Pvm doesn't look like my childhood

[Einzelherz]

Nice to see you have a good deck! What Nakimichi model is it? I have a luxman here.
sorry to derail the thread a bit here guys >w>

BX-1 from 1984. Its idler tire (o-ring) was hardened. It's not the most high end available ( I think it was the base model), but it was $15 and now has me searching out complementary vintage high end crap like VHS and possibly CD.

I've never believed in the analogue imperfections nostalgia theory, analogue works fine in areas where digital audio still has issues and vice-versa.

Maybe imperfections was the wrong word. It's more like hearing a different mix. There's a dullness that my lack of vocabulary cannot better describe in the cassette dub that I have compared to the MP3s, and likely to a CD. In this case I have two data points separated by at least fifteen years. One of them sounds "more correct" for lack of a better term. On the other hand I have cassettes of albums that were factory made, which I later replaced with CDs and later still, MP3s. Those are albums I've listened to consistently over the past 20 years and I'd wager they won't instill as much nostalgia as the aforementioned dub cassette because the memory has been "updated" so to speak. I'm not a PhD or anything, just a speculator.

[Xyga]

Yeah well tapes and mp3 aren't what we'd call ideal media to compare anyway lol. ^^

I'm no specialist either, but I meant in a general way that analog audio is better at catching and delivering some of the qualities of the sound, which unlike certain hard-science sound gurus I don't believe are coming from the flaws or imperfections inherent to the technology.

Of course digital is largely more competent, even decently encoded mp3 destroys cassettes...at least on paper.
That's the problem with the theory, it doesn't really tell you why you'll come to enjoy the tapes or vinyl as more natural and feel less fatigue on the long run. There are accepted explanations telling you about the challenges with quantization, bitrates, aliasing etc, but not what is missing on the digital side.
I haven't read anything yet stating clearly, scientifically and credibly what are those things digital lack that will make technically poorer recordings sound more 'real' even to just barely amateur ears.
The only proposed solution is better everything at every stage of the digital process, and better listening hardware, well, sure. ^^
But that's not the end of it IMHO.

You'll see the day we have perfect flat panels with humongous resolution and the most advanced CRT emulation developers and computers can offer, there will still be some to say "yesssss....but", and they'll probably be right saying it's still feeling off.

PS: sorry for the thread derail too. :p

[tacoguy64]

The last consumer crt I ever owned was a mid 2000s Sanyo 27' inch tv which I was playing GCN games on it. In fact by the time N64 came out I hardly ever played any 2d games until the Wii came out with its VC. I did get to try a few VC games on it but I was oblivious to rgb and even s-video quality graphics.

I prefer the rgb monitors I have now over any of the consumer sets I grew up with as a kid or the one I purchased in the mid 2000s. Those rgb monitors give you the sharpness of lcd displays but with the highest color quality and all the advantages of crt technology. Truly a best of the best in crt technology.

With that said I have been a bit curious to buy a crappy consumer set and connect my consoles through rf just to see exactly how they look

[kamiboy]

CRT's and analogue audio are both deep in the enthusiast realm anyway. I know from personal experience how deep the CRT rabbit hole goes, and even as crazy as it gets over here the overwhelming depth of the niche audio realm makes it seem infinitely more like a place only loonies dare venture. Loonies with deep pockets mind you.

In any regard, I am not so conceited that I do not see how from the outside it all amounts to little more than a whole lot of hair splitting. The average human being is perfectly content with hooking their vintage gaming system to their LCD via composite, or RF, and play 4:3 games stretched to 16:9.

If they even bother with real hardware over an emulator played using a keyboard on their computer of choice.

[Ikaruga11]

And to the OP - brightness and saturation can be increased on professional monitors. The bleeding though won't really happen unless you unfocus things.

You could look into getting a later model shadow mask set. The lower TVL on consumer sets reduces the thickness of the blank lines so the screen appears less dark.

So wouldn't that make lower TVL PVMs/BVMs or consumer CRTs ideal for 240p content and high TVL PVMs/BVMs ideal for 480i and up?

[Einzelherz]

Of course digital is largely more competent, even decently encoded mp3 destroys cassettes...at least on paper.
That's the problem with the theory, it doesn't really tell you why you'll come to enjoy the tapes or vinyl as more natural and feel less fatigue on the long run. There are accepted explanations telling you about the challenges with quantization, bitrates, aliasing etc, but not what is missing on the digital side.
I haven't read anything yet stating clearly, scientifically and credibly what are those things digital lack that will make technically poorer recordings sound more 'real' even to just barely amateur ears.

I wasn't claiming that goodness or quality or natality had anything to do with nostalgia. At all. My hypothesis was specifically about the first/earliest hearings being those that imprint.

And to the OP - brightness and saturation can be increased on professional monitors. The bleeding though won't really happen unless you unfocus things.

You could look into getting a later model shadow mask set. The lower TVL on consumer sets reduces the thickness of the blank lines so the screen appears less dark.

So wouldn't that make lower TVL PVMs/BVMs or consumer CRTs ideal for 240p content and high TVL PVMs/BVMs ideal for 480i and up?

Maybe? It's all a matter of preference, really. I like looking at my high TVL Sony because it looks like a single painted line of color. Some people prefer a bit of blended look that a commercial and/or shadow mask gives.

I can say that at 480 size resolutions the aperture grille screens are definitely brighter.

[Sid]

Perhaps it's simply that the OP fell in love with the reality back then (nostalgia now requiring the same reality), while others fell in love with the fantasy (nostalgia now requiring the realisation of the fantasy). Basically, for those in the latter's camp, the image needs to look different for it to look the same, perception-wise.

[Brad251]

I prefer the way NES looks over composite vs RGB and it is all because of Nostalgia. For everything else I prefer a higher quality connection.

[thebigcheese]

Forgive me for continuing the off-topic discussion, but the CD vs. vinyl debate is not purely nostalgia. I am 29, so, while we had a record player and LPs in my house growing up (still do), tape and then CD were my primary means of listening. Tape is crap that I would never go back to. It has hiss, it degrades over time... just generally a crappy format. Vinyl, on the other hand, requires different production techniques. CDs theoretically provide a basis for pristine, clear audio, but generally most productions involve squashing the dynamics to make it as loud as possible. You can't do that with vinyl, so the format requires better dynamics. It also tends to have a warmer, more pleasing sound (that part is subjective). These days, most recording is done in the digital realm anyway, so it's not like you are regaining something lost by going vinyl (other than dynamics). There is nothing about CDs and digital audio in general that makes it inferior to vinyl; in fact, technically it is superior. BUT a well-made LP does sound better. Lamb of God's album Wrath is a good case in point. The LP sounds AMAZING, much better than the CD. But most of my albums that I own on CD and LP sound... basically the same. So it really depends on the production, not the format.

Back on topic, RGB allows for more subtle color variations, I believe, so it tends to be much less saturated. Even just comparing composite/s-video/RGB on the same display shows a huge difference. I prefer RGB now, but yeah... memories evolve over time, so I'm sure our opinions of the past are very skewed.

[Xyga]

Tape is crap that I would never go back to. It has hiss, it degrades over time... just generally a crappy format.

Missed that.

Would you be even older you'd have known the golden age of the audio cassette (the 80's-mid90's, by 2000 when you were a teenager the cassette was already entering retirement) and how immense a difference the hardware actually made in regards to quality/fidelity.
The gap between cheap consumer stuff and audiophile+professional hardware was much greater than even vinyl's and immensely more than CD's.
For having been a musician during the 90's and also in charge of the recording for my band(s) when all kinds of devices and formats were strong and cohabiting on the market (save for high bitrate pcm who was still either dodgy or too expensive), I can absolutely tell good cassette hardware definitely wasn't crappy.

Time passed and everything digital has matured (though paradoxically the consumer market has degraded) and analog is now osolete though there are still subtle areas where it still wins, but that's not a reason to be unfair with the past technologies, you have to be cautious when judging something from an era when the audio market was like 10 times the size and complexity of what it is today.

[FinalBaton]

Tape is crap

Tape is not crap. Think again.

CDs theoretically provide a basis for pristine, clear audio

CDs don't actually hold a lot of data. They sound fine but digital is capable of so much more, which CDs don't even come close to realizing the potential of. Now digital lossless recordings : now we're talking!

[Lord of Pirates]

So I've been using a pvm-20l5 with rgb everything for about a year now... Snes, n64, Genesis. I love it. But I went to visit my parents and had my NES in my car and hooked it up via composite to one of their old shitty Sanyo CRTs. I was expecting it to look terrible, but to my surprise it looked fantastic. It was much brighter and had all kinds of color bleeding between the lines. The colors were very intense and overly saturated. But it looked great- it looked just like what I remembered growing up with. Playing on my PVM has much more pronounced scan lines and a much duller brightness. The colors are a bit muted in comparison and although it is much sharper, it just doesn't look anything like I remember growing up with. Im not planning on getting rid of my pvm of course, but it just got me thinking about "perfect picture" Vs nostalgia. Anyone else have a similar experience?

They're good displays getting a quality signal; unlike the cheap junk most of us probably grew up with. I do have a soft spot for lesser PC CRTs. That said, I'd take a top end monitor (or TV) over a cheap one any day.

[kamiboy]

I remember back when DVD Audio and SACD's launched with the promise of better than CD quality audio I decided to give them a go. To my great disappointment I did not notice any quality leap over regular CD's.

Maybe I am not that much of an audiophile, but to me a jump in video quality is much more apparent than with audio.

[BazookaBen]

On a decent set of speakers, it's near impossible to tell the difference between a 320k MP3 and a CD. Maybe if you had $10,000 set up and a noise-controlled room.

But the real crime on this forum is when somebody goes through the trouble to get a PVM or something, then just uses the tinny built in speaker. Especially when decent bookshelf speakers are so easy to come by. Audio is half the appeal on these older games, they're missing out.

[kamiboy]

Oh, yeah. I love nothing more than to crank the volume up and let some sweet game tunes wash over me. Good audio truly does make up half the experience. I have a pretty good sound setup, and do like things really, really loud.

Fuck the neighbours, they'll learn to appreciate the classics yet.

[orange808]

Tape is crap that I would never go back to. It has hiss, it degrades over time... just generally a crappy format.

Missed that.

Would you be even older you'd have known the golden age of the audio cassette (the 80's-mid90's, by 2000 when you were a teenager the cassette was already entering retirement) and how immense a difference the hardware actually made in regards to quality/fidelity.
The gap between cheap consumer stuff and audiophile+professional hardware was much greater than even vinyl's and immensely more than CD's.
For having been a musician during the 90's and also in charge of the recording for my band(s) when all kinds of devices and formats were strong and cohabiting on the market (save for high bitrate pcm who was still either dodgy or too expensive), I can absolutely tell good cassette hardware definitely wasn't crappy.

Time passed and everything digital has matured (though paradoxically the consumer market has degraded) and analog is now osolete though there are still subtle areas where it still wins, but that's not a reason to be unfair with the past technologies, you have to be cautious when judging something from an era when the audio market was like 10 times the size and complexity of what it is today.

I miss a stack of components that I could mix and match--and an Amiga.

I don't know how mature we can call everything digital. I still can't get virtual synths to sync. It still has to be all real hardware--and if it's not analog vintage equipment, it generally sounds awful.

Now, I have to invest entirely in a piece of software and the entire "ecosystem" that comes with it. Cubase is great, but feature creep has made the GUI into a nightmare. And, Windows has always been a nightmare.

There was a beauty to running the stack with the Amiga...

[NJRoadfan]

Nice! I was always amazed by the Zenith RGB monitor Nintendo used as part of their SNES demo kiosks!

Funny, that is one thing I clearly remember from my childhood. Super Mario World just popped on that display at the local Toys R Us. You don't forget the razor sharp picture and dazzling colors of a RGB connection.

BX-1 from 1984. Its idler tire (o-ring) was hardened. It's not the most high end available ( I think it was the base model), but it was $15 and now has me searching out complementary vintage high end crap like VHS and possibly CD.

Its amazing how good cassettes sounded on a decent deck. Its a shame that advancements like Dolby-S had to come so late to the party. I am impressed at the audio quality of my Sony ES deck on plain old Type I cassettes with Dolby-S. As for VHS, well that's a rabbit hole too:

(keeping things on topic with a RGB capable Toshiba TIMM monitor on the right!)

[mvsfan]

Nintendo used snes scart cables in those kiosks. the zenith monitors had scart ports.

I always wondered why it looked so much better on that kiosk than at home.

[Taiyaki]

I prefer the rgb monitors I have now over any of the consumer sets I grew up with as a kid or the one I purchased in the mid 2000s. Those rgb monitors give you the sharpness of lcd displays but with the highest color quality and all the advantages of crt technology. Truly a best of the best in crt technology.

In my experience a high end consumer set is not going to be that far off color wise to a PVM (post calibration). Also LCD's now have the ability to produce the same level of colors and have been able to do so for a few years now. Although your RGB monitor might still give you a tad better contrast and also most importantly won't give you input lag.

I prefer the way NES looks over composite vs RGB and it is all because of Nostalgia. For everything else I prefer a higher quality connection.

For me I've decided my preference goes to S-video for all consoles other than the 6th generation of consoles (PS2, GC, etc) which I hook up via component. It's the sweet spot to me.