Comment by annex-winged-cr
8 hours ago
> Letterpress printing historically didn’t try to put much bite into printing, preferring what’s called a kiss impression—just perfectly laying the ink on top of the paper. Martha Stewart popularized debossing because, unlike real letterpress, it felt like letterpress.
“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.”
>CD distortion
Ah yes, that notorious -96dB noise.
Surely tape saturation or the artifacts/tone coloring of vinyl records would have been a better example.
My thoughts as well. The main complaints I remember hearing about CDs were people claiming that they were “too clean” and didn’t have the same personality as analog formats
"Any format that is less clean than my favorite analog format is crap. Any format that is more clean than my favorite analog format is soulless."
That quote is from Brian Eno’s 1996 book, so he knows his stuff.
I’m guessing he’s referring to early CDs when both mastering and player DACs had digital roughness. Or maybe he’s talking about digital clipping which was deliberately being introduced in the 1990s to create loudness.