Sean's Blog

caseyliss:

Although I don’t personally have a turntable, my father has a killer stereo setup, and I can attest that vinyl actually sounds better than a CD. Granted, there are cracks and pops, but the music sounds so much more full, and natural. It really is striking.

Oh boy, you just opened a whole case of worms right there. You might as well come out and say that solid state amps suck ass, and that the only proper way to listen to music is through a tube amplifier (with the speaker cables properly suspended from ceramic hangers, of course).

That being said, I kind of agree with you. I say “kind of” because I’m torn. The scientist part of me believes that Nyquist was on to something, and that a digital medium is fully capable of reproducing sounds a human would find indistinguishable from the original analog form, given a high enough sampling rate. But I’ve heard the same things you have, hence the whole being torn bit.

I think there’s a few logical explanations (though partial they may be) behind this. First, and probably foremost, the greatest advantage CDs had over LPs when they first came out was their dynamic range advantage. However, the record industry has gradually eroded this advantage, thanks to most people and the Loudness War (the animation there is particularly telling).

Part of the problem is also the listening habits of people. Very few people just listen to music anymore. Music has become too damn convenient, to the point where more often than not, music serves as little more than background noise. Back when LPs were popular, it took effort to listen to music, so people generally sat down and enjoyed it when they put a LP on. These days, not so much.

And honestly, I think the last part is nostalgia. The pops and clicks aren’t true to the original performance of an album, but depending upon age, they’re original to the first time we heard “Hotel California” or “Dark Side of the Moon.” All in all, it combines to make us want to listen to vinyl.

Of course, this is comparing vinyl and CDs. Compare vinyl to a shitty MP3, or vinyl to SACD or the like, and it’s entirely different ball game…

marco:

Every recent consumer electronics product from Apple—definitely the iPad, but all iterations of the iPhone including the initial one—has been greeted with rounds of articles crowing about what an arrogant, foolhardy mistake it is and how this will finally, finally, be the moment the emperor is revealed to have no clothes. And ultimately this is what’s so infuriating about Apple: that’s not what happens. Ever.

A very interesting read, full of good points. Apple has, in recent history, set the bar so high for itself that it’s become impossible to continue to meet the bar. Apple has become to computing what the Patriots have been to football, what the Lakers and Celtics have been to basketball, and as much as it pains me to say it as a Flyers fan, what the (gulp) Devils and Penguins have been to hockey. No matter how good a team is, anything short of a championship becomes a disappointment. No matter how good a product is, it’ll be expected to be perfect. Unrealistic expectations, for sure, but it comes with the territory.

That being said, I still maintain that the iPhone/iPad is now where the Mac was in the early 90s. It’s still a superior product for most people, but the competition has caught up quickly, and has even surpassed Apple in a few areas. Apple got complacent, and more or less stagnated, compared to the competition. The competition may have never bettered Apple in all or even most areas back then, but it didn’t matter. As it might not now…

Direct injection engines seem to be all the rage today, and for good reason: you can bump up the compression ratio (compared to port injection) without necessarily raising the octane requirement, and/or combine it with forced induction to get higher HP/torque numbers while maintaining or even improving fuel economy compared to a similar engine with port injection.

My 2010 GTI has it, and I’ve been very happy with the engine’s performance. But when I look at the images in links like this one, I do get a little worried. And I’m hardly alone in that regard. This happened with the 2.0 FSI motor, it’s happening with the 2.0 TSI motor in my car, and it’s apparently happening in a wide variety of other engines from other manufacturers (BMW’s N54, various Porsche engines, et cetera).

In a car with port injection, this wouldn’t be a problem, as the fuel would wash over the valves upon injection, but in a car where the fuel is injected directly into the combustion chamber, that obviously has no chance of occurring.

Volkswagen recommends oil changes at 10,000 mile intervals, but after reading about this quite a bit, I can’t see myself ever going that long. I changed my oil yesterday with a quality synthetic 5W-40 at 4,900 miles or so, and I’ll probably be doing every 5,000 miles from here on out. Oddly, for all the crap Toyota has been getting lately, they have seemed to avoid the direct injection problems by pairing their direct injection with smaller port injectors that periodically send fuel through the intake manifold to wash the valves off…

caseyliss:

Those who buy a new Z06 or ZR1 corvette, and pay a ~$6k premium, and get themselves to Detroit, can actually help build the motor for their new ‘vette. Sweet.

I’d rather take the money, go to Germany, take delivery of either a Porsche or BMW (or perhaps a R8) for a discount, and enjoy breaking it in on the Autobahn. I might not even get shot, as one might in the wonderfully developed and upscale area that is Detroit. Thanks for making it an easy choice for me, GM…