Music for home use had the same evolution, tho spaced out over a much longer time span. First came piano rolls assuming you could afford a VERY expensive player piano. Then wax cylinders, which were plentiful, but you had to buy a player. Both can be purchased at antique shops today. Then came 78 rpm’s which required a whole new playing apparatus. 78’s were the standard for decades, but were quickly eclipsed by 45’s, LP’s, 8-track and cassette tapes, then CD’s. Now it’s all downloadable. What’s a music lover to do?
I collect LPs, CDs, and FLAC files. On one hand, I'm delighted that vinyl has made a strong comeback, but the consequence is that it has driven the price up of vintage LPs.
I never got hoodwinked into SACDs. I still have some cassettes, which I used to collect in the 80s. I never did 8-track.
I like vintage LPs more for the mastering rather than the format, although I do enjoy handling records and putting them on a turntable. For vintage music, it's ironic that the earliest CD issues are usually the best. Why? They didn't have the newer technology to mess them up!
![[pie]](https://threestooges.net/forums/Smileys/default/throwingapie.gif "Throw Pie")
When a CD says "remastered", run the other way!
Way off topic: we call LPs analog, which is correct. But with film, the term "analog" is really incorrect. In fact, film is more akin to digital music. Let me explain.
Take CDs, for instance. The music is sampled at distinct intervals -- a 44.1kHz sample rate, which means that every second, 44,100 samples were taken.
Now for film: the sample rate is a mere 24 samples per second. That's it. It's not analog at all!
So digital representations of film should be really, really good. For HD, say, you only need 24 scans of 1080x1920 pixels per second. But then we get into the math of the frequency of electricity, which is either 50Hz or 60Hz. So this is where things get complicated. And 24fps becomes 23.976fps for video (in the U.S.) And sometimes 29.97. It gets complicated, and if you Google it you will get a million explanations, all pretty much the same.
I'm not debating that HD or SD is really good. I just think that there are so many other variables to consider, not the least of which the quality of your TV. And how many different settings it has. And how you adjust the settings. So what it really comes down to is apples vs oranges when one person says this blu-ray is great, and the other says it sucks. Even if they both own the exact same TV -- make and model. One person may have the settings configured differently.
You can spend hours, days, weeks, trying to get the settings right. I usually just pick a pre-set on my TV, and maybe tweak one or two settings in the pre-set, and save it to a custom setting. The problem with my particular TV (LG) is that it stores an entirely different group of setting for each input on the TV. So I may get it set up OK for cable, but then I have to set it up again for streaming, and again for a DVD or Blu-ray player. And it doesn't allow you to copy a setting from input to input. So you need to write the settings down on a piece of payer and manually set it up for each input. Geesh! And the thing is, it took me a while to figure out that it wasn't sharing the setting among inputs. It wasn't obvious, other than wondering why the picture suddenly didn't look right. And oh yea, my old DVD player has settings you can tweak too. Good luck, Charlie!
Even with all those variables that you actually have control over, if they messed up the video transfer, they messed up the video transfer!
With B&W films especially, like the Stooges, you really need to have the black and white balance and contrast adjusted spot on. When done properly, B&W films have a depth to them that I feel you can never get with color. And that, my friends, is why I feel that there is no substitute for viewing movies, that were shot on film, as projected film, with the film running through a projector. It really comes across with vintage B&W movies -- almost 3D-like. To me the old IB Technicolor had a similar effect, but it's been about 50 years since that system was retired, even in theaters -- so not sure how many people here remember seeing an IB Tech print projected in a theater.
The moral of the story -- if you're happy with your Stooges DVDs, enjoy them. My prediction is that the reviews of the blu-ray will be like the Laurel and Hardy Definitive Restorations -- "they removed the grain!", "the images look waxy", "they sharpened the edges", "they cropped the image wrong", etc. They've already dropped the ball by dropping shorts from the set -- so what else will the mess up?
Then again, maybe it will turn out great! Only one way to really find out, but I'll find out by reading the reviews just out of curiosity.
