And you know what, to a certain degree that's a correct and just idea; you're conscious is just giving you a hard time about it because you've been brought up to be kind and caring about your fellow human beings on the individual level (which is great, by the way, don't get me wrong!). Although I am 100% convinced that the specific kid in your picture hasn't done anything to deserve his situation, I am also convinced that to a great extent his community as a whole is very much responsible for their collective poorness. Very much so. The African people, instead of working together on their famine problems, choose to fight amongst each other. Tribe vs tribe vs tribe. This is civil war at it's hardest and their total disregard for the well-being of their own children is sickening to me.

That's why I'm saying: hold the group responsible instead of being politically correct. The individual should never be judged by the actions of his ethnic peers - that would be racism, but ignoring the real underlying reasons for their situation is dishonest towards those communities who have worked hard to have things like social security, minimum wage, orphanages, health care infrastructure, basic access to technology, ... available to as many people as possible.

We need to realize that they have to want to get out of the rut they are in before we can help them. And by the way, sending money to the "poor Africans" seems like a very disrespectful way to treat an entire race. "They can't make it on their own, if we don't help them" is sort of patronizing, isn't it?

Reminds me of this. Although not exactly the same, and Alabama instead of TX, it's funny nonetheless, and really does drive the point home (lame pun intended):

Apologies for the mirrored clip, there doesn't seem to be a good version on youtube...

Oh, don't get me wrong, I'm not saying it should be illegal... I'm saying it doesn't paint a pretty picture of the guy as far as character & personality goes.

Yes, true, however... (and I know I'm getting in digital audio geek territory here, my apologies for that), keep in mind that your bit depth will only determine your dynamic range (which is greater on a CD, even though it's only 16 bits). Your "smoothness" is determined by your sampling rate, which is 44.1khz for CD. According to Nyquist's theorem this means that you can produce audio indistinguishable from the analog waveform op to 22.05khz. So in fact, you can not hear the "digital aliasing artifacts" that so many people seem to attribute to CD's and digital music in general.

That's actually the point I was trying to make. People accredit the fact that vinyl sounds better to the technology, unfortunately that's not really the case. People mix/master brighter and more compressed for CD, which makes it sound harsher/colder and more tiring to the ears. CD should be better in any aspect than vinyl, but the music industry just fucked up a great medium.

Again, sorry for the rant, LPs do rock, but I'd rather people started mixing & mastering like in the old days again for every medium instead of just for LPs.

Oh wow, good to see that you're really enjoying those LP's Russ, but I do have to say something to try and keep people from buying into the whole "Vinyl is better than CD" thing that seems to be spreading around. Especially your "frequencies" remark is pretty much completely off the mark. The physics just doesn't add up to support such claims.

CD's can accurately reproduce up to 22khz and down to 1hz tones with absolute fidelity. And although it is true that decently made vinyl records can reproduce up to 45khz, the actual highest frequency humans can hear is limited to roughly 20khz for people younger than 20 years old or so (older people fare much worse, topping off at around 17-18khz) so it's a bit pointless in all fairness. To top that off, record players have a problem called "rumble" in the sub-30hz frequencies that basically makes them useless in that range. A problem CD's don't have. Luckily most home equipment can't even reproduce those frequencies anyway, so it's not an audible problem. Speakers are probably your best bet for an upgrade in quality, by the way, and most worthy of spending a good deal of money on. Amps, EQ's, players, etc... not so much. "Monster Cables" and the like are a complete myth and rip-off altogether.

That said, the differences you hear might just well be there, but they're not a limitation of the CD medium. They are more than likely the result of a difference in mastering philosophy for the different mediums. Unfortunately, and counter-intuitively, mastering engineers tend to squeeze out much of the music's dynamics when mastering for CD. Although the medium has a much broader dynamic range than Vinyl (96db vs 70db in best case scenario), somehow people fuck things up during the mastering process. Blame the loudness wars for that.

Bottom line is, it is perfectly possible to make a better sounding CD than any vinyl record can be made to sound. For various ridiculous reasons though the pop music industry just decided not to do so. Classical recording do make the most of the medium, so for proof just listen to a good classical music CD.

But please, don't let the above make you enjoy your records any less, they probably really do sound better than the CD.

Yeah, maybe, style of production kinda does (updated for today though, super-loud). But the music itself, dunno, sounds more punk to me than anything. Kinda reminds me of Dog Eat Dog's Rocky...

Fun is the right word to describe this