muffed a mod. posting to cancel....

The first time I saw porn on video was beta tapes. From what I was told, an awful lot of porn on beta was quietly sold and traded nonetheless. Porn was very much borderline legal then. That Sony didn't want porno on their precious widdums really didn't matter worth a fart in a windstorm.

.. VHS was such poor quality that the fact that it won out over Beta always amazed me.

The first killer app for VHS wasn't home rental. It was time shifting TV, especially daytime soaps. VHS could record two hours in SP or even more in the LP and then the SLP modes. Sure it looked like crap but it was "good enough" for catching up on the soaps you had to miss.

Beta recorded about half as much. That it looked a little better was irrelevant for what many of the early adopters were using it for.

You really, really, really, need to read up on Nyquist, Shannon, and Fourier. And the former two were Real Engineers as opposed to the hacks that write for Absolute Sound and Stereophile.

Short answer: neither analog or digital methods will reproduce wave components outside their frequency response envelopes. If you really do have the hearing of a bat or a dog, then you can readily buy 24 bit audio equipment that samples at 96Khz (or higher! in some cases). M-Audio has a well engineered card that will do this to professional standards for a $100 (Audiophile 2496). Their more expensive ones have more inputs, outputs, and some do 196Khz sampling(needed for highly multitracked editing). I guarantee that card will perfectly preserve every bit of crackle, pop, and hiss that would otherwise be rolled off over 20Khz.

Incidentally, vinyl faces very real constraints on it's dynamic range and frequency response. Especially on the inner tracks. Good reel-to-reel tapes and players can approach 30Khz. I'd suggest using that for future gotcha games when arguing against digital.

In an ideal world, what you say is true. But thanks to the Loudness War, old vinyl is often more pleasant to listen to if it is in good shape.

You'll hate me then. I make mp3s from vinyl. After processing with declicking and dehissing software, I wind up with something I'd rather listen to over most CDs and the original vinyl.

CDs should absolutely incredible compared to 99% of vinyl but the Loudness War has absolutely ruined my trust in any audio I can buy now. New issues of old material get the bejeezus compressed out of them and most tracks you can purchase digitally get the ole brickwall treatment. Technically CD IS superior to vinyl. It has far more usable dynamic range (in practice) and doesn't degrade with use if handled properly. But CDs and digital audio in generally have been gradually ruined over the past twenty years by evil marketdroid driven mastering practices.

Clean infrequently played vinyl on high end equipment MAY have some points over PROPERLY mastered digital audio. But what you have most of the time is vinyl in indifferent condition on mid-range equipment at best. In practice, properly mastered digital audio is going to out-perform it 99% of the time.

And don't get me started on tweaks with half-inch thick oxygen-free solid gold interconnects who regularly receive the gospel from Absolute Sound and Stereophile.........

The monied and powerful would just hang abusive contracts on everything. You'd need to sign a multipage contract in very small print just to walk into a grocery store or buy gasoline. By the time they got done, anybody who isn't rich and powerful will have had to sign most their ability to seek recourse away just to go about everyday life.

You don't even need shellack. Mythbusters did an episode on turd polishing.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yiJ9fy1qSFI

think one of the first things they do is make an image of your hard drive, preserving the data, no matter what you do to it.

There are ways of mitigating that but at the cost of the safety of the data. The encryption suite could use methods similar to software activation. Take an inventory of the authorized machine including any Mac addresses or serial numbers that can be queried. Hell, stick a GPS in the thing and require it to be an authorized location. The really paranoid could stick a UPS inside the case rigged to a dead-man switch if the case is opened or power not restored in an alloted time and of course the GPS monitor will trash the data once the machine is moved.

An image on unauthorized hardware in the wrong place won't help them assuming a good image could be gotten.

I didn't say any of this was a good idea.

I think the wheels just fell off the bus.