the very last minute, it's exhausting.

[bensyverson]

People need to be careful about romanticizing the 80s & 90s. It was not a golden age. It was full of just as much ugliness as the present day.

[BretonForearm]

> "Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature [...]

I bet the first viewers of VHS were busier with marveling at color, compactness and convenience instead of thinking of the new medium as something ugly and nasty. New technology that gets very popular usually starts as state of the art and impressive, and it's only in retrospect that people think of it in condescending way.

[phire]

Yes, they loved the compactness and convenience (well, I’m not sure anyone ever loved the rewinding/fastfowarding experience)

But the quality/color was always a noticeable downgrade from broadcast quality video (and that was a noticeable downgrade from film). But the sacrifice was absolutely worth it.

It is notable that LaserDisc only came out two years after VHS (and before it reached mass adoption), and it could produce (and often exceed) prefect broadcast quality video. Anyone could see the improvement.

Yet LaserDisc never had much success outside of enthusiasts, simply because it couldn’t match the convenience of VHS. Well… it was mostly the lack of recording, but that’s an aspect of convenience too.

[donw]

You’ve also had to flip the disk halfway through a movie, it couldn’t do two hours of continuous video, unlike a VHS tape.

The lack of recording was also a killer, if you went with VHS you could record and watch home movies if you had a camera, read videos at the video store, record from broadcast TV, it was much more versatile.

[giantrobot]

For me and most people I knew at the time, VHS didn't have a noticeable quality loss over broadcast unless you were watching LP/EP recordings.

Many TVs people already had in the 80s didn't have RCA connections so VCRs were connected via twin lead to F connector adapters. They had the same noise as the antenna or cable input. So your commercial tapes usually looked about as good as broadcast. If you actually read the instructions with your VCR to set the timing correctly recorded broadcasts in SP mode also tended to look pretty good.

In absolute terms the VHS video was worse than the original broadcast but on the TVs we had it was hard to notice.

This definitely changed through the 90s. Larger and brighter tubes made the deficiencies of VHS more noticeable. Moving to cable TV from antenna was also very noticeable and made VHS quality more apparent.

If you happened to see a LaserDisc video as a comparison to VHS then the quality difference was stark. As much as VHS and DVD by the late 90s and early 00s. However I think that direct comparison was out of reach for most people.

[osullivj]

Richard Gabriel: Worse is Better

[ahartmetz]

I've always disliked VHS. Broadcast TV was available for comparison at the time and it looked much better.

DVD resolution seemed fine to me at the time - it does not seem fine anymore.

Cassettes were not great, not terrible compared to CDs. That is still the case because stereo audio doesn't get much better than CDs.

Conclusion: Whether something seems good at the time depends on availability of something similar but better.

[unleaded]

I think 480p resolution can look a lot better than people make it out to be. I reckon people's perception of it has been warped by YouTube serving dreadful low-bitrate 480p video for years.

[flir]

On DVD: DVD would still look fine (I think) if you were still playing it through the same screen you did back then.

[nikau]

Most were enjoying not having to stop whatever they were doing at whatever time a show was broadcast to watch it live on air - time shifting recorded TV was a game changer.

[npunt]

Sure the first first ones, but hedonic adaptation happens pretty quickly. If you watched a movie in the theaters and then got a VHS copy to watch on your TV at home, you'd notice the difference, especially if it was a well-worn copy. I remember being so excited about laserdiscs because they overcame the VHS noise.

[achairapart]

It was “good enough” for them at the time. Technology is and was always about something good enough for most people. But the Eno quote is about art and aesthetic.

[dylan604]

I'm familiar with the quote. Still don't like this nostalgia-esque recreation. As someone that spent many hours in edit bays dealing with these tape based artifacts, seeing them now is not nostalgic but brings out a Pavlovian response nearly PTSD like triggering. However, I do understand why others less in the trenches of trying to avoid these types of issues would want it.

[npunt]

We all want what we don't have. Back in the day we were desperate for a clearer picture and found these artifacts annoying. We longed for an alternate reality that was as crisp as our own. Nowadays folks that didn't experience the pre-digital era want aesthetics that embrace the imperfections that today's visual culture glosses over. They want reminders that life wasn't always this way.

[breezybottom]

Speak for yourself.

[Animats]

I'm getting really tired of seeing dust and scratches applied to YouTube video. Especially when it's applied to zooms and pans over stills.

[myself248]

Absolutely this. Blind application of a technique, not understood by the one applying it, is jarring. IMHO it insults the era from which they were trying to mooch cool points.

[stgo]

There's also Marshall McLuhan:

- Every new medium obsolesces the previous one - which then becomes the content, or the art form, of the new medium.

- Once the old ground becomes content of a new situation, it appears to ordinary attention as aesthetic figure. At the same time, a new retrieval or nostalgia is born

[sharperguy]

So in future we will have "retro" streaming platforms that buffer with the spinner a random times for nostalgia and have menus full of promotional material that are impossible to navigate to just find what you're looking for.

[reactordev]

You mean CrunchyRoll?

Yes, yes we will. And we'll throw random ad breaks in there in the middle of the dialog just for shits and giggles, unskippable of course, at a +10db volume too.

Yes, just like we make remakes of Windows 95 in typescript, we will make retro video streaming platforms with spinners and buffering effects.

[WhrRTheBaboons]

if these things ever went away? we would absolutely have nostalgic recreations.

now, i am not so optimistic we will get there, however.

[Kaliboy]

I never heard of this quote, but "heard" something similar a while ago, must have been 2020.

I was watching a live worship session on Youtube and it was beautiful, kept my mind at peace.

Now mind you at the same time I was also a perfectionist, which means you tend to see imperfections in others.

Now at a certain point the singer's voice broke as she was hitting a high note. But before I could mentally register the imperfection I heard or felt such a clear gentle voice that said: "that was the most beautiful part".

In an instant it reframed the imperfect into perfect for that moment and thus forever.

And that's what your quote encompasses. Good read, thanks for sharing.

[npunt]

Cracks in the voice are so visceral. One I love is in the Rolling Stone's Gimme Shelter, Merry Clayton is just about screaming and her voice cracks and they kept the band's cheering reaction to it on the record [1]. Truly a case of the subject matter trying to break out of the medium.

Related is that a lot of cultures embrace intentional imperfections in art for spiritual reasons, as it conveys authenticity and humility in the face of perfection. E.g. Persian flaw [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimme_Shelter

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persian_carpet#cite_note-68

[flir]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVevvbFNKiY

At about 1:30, just after the "I was very nervous" line, Haley pushes her voice until it breaks. I found it a lovely little grace note, emphasizing the lyric.

[QuackyTheDuck]

I wouldn't call it a voice break, more an intentional melodic variation by singing a perfect fourth higher than the expected note in falsetto. But I agree: it sounds marvelous.

[jeffreygoesto]

One of my favorites: https://youtu.be/Jm-FH82lVbE?si=MoD1qaMMtCpRsJwS

[101008]

In the same vein, the most beautiful part of Patti Smith performing "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall" at Nobel Prize Award Ceremony is when she mistakes the lyrics. Whenever I need to cry, I watch that video.

[ErroneousBosh]

> In an instant it reframed the imperfect into perfect for that moment and thus forever.

In Islamic art, the artist often leaves a mistake in a pattern, or a little blob, or some error somewhere in it, because only God is perfect.

In Japan, craftsmen will leave a tiny scratch on an immaculately polished piece of wood, to show how perfect the rest is.

[PowerElectronix]

I'm gonna have to "yes, but" here. Yes, there's no doubt the limitations of a media are interpreted by most as desirable things to chase, like scanlines in a crt that's outputting a low resolution image.

But there are also certain qualities in analog audio or video that were lost or severely degraded in the technologies that came after. For example, you need an extremely high bitrate mp3 to get to the fidelity of a vinyl (CDs can achieve it without issues, though) and in crts image clarity in movement is still unmatched in modern displays, and will probably always be due to the sample and hold nature of modern displays.

[BobbyTables2]

That is pretty good!

Hmm. Now that we have 1 terabyte 1000MB/s NVme drives, we can really be nostalgic about the 1.44Mb 3.5” floppy drives that have about 30KB/s throughput…

Might even be practical with the latest trends in storage pricing…

[breezybottom]

CD distortion? Did you mean vinyl record distortion?

[exsysadmin]

Probably quantization noise is meant:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantization_(signal_processin...

[breezybottom]

I'm not sure what that sounds like on CD, but if it's a nostalgic relic of the past, then we must have some new format without it?

[bel8]

The power of nostalgia.

[pipes]

One of my favourite quotes too.

[qubex]

There’s certainly a Baudrillard reference to be made here, but I’m not awake enough to exactly phrase it (yet).

[IshKebab]

> CD distortion

What?

[picofarad]

Advent of digital mixing and therefore the loudness wars started roughly contemporaneously with the compact disc audio format becoming mainstream. Most complaints of AAD mixes of old vinyls converted to disc were poor, and DDD mastered stuff sounded harsh because of the novelty of compression (audio compressor, not filesize or redbook/Wav/CD-A compression.)

Maybe. I lived through the 90s as a cd purchaser and I tend to agree, CDs were real nice, but different. By the time I had a cd player, tapes had exotic coatings and EQ-trickery to mask the hiss and whatnot of tape media.

[hackernulls]

I don't miss TV movies recorded on VHD one bit, with their unstable paused picture and muddiness. Also not the slow speed and unreliability of 3.5" disks.

[xahrepap]

I miss being able to skip ads and previews without “this feature is disabled for this disk”.