elucubra

I agree. The loudness is not what I dislike the least. Most 1st gen CDs were the work of love of sound engineers and producers, given near miraculous equipment, to produce records with unheard of quality. I own several. Dire straits Brothers in arms is one of these, a truly brilliant recording (The album itself is brilliant) The sound quality is truly astounding.

The whole thing took a downturn when they started compressing the recordings to fit FM frequencies. Why they didn’t do the compression at the FM station, and leave the uncompressed stream for us, is always been a mystery to me.

As for the range, it is generally pointless. Most people, even when young, can’t hear above 20 Khz.

That is by design. Unwanted noise is shit. A large part of the electronic pathways were noise and other unwanted signals removers

Shit! I forgot about the life -changing Need to spool with a Pencil

Older dude here:

There is no advantage to listening to something on a cassette, except for the vintage brownie points.

I did the analog to digital transition, and miss nothing. There was an intermediate time, when mp3s came along, and people were lowering bitrates to absurd levels, but digital is simply better.

All the people talking wonders about the "warmth", "tone", and other supposedly desirable qualities are very mistaken. What they are fawning over is noise, feedback, muddiness, lack of range, lack of definition, and so on. Vinyl records are shit. They make sound by literally scratching something.

The only advantage of tape was, at the time, it's smaller size and portability, but sound was worse than records. I still have the last deck I owned, a marvel of technology of the time, a double auto-reverse TEAC deck with Dolby and Dbx noise reduction, auto azimuth, programmable, etc, which is objectively shit compared to a decent mp3 player, provided that the music is encoded in lossless, or large enough bitrate.

CDs were a massive improvement, and the pinnacle were DDD CDs, which were Digital recording, Digital mixing, and Digital mastering, meaning very little analog garbage was introduced in the process.

The objective for audio equipment is to be transparent, to not add or detract anything from the original performance.

"Thanks to Microsoft's legendary approach to quality control, installing Windows patches these days is getting to be less like Russian Roulette and more like accidentally stepping on a rake left in the grass."

Oooof!

I don't know why Norwegians are up in Arms because a royal is being a traditionalist and honors his viking ancestry.

Please read and and try to understand my point, I know that what follows may be controversial. I 110% agree that no one should be forced into acts which it doesn't desire, and that the guy is a proven douche, but is it rape if it was in the frame of consensual sex? I love getting woken up by sexy stuff.

Does getting in bed for a night of sex have to have a written out menu, script or 15 page contract? I can clearly discern between a soft, coy or giggly no, and a hard no, and don't think I could force a woman to have sex with me (I find the concept so abhorrent I'd probably go limp). I'm the type that ensures "she's had her fill (pun intended?) before I finish the meal"

I think that if someone has gotten in bed with you for sex, and stays, it could be safe to assume they are open to more. Maybe he didn't acknowledge a serious "No!" I don't know.

Also, it may be good to keep in mind what one of the old time heroic feminists, Greer, from the 60s-70s said that "often rape isn't, it's bad sex".

Hey, my dudes, we have the land we wanted, and have killed as many as we wanted.

Let's demonstrate and make the world think that the majority are against the war.

Oh, so thats where the expression seersucker comes form!

No.

My mother and her friend set her daughter and me up. We were teens. We hit it off, and were a thing for over 2 years. I moved away, and we tried the long distance thing, but it didn't work out (Duh!).

She's one of the best things that's happened in my life. Smart, sweet, funny, so, so cute, with an edge when appropriate...

Go along. If you don't hit it off, well, so what. You aren't getting married. Just don't go with preconceptions, or expectations. Just expect to have a good time. Worst case is "Ok, see ya"

Also, break the ice with "Isn't this cringy AF?!" or something like that.

Mmmmm. Nom nom!

My ex wife's uncle was the director of the south American division of the arm that made coloring and flavorings of one of the big Food/Chem groups, Procter & Gamble, or unilever, or one of those. Can't remember.

No one in his household ate any processed/ultra processed foods.

Do the math.