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Because they weren’t made as stylish. If you had that exact same tv, but with wood-style paneling and the occasional velvet lining, it would be exactly as charming. Nice style has been phased out over time, being reserved for extremely expensive versions of appliances instead of being the standard.
And like, that’s not to say there’s literally no nice style in anything these days, but the average product tends to look… bland and cheap.
Not old enough.
VHS next to DVD on a CRT is why lol.
Good sound fidelity is easier to reach on a vinyl record than good video fidelity on magnetic tape. Hence why even old TV shows that were shot on film look great on modern TVs, but their tape counterparts look dated.
That all being said, VHS has inherently more sentimental value due to its widespread use for personal and home video. Anyone still using vinyl is either a hobbyist, collector, or moronic audiophile who can’t cope with stuff like opus or even flac/wav.
Another point is that the one on the top is a premium model, whereas the one on the bottom is meant for us plebeian masses.
the one on the top is the cheapest, worst turntable you can possibly buy. they’re so cheaply made they don’t even play records reliably
You really think portable vinyl player is the premium model? Oh you sweet summer child…
Premium ⇒ functionally worth less than what you are paying for, in turn for form.
Yes.
Try playing Control with all the settings maxed out on 540p and have it be the most amazing looking game you’ve ever seen
I mean I think CRTs are going back into vogue as a nifty thing in many indie circles, including on YouTube where you see a lot of smaller creators embracing the aesthetic nowadays.
Meanwhile the hardcore smash community never left crt because latency.
Although Melee was the first big ‘hardcore’ Smash community I was aware of, there are quite a few of its contemporaries in the Counter Strike community that also stuck with CRTs…
There’s a weird debate about the audio quality on VHS. Under the right conditions (right tape, right player, right source) it could be shockingly good – perhaps even better than CD audio, despite not being remembered terribly fondly.
If you really want to wow the ladies, be the one guy with a music collection on VHS.
Better than CD is a pretty bold claim. That format is near perfect for listening quality.
Agreed. Main issue is “better” is subjective and doesn’t always mean the same thing to different people.
I have dabbled in other tape formats, and one thing stands out to me about the compact cassette (not VHS): most people used them in the car, where conditions were bad for cassette storage. Car cassette players also tended to have poorer quality mechanisms and heads. As a result, many people remember the format being bad, when in fact, it was more about their use case. A quality home cassette deck with a quality cassette (e.g. type II or chrome) stored in the right conditions is capable of extremely good results.
Not sure if there is something similar with VHS audio, though. Very different format. I just know there is a debate, but it could be entirely bogus.
The debate is basically bogus. There are very few analog audio formats that can reproduce an audio signal more accurately than a CD, and even then, that’s only because CDs use a 44.1KHz sampling rate and 16bit encoding. There is no analog audio format that can rival a 32bit 96KHz PCM recording, and that’s not even the best digital recording available. CD chose 44.1KHz and 16bit because it’s nearly perfect for the range and sensitivity of human hearing. It’s only when you need to record ultrasound or extremely low amplitude sound that you would use something better.
Fun fact: if you add some hisses and pops and a little bit of compression to CD audio before playing it, some people (me included) will say it sounds better.
This is why the debate still exists:
There is no analog audio format that can rival a 32bit 96KHz PWM recording, and that’s not even the best digital recording available
Analog audio is not sampled. By definition, it includes more data than any sampled version.
Now, the benefits of the sampling in terms of reducing format noise or similar are (subjectively) up for debate.
Totally agree with things sounding better if you introduce noise. I suspect it has to do with sampling, and maybe is not well understood.
Fun fact: if you add some hisses and pops and a little bit of compression to CD audio before playing it, some people (me included) will say it sounds better.
Exactly. It is subjective. It’s not about right or wrong.
I think there are things (like above) where the measurements are misguided. But at the end of the day, even that doesn’t matter.
Analog audio not being sampled doesn’t really matter. It’s like film, it can’t have infinite “resolution”. It’s the size of the granules on the tape and the speed the tape is moving that determines how good audio can sound. Grain size is kind of equivalent to floating point resolution, and tape speed is kind of equivalent to sampling rate. In order to get as true-to-life audio reproduction as 32-bit 96KHz PCM, you’d need absolutely wildly expensive tape and equipment. I’m not even sure if it’s physically possible.
When you say by definition it includes “more data”, you have to think about what that data is. There’s signal, the stuff you want to record, and there’s noise, the stuff that gets on there that you didn’t want. The higher precision a digital recording is, the higher the signal-to-noise ratio. Unlike analog tape, there’s not really a theoretical upper limit (just the limits of your recording hardware). If you record with a high enough precision, you can record incredibly quiet or incredibly loud sounds, way out of the range of the best audio tape. Same with frequencies. The faster your sampling rate, the higher the frequencies you can record. And unlike tape, it’s not going to shred itself to pieces if you go really really high.
Things sound “better” when you introduce noise because people like analog recordings. Not actual analog recordings, mind you, just the appearance of analog recordings. It has nothing to do with audio quality, it’s just vibes. It gives good vibes.
I totally agree it’s just vibes. I’m sorry if I suggested otherwise, but most of my point is about audio being subjective.
If everything is subjective, then some people will like tape.
Ok, yeah. I get you. It definitely is subjective, and I like tape. :) I have a huge tape and vinyl collection. And I have an all-analog setup to listen to it. Tube pre-amp and tube amp. For me, I know it’s less accurate audio, but I want that less accurate audio.
A VHS physically can’t be better than CD audio. The tape would have to move faster than the VHS equipment is designed for. The Hi-Fi VHS audio system can come close to CD’s frequency range, but there is still about 70 dB signal-to-noise (compared to CD’s 98 dB), and there is always loss when writing to and reading from analog tape. CD is not destructively read, so any signal up to 22KHz will be reproducible the exact same way every time.
Hi-Fi VHS audio is nearly as good as CD audio (the best consumer analog audio format, in fact), but it’s not as good. The simple fact is that an appropriately comparably sampled digital PCM recording will always beat an analog recording. You can read about the Nyquist-Shannon theorem for an actual proof, but basically CD audio is near-perfect for almost every human’s hearing range (most people can’t hear above 20KHz).
I’d like to gloat that I can still hear above 20kHz, but I can’t be sure if it’s just my audio consumer-grade equipment creating undertones. Although my Headphone says it can do 28, I have no idea about the stock sound drivers on the devices.
I totally agree that CD should be better.
I really wasn’t trying to make a point, except that a simple search shows that the debate about VHS vs CD exists.
I don’t think it comes down to either one being objectively better.
Well this is going to be an interesting rabbit hole…
In I go!
Brb. Recording all my records into my vcr.
It’s gotto be real analogue vintage
The real obsolete media player.
The year is 1987, Christmas has just pasaed. This baby gets plugged in down in the finished basement. You and your older brother are sitting down on the carpet for the first time to check out this game, Super Mario Bros. Your only gaming experience so far has been the Atari 2600 and C64…
Now this is classy.
I only see a TV stand without a TV.
My grandma (who lived about a 12 hr. way) had one of these growing up and I always loved it. I was disappointed one year to find that it had been replaced since it quit working.
I’m also reminded of my mother who, no joke, brought one of these home from the landfill. It didn’t work, but she gutted it and turned it into a bed for our little dog we had at the time. In hindsight, she’s probably very lucky she didn’t hurt or poison herself in the process.
I would love to get one of these to use in like a multi-purpose gaming setup. Like use this as the TV stand for the newer TV so I can play newer and older games in the same place.
That dog bed sounds adorable
In hindsight, she’s probably very lucky she didn’t hurt or poison herself in the process
How come? A tiny circuit board isn’t anything like thin vials of mercury or the like.
CRT tvs have pretty big capacitors that zap you good and hard if you touch em funny.
Older boxes are probably long since dishcharged BUT many many tinkerers will plug it in first to see if it still works just for shits and grins and those caps will take juice given the chance….
NES isn’t a CRT tv though.
You ought to go back and re-read their comment
I have. I thought it was replaced with a newer console. The comment doesn’t specify “crt tv” and it would be weird if that’s how one would refer to tvs of that age. Having nes is much morr specific than just having a TV.
They’re talking about the console TV in the picture, that’s what was brought home from the landfill and converted to a dog bed
What a beautiful memory.
If ours wasn’t a mess of wires, I’d showoff the huge blocky model we still have!
We use it for holding a slightly more modern TV!
Because VHS/CRT was such a fucking hassle even when it was the best possible format option for home media. The dawn of LCDs and DVD was a glorious thing.
VHS wasn’t the best format even when it came out. VHS was specifically designed to be a middle ground between quality and affordability. That’s partly why it succeeded in the consumer market, both the tape and the player were cheaper than the other formats of the day. Beta and LaserDisc both had better picture and sound quality but both had their own drawbacks as well as cost. CEDs were cheaper than LaserDisc and predated VHS by several years but didn’t have the industry acceptance of the other formats and had similar drawbacks.
I had never heard of CED and researching it led me to the knowledge that laserdisc was originally called Discovision.
The dawn of LCD’s sucked. They were inferior to CRT in most ways, they were bigger and lighter. They eventually got better and cheaper and that is when they took off.
DVD was a day 1 upgrade over vhs for watching movies.
I have a laptop from the mid 90s that looks like mouse trails are on even when they aren’t. This is why mouse trails exist, because early LCDs sucked that bad.
Was, “Be kind, rewind” really that much of a hassle?
Yes. So much so they made completely seperate machines to rewind vhs tapes so your one vcr could continue to do other things at the same time.
Binging movies wasn’t much of a thing back then; I can’t remember a single time when I wanted to immediately put another video in after just finishing one. Plus it took like 5 minutes to rewind one - I’d usually run to the bathroom and grab a snack and it’d be done by the time I got back. It wasn’t any longer than a commercial break, and we were all used to that back then. I remember I once mowed the lawn 5 minutes at a time during commercial breaks because I didn’t want to miss the show I was watching, haha!
And how many people actually bought one? Not us, I can tell you that much.
We had one that looked like a corvette.
Aside from rental places and the like, no one.
Evrryone in my family had one. Grandma had 2 cause i watched a lot
My grandparents had one, it made an awful screeching sound
VHS cassettes were also relatively fragile and decay on use (technically so do vinyl records but they are more forgiving). Humans are also really good at ignoring minor flaws in audio, while visual noise and low graphic resolution is much harder to ignore (though CRT messed up the image in one of the best ways possible for the human brain to fill the gaps).
It was tedious and time consuming.
Hitting a button on a device and waiting (gasp!) more than 30 seconds was so tedious!?
… no wonder people constantly pay greedy fucks like Elon than take five seconds to think about … anything.
I still have a tiny little monophonic CRT I found at a yard sale for like $2 that I use to watch my 1985 letterboxed Star Wars VHS tapes. It’s just a different vibe
I once binged IT Crowd using an old CRT monitor as my second screen. Definitely a vibe.
Wanna come by my place later and check out my… Sony Trinitron?
Yes. I really do.
Don’t expect anything sexy or nothin’, I’m genuinely in this for the Trinitron. Do you have retro consoles or should I bring mine?
people would love crt tvs. i have hounding me for crts
Don’t fret. In 20 years’ time future hipsters will romanticize bleeding colors, dogshit resolution and subpar color space and call it “so much nicer to watch”.
Video games have been doing that for over a decade at this point
I even saw mainstream ads on TV that deliberately have this look (and in 4/3 ratio !)
I’m already at this point. Over resolution is bad.
What’s over resolution? Wouldn’t we eventually stop once we reach the full input resolution of the human eye?
Mhm but aren’t suitcase vinyl record players pretty bad?
My first thought too. I love records, my record setup is where nearly all of my hobby money goes into, but I’d never recommend a suitcase player to anyone. I don’t have a ton of hobby money to spend so my setup isn’t super expensive or anything but I did make sure to get a nice player at least. Low-to-mid range speakers and pre-amps and stuff can still be okay, especially these days the lower end is getting a lot better, but a cheap player can do actual damage to a record over time.
If someone reading this is looking to get into the hobby, do yourself a favour and save up a bit for the player. You can get cheap speakers and all that and upgrade later but a bad player can ruin your records over time, especially if you spin them regularly. I personally have a Pro-Ject Debut III, you can switch between a built-in pre-amp or an external one, so you can start with the built-in one and then get a dedicated one later on to help with initial costs, and Pro-Ject makes excellent players. Zero plastic anywhere except the dust cover, European company and hand made in Europe, so you’re not supporting American business if that’s important to you, and even their lower end players are still very well made with all the features you’d want (adjustable anti-skate and counterweight, switch between 33/45/78 rpm, soft drop for the needle so it doesn’t hurt the record, high quality materials, comes with a pretty decent diamond cartridge, etc) plus they tend to be pretty easily upgradable. Audio-Technica is also supposedly pretty good at that price range but I never found one I loved, meanwhile every Pro-Ject I’ve messed around with has been a genuine pleasure to operate. I’m not an expert but I do have a bit of a hobbyist knowledge and experience if anyone has questions.
Plus one on Pro-Ject. Excellent record players.
The cheapest “audiophile” record player they have is probably the Debut Carbon Evo, but even the cheaper ones, especially with an elliptical stylus, are are excellent. You can get their cheapest turntable, the E1, with a 60€ Ortofon OM 5E cartridge (elliptical stylus) for only 230€ in Europe. I’ve tested it and it punches well above its weight. The only thing missing is tracking force control and anti-scating control, so you’re a little limited, but who can complain at that price.
The one thing I’d note for people considering adopting the hobby is the importance of a good phono preamp. Most cheaper or built-in ones are wildly inaccurate and will intensely misrepresent your records. Always make sure to look up the frequency response and how well it matches RIAA from a third party’s measurements! A good phono will do wonders for audio quality compared to one of lesser quality.
yeah, especially any made this century. complete shite.
Records and their players are tangible. You don’t need any electricity to play a record. It is a kind of magic the human mind can comprehend.
VHS tapes and cathode ray tubes on the other hand work with magnets and quantum physics and shit. Nobody knows how they fucking work.
Yeah, there’s something about the physicality of a record player and records that changes the experience. At least for me it encourages more focus on the listening. Even if you just put something on while you do something else, you’re going to be interacting with again before super long.
The record, the part you interact with, has size and weight. It’s definitively a “thing”. And choosing a record is a choice. You can’t just press some buttons on a remote and change to whatever else (unless it’s a full music system setup).
Plus the beautiful art on the sleeves, and the time it takes to get the record out forces you to spend at least a little time with that art.
With a CRT TV, you’re using a remote and there’s a lot more abstraction and layers between the physical object holding the content and your actual consumption of it.
VHS tapes are physical, but the moving parts that make it all work are hidden away in the VCR and the magnetic tape isn’t really touchable. Playing one on most TVs required another device plugged into the TV and pressing some buttons on one or two remotes that could just as easily bring you other content without ever leaving your seat.
There is art on the VHS case, but it’s not like it takes time to get the tape in and out, so you’re not as likely to look at it for long.
Most importantly, people are still making new record players and records. There was a long while where it was a very niche thing, and there weren’t a lot of new records coming out, but there were still new players coming out. And the technology is simple enough that the average person could at least keep a player in working order or fix the most common issues themselves. Enthusiasts could even “fix” an old machine with modern parts that are readily available, as long as they function the same. It’s not like people are going to stop making electric motors anytime in the next century.
CRTs simply aren’t manufactured anymore. Depending on the issue they aren’t end user servicable for the average person, or even most enthusiasts. Maintenance is potentially dangerous to the person doing the work. The parts have limited lifespans with no replacements available for the main bits. If the electron guns start to go, you can potentially rejuvanate them with special equipment, or you can end up breaking a damaged one entirely (see 10:32 of this video about restoring an old arcade cabinet).
It’s the same (sans danger to the person doing the repair) for VCRs. No new stock, specialized parts that can’t be swapped for more readily availble modern components, you get the picture.
And that’s also not considering the fucking weight of a good size CRT compared to a record player.
Don’t get me wrong. I love CRTs. Pretty sure I still have my childhood one in my basement, complete with some discoloration from when my 8 year old self had some fun with magnets.
I was legitimately distraught when my wife talked me into only keeping one of the three CRT TVs we had gathering dust, and I think I still have one or two CRT monitors stashed away somewhere.
I spent multiple weekends years ago looking up and configuring the best CRT shader for emulators so it looked like an idealized version of that childhood TV.
But I entirely get why records and record players are such strong and well thought of “nostalgia bait” and CRTs and VHS tapes are not.
You don’t need any electricity to play a record
Are we talking about the hand-cranked players from the olden days?
Yes, but you can also spin a modern player and just listen closely to the needle.
Don’t do that - that’s really bad for the vinyls and your stylus
My cheapo one has a short gap where it will start spinning before the speakers catch up and I can listen that way guilt free. You can also just turn the volume of the speakers all the way down, but that’s not nearly as disorienting as hearing a half second of the audio all small and tiny and not coming from the right place.
Degaussing a CRT is also a magical experience
BAWWWWWWNNNN
Mp3 players my beloved <3
I’ve been thinking for years now about picking up one again that can run RockBox. Used to live out of an iPod nano with that, and didn’t have to carry flash drives. Just plug the usb cable into a computer and use it as one. A lot of modern music apps still aren’t as fully featured when it comes to on the fly playlist creation.
