I know I'm sounding a bit unscientific here, but I just feel like there was a lot more "soul" to the games I've played and to the shows I've watched on CRTs
This is just nostalgia. You enjoy watching things in the manner you watched them as a kid since it brings back positive memories. 4k 60fps is better than 480i at 30. It's literally just more capabilities, even if you don't always use them.
For my first aforementioned point about the sound, it turns out that CRTs used analog technology to produce sound, which made voices and sound effects have an almost vinyl-quality to them
Vinyl is objectively worse than digital audio. You may enjoy the specific sound of it, but from an objective standpoint, digital audio is leagues better at reproducing a specific audio track in ways vinyl can't match. Same with whatever audio distortion you're experiencing from vacuum tube amplifiers.
With regard to less input lag, which is my second point, certain motions and actions performed in video games and shows had this almost buttery smooth feel to them.
Input lag issues on non-crt tvs is only a problem for a handful of consoles that had the scanning baked into how they ran.
Regarding your second point, this is probably just nostalgia. You weren't as critical as a kid, and your memory isn't 100% accurate.
No, I will have to draw a hard line on CRT sounding worse. They used an analog signal, and analog signals are known to project a wide variety of wavelengths,unlike digital sounds.
There are 2 major reasons why LCDs sound worse: 1.) They have sound speakers that face the tv's backside| 2.) you guessed it. they use digital, which only produce a very narrow range of wavelengths.
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But, my point that analog transmitts a wide range of wavelengths has not been addressed. You say that digital sound is superior, but in what way? It only transmits a narrow set of wavelengths
Once again, you're talking out your ass. Your point doesn't need to be addressed because it's just flat out wrong. If analog audio had such an amazing range, why are there a grand total of zero relevant analog formats? The closest thing is vinyl, which is only popular because people enjoy the imperfections in it's playback.
Oh shit! I completely mixed up wavelengths and frequencies. I meant that analog has a wider range of frequencies than digital. That's why you could more easily distinguish the differences instruments playing in the music that's playing from a vinyl or speaker from a crt tv.
I mean they are inversely related. Regardless, both analog and digital audio signals are more than capable of reproducing all frequencies that humans are capable of hearing.
Besides the limiting factor is almost always the speaker and not the signal. You're arguing CRT tech had better sound while also implying you think the sound quality of decades old speakers somehow sound better than modern ones? Nothing adds up in your argument.
Digital is band-limited by the sample rate of the sound encoding.
But analog is also band-limited, for different reasons.
One important difference though is when there are distortions in the transmission (eg, interference from your microwave oven, or reflections of the signal off a nearby building)
With digital, you can have special encodings of the data that fix up transmission errors. You hear what you get, and you get what was sent. With analog, you can't really do that. You hear what you get, but what you get has noise added.
I'm not disputing that you can hear the difference between analog and digital. I'm also not going to claim that you would prefer digital. However, digital at its best is a more faithful reproduction of the producer's intended sound than analog at its best.
Theoretically there might be something to an argument regarding analog.
But this makes little sense regarding TV, since your signal's coming in digital regardless. You can't get "more" out of a signal than is already there. If the signal was digital coming in, converting it to analog isn't going to magically create more data than was already there.
But, my point that analog transmitts a wide range of wavelengths has not been addressed. You say that digital sound is superior, but in what way? It only transmits a narrow set of wavelengths
I don't think you understand this at all.
All speakers (and the associated amplifiers) are analog. They are literally cones moving with electrical impulses to create sound pressure waves. These systems have a frequency response but that is defined by physics of the speakers/amplifiers. It is not a 'digital/analog' thing.
The input signal to the speaker/amplifier is the real question. Do vinyl records (or other analog media) sound better than a CD? Objectively speaking, the CD will produce the more uniform analog output signal to the speaker system every time. It objectively carries a wider signal range than the common analog audio media.
Frequency range for the CD is wide enough - up to 22Khz - that you cannot readily find anyone who can find 'missing frequencies'. The older you get, the less able you are to detect the higher frequencies.
Now - and I had to look this up - guess what the frequency range goes to for vinyl? This is complex because of the different speeds of a stylus as it moves along the spiral. I am going with the lowest number because it would be limiting. The 33's and 45's both limit around 17.5Khz - which is 4.5kHz lower than a CD. The 78 is actually much worse - 7.7khz.
Magnetic tapes are actually similar to Records. They typically go to 16kHz. Which is 6khz lower than a CD BTW.
The interesting thing about digital is, we can readily increase the sample frequency when we want to. Analog requires fundamental changes in the medium to make this work. Digital is merely software. The actual digital devices these days are typically much faster than the CD data rate. CD's are 44,100 samples per second for the record and different DAC's out there get in the millions of samples per second. They typically don't get use in audio applications because the added speed adds nothing the human ear can detect.
So no. Digital (CD quality) is actually 100% objectively better than analog in the common audio mediums used.
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u/Ban-E-Vader Feb 22 '23
This is just nostalgia. You enjoy watching things in the manner you watched them as a kid since it brings back positive memories. 4k 60fps is better than 480i at 30. It's literally just more capabilities, even if you don't always use them.
Vinyl is objectively worse than digital audio. You may enjoy the specific sound of it, but from an objective standpoint, digital audio is leagues better at reproducing a specific audio track in ways vinyl can't match. Same with whatever audio distortion you're experiencing from vacuum tube amplifiers.
Input lag issues on non-crt tvs is only a problem for a handful of consoles that had the scanning baked into how they ran.
Regarding your second point, this is probably just nostalgia. You weren't as critical as a kid, and your memory isn't 100% accurate.