I’m sure it’s old news to Makerbot, but I was not aware there was an alternate ending to Army of Darkness. Rather, an original ending that test audiences hated, prompting a rewrite / reshoot.
Bruce Campbell Twitter is also great Twitter, if there is such a thing.
Army of Darkness flashback. The ending that never was. Ash swallows the wrong amount of magic drops trying to get back home, oversleeps and awakes to a world destroyed. Typical Ash. Test audiences said this version was a “downer,” so we re-shot a “happy” ending. Go figure. pic.twitter.com/PBAn5BHbVi
Also called Sun Dogs, “they can be seen anywhere in the world during any season, but are not always obvious or bright. Sun dogs are best seen and most conspicuous when the Sun is near the horizon.”
Guitar player numbers his Les Paul’s like Pete. Singers have real talent. And they’re doing an Elvis song. Let me see, what else is interesting here…..
This description of the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs is probably the best piece of writing I've read in a while. That was beautiful. pic.twitter.com/13iLrLrMe2
As this site’s extremely senior medical correspondent, I’m happy to report that I received my first COVID 5g chip a couple of weeks ago and am scheduled to inject the second one tonight. My corpuscles and sinews have nearly hit the intended full metal zone vibrato. More on the uh, science, here.
“I remember being in a car on Neil’s ranch with him when CDs first came out, and he was lamenting how the sound was so damaged. He was pretty horrified by it, and I was kind of amazed. He really made me aware of the damage the fidelity had taken.
“I don’t have Neil’s ears to really get as bothered as he is by it,” Lofgren says, “but it is an extraordinary difference when you know what you’re doing and you get the sound right.”
Stuff I learned, down various internet wormholes, which you all probably know already:
A CD holds about 600-700 MB of data. At the time the format was invented, that was 50X as much as a hard drive, so it seemed incredible. But music takes a lot of memory. The goal was to compress an album (say, 60 minutes of audio) onto that CD. That can be done if you sample at 44.1kHz (roughly twice the max frequency of adult human hearing) and limit the bit depth to 16 bits per sample. That gives a maximum dynamic range of 96dB between the quietest and loudest sounds – thought to be decent enough for the human ear.
A good way to start a fight among audiophiles is to suggest that we don’t need anything better than 44.1kHz/16bit. Many people insist that they can hear a difference; double blind studies do not necessarily bear this out. This blogging nerd set up a great test including the Goldberg Variations, to see if audiophiles could tell the difference between 24 bit and 16 bit. They pretty much couldn’t.
When mp3’s came along, they allowed us to compress musical data by a factor of ten. A 30 megabyte, three minute CD song becomes a 3 megabyte mp3 abomination. It sucks the life out of the music!
Neil Young says so!
But lo! Nowadays since we’ve all got bandwidth coming out our ears, with cloud storage and whatnot, audiophiles are excited about bigger, uncompressed audio files.
– wav: 10 MB per minute
– aiff: 10 MB per minute
– FLAC: 5 MB per minute
– DSD: 40 MB per minute
“DSD [Direct Stream Digital] has become the audiophile standard, higher than the 96-kHZ/24-bit FLAC-based audio of Tidal Hi-Fi, and even higher than the 192-kHZ/24-bit FLAC favored by Neil Young Archives.”
Listen to the inventor of DSD! You won’t understand a single word! Noise shaping and pulse-code modulation! That looks like a damn oscilloscope behind him so you know he doesn’t fuck around:
You can now obtain DSD files of a few of your favorite artists. And Amazon and Apple are getting into the hi – res game. To play hi-res files back, you’ll probably need at least a high quality DAC (digital audio recorder).
The company Qobuz has hi-res Replacements! Itrax has other power pop like Mozart, Stravinsky, and Glenn Gould.
Mr. Young, in the meantime, has set up the cool steampunk, idiosyncratic, wonderful $1.99-per-month Neil Young Archives where you get what the artist intended. I’ve been enjoying my time there.
