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Tuesday, June 9th, 2009 02:11 pm
I'm currently listening to a totally bitchin' buttrock playlist on YouTube. Which is really rather decadent, when I think about it, streaming all those music videos when I'm not even looking at that tab.

Sometime around 1992, my family upgraded the ancient 8-track in the living room to a modern stereo system, complete with a CD changer. Before that, the only CD player in the house was a CD-ROM in my desktop. My dad bought a bunch of CDs, to jumpstart the collection, and it was all pretty exciting. I remember thinking at the time, wondering how a stereo could be improved further. The only thing I could come up with was to have music videos playing on a little screen, but that seemed pretty silly.

Things have come full circle, and still much weirder than I could have guessed. Not only do I get the music videos now, I'm streaming them wirelessly onto my laptop. All for free, in this weird kind-of-post-intellectual-property-except-when-people-get-pissy environment.
Tuesday, June 9th, 2009 09:21 pm (UTC)
Just think how much better all that bitchin' buttrock would sound if it weren't compressed to within an inch of its life to fit a youtube stream.

Sometimes technology advancements make our quality of life worse. And by "quality", here I mean the technical term for the amount of distortion introduced by overcompressing an audio or video stream. :-)
Tuesday, June 9th, 2009 09:24 pm (UTC)
I was thinking about talking about that too, how another fundamental assumption I always made was that higher tech would mean higher quality, but that hasn't always been the case. Turns out cheapness and ease of consumption is even more important.

That said, I just skipped one of the songs because it was so horribly distorted.
Tuesday, June 9th, 2009 10:29 pm (UTC)
Buttrock? Is this a particular musical genre I'm not familiar with?
Tuesday, June 9th, 2009 11:31 pm (UTC)
I have heard "buttrock" as a synonym for "hair metal" if that helps. :) Genres are weird.
Wednesday, June 10th, 2009 06:06 am (UTC)
I always assumed the name was associated with the horrible spandex worn by many of the performers, along with the HAIR.
Wednesday, June 10th, 2009 06:07 am (UTC)
But who *hasn't* heard of Buttrock? Kids these days.
Wednesday, June 10th, 2009 04:17 pm (UTC)
I'm so glad I'm not the only one who does that.

Re: Tony's comment about sound quality, I don't notice distortion unless it's bad. I just don't think about sound quality that much. I notice when it's amazing, but generally with headphones my ears hurt (like a physical ear infection ache) unless the volume is too low to catch most of the details.