> Record companies accordingly used sampling rates just dense enough to keep most listeners from complaining, and called it good. It was good for their profits, sure, but it made the music sound flat and tinny.
Were there CDs with lower sampling rates than the standard 44.1kHz? I could understand complaining about low quality DACs or something, but if 44kHz is not enough for you then you're either a child or a bat.
No other sampling rate was used, but before sampling the audio signal had to pass through anti-aliasing low-pass filters.
In the beginning, it was extremely expensive to make analog low-pass filters that were steep enough to block frequencies over 22 kHz, but to pass those under 20 kHz.
So many audio-to-digital conversions used cheaper anti-aliasing filters, with a narrower pass-band, which could be significantly lower than the 20 kHz promised by the CD technology. The CDs mastered in this way had a worse quality than claimed.
Even today, such analog low-pass filters would be too expensive, which is why now everybody uses much higher sampling frequencies for audio, like 192 kHz.
If a 44.1 kHz digital stream is desired, it is obtained through digital filtering and decimation, which are free of the constructive problems of analog filters.
But higher sampling frequencies where impossible in the early years of CDs, when the existing 16-bit ADCs barely reached 44.1 kHz.
Moreover, 16-bit DACs were very expensive, so the cheaper CD players used DACs with a lower resolution, like 14-bit DACs, which further reduced the quality of playback.
So for some years in the beginning, typical CD quality was not as good as advertised and as demonstrated by using equipment much more expensive than what was typical for consumer players or even in the recording studios with smaller budgets.
Indeed 44.1 kHz mathematically and perfectly represents sound waves within the human hearing range (by Shannon’s sampling theorem), so you’re limited by the recording and playback devices. The author failed to demonstrate an understanding of how digital sampling works and perpetuates this common misunderstanding despite the wealth of information available in 2026.
I hate when people say that vynils are better than CDs. Sure, some people feel this way for the "vintage" sound of vynils. But that's a personal and niche opinion that isn't objective or widely seen as better by listeners.
I was there when the switch happened. I can't express how happy I was to get rid of vynils and cassette tapes and trade the whole thing for CDs.
I'm a "musicphile" and always hated vynils for the noise, slowly degrading sound, pain the ass handling and care and, yes, audio quality. I always loved CD's pristine quality and everything else really.
Virgin vinyls always had a good enough audio quality.
Their unavoidable defect was that the quality degraded continuously with the number of times you played them.
When played on a cheaper turntable, even playing them only 3 or 4 times could be enough for a noticeable degradation of the quality.
That is why before CDs most audiophiles who were not too poor played their vinyls only once, to transfer them onto an open reel magnetic tape, which was played from then on, to avoid wearing the vinyl record.
Well, vinyl records are an analog medium so their sampling rate is infinite. More important would be physical and electrical band limits of the original recording, cutting and pressing devices and of course the playback devices.
It's well above the rate you need to reproduce everything a human can physically hear; this is one of the big points that shows the author as a moron...
The change from cd to vinyl "sound" was largely about mastering, and cheap digital production technology being not that great. But you can find examples of the same master going to cd or vinyl, and there's no benefit to the vinyl.
And I say this as someone who enjoys the physical medium, huge art covers, and tube amps.
The author might be a moron, but this is not evidence of it.
The 44.1 kHz sampling frequency is theoretically able to ensure a 20 kHz pass-band for audio signals.
But this does not mean that this is true for an actual recording.
A 44.1 kHz ADC cannot be used without being preceded by an analog low-pass filter.
An analog low-pass filter that blocks signals over 22 kHz and passes those under 20 kHz has always been and it would be even today very expensive.
That is why many early CD recordings may have used worse anti-aliasing filters, which could have reduced the pass-band to significantly less than 20 kHz, possibly also introducing audible artifacts due to a non-flat frequency characteristic at the high end of their pass-band.
Because of the great difficulty of making digital recordings when using a 44.1 kHz sampling frequency, as soon as faster ADCs became available, the standard method has become to use at least a double sampling frequency or even better a quadruple sampling frequency, and then use digital filtering and decimation for creating the CD audio.
However this became possible only many years later after the introduction of CDs.
I feel that another issue the author ignores is that vinyl records degrade and their sound quality suffers. I vaguely remember that a typical vinyl record has about 8 perfect performances before its playback qualify steadily declines. This isn’t an issue with digital media.
No, they weren't actually. It's fine to enjoy vinyl. I have some myself, but the audiophiles were no more right about sampling rates than they were about paying for platinum-coated speaker cables.
> For that matter, if any Ford Motor Company executives happen to read this, I have a helpful suggestion for you, too. Cooperate with the mass pruning of regulations, and then get one of your factories turning out brand new copies of the 1966 Mustang fastback.
I'm going to be generous and call this cute, but... no one wants this. And even aside from there not being a massive market for 1966 Mustang fastbacks, tossing out environmental regulations wholesale just so we could build more cars gets us what exactly, as a society?
> Chemical pesticides got marketed using the same high-pressure tactics that made CDs popular
This is just conspiracy brain. Chemical pesticides are cheap, they massively increase yields, and they work.
> I’m going to focus here on one of the many branches of homeopathic medicine, partly because it’s the one I use and partly because it’s been sedulously ignored by the pseudoskeptics who like to assail anything that doesn’t make profits for Big Pharma.
Basically, if you disagree with him about his quack medicine, you're a "pseudo-skeptic" just looking out for Big Pharma's bottom line.
This post has a very simple response: there is no book of "forbidden" technologies. These technologies were abandoned mostly out of experience and demonstrated inferiority to alternatives. The fact that conspiratorial thinking is used to explain their failure suggests that the author is more committed to believing in their superiority than actually gathering evidence and making a rational choice.
> Basically, if you disagree with him about his quack medicine, you're a "pseudo-skeptic" just looking out for Big Pharma's bottom line.
The hallmark of the anti-intellectual is to attack your motivation instead of your evidence. This made it really clear to me that this is not a serious writer.
Wow, I never thought I would see the day that an article promoting something as widely discredited as homeopathy reach the front page. We can do better than this.
A very worthy premise for an article. Shame the content of it is claiming CDs sound "tinny" because of sample rates, and extolling homeopathy. Also, after praising the revival of vinyl records based on apparently higher audio fidelity compared to CDs, he undoes this point by also praising the comeback of cassette tapes, which, while having a kind of portability and (external) robustness about them, are one of the worst sounding physical media developed.
The biggest common factor for the benefits of old electronic technology now considered obsolete is much lower latency. For nearly every modern digital technology that takes a noticeable amount of time, there's an older version that is less capable but also has a practically instant response to input. Telephony, television, keyboard input lag, sound amplification, the list goes on.
I genuinely think that was the worst example he could have possibly used. There might be something to electro-gardening, and everybody will agree that a tractor doesn't need to be a computer, but homeopathy just sells the placebo effect. There's no remotely plausible physical mechanism behind it. Makes everything else he's suggesting seem suspect, IMO.
On that note, I recently learned how popular homeopathic medicine is in Germany. That was surprising to me given the stereotypes about German people being so... down to Earth. Can someone explain the apparent contradiction to me?
They're not "down to earth", just pedantic and pedestrian. Other than that, they're also notoriously with their heads in the clouds. That was the stereotype of the german culture compared to french, italians, and others, them being all about "higher ideals" and full on in ideology over pragmatism. Which is also how they so eagerly followed certain ideologies (whether romantic or economic focused), then or now.
> John Michael Greer (born 1962) is an American writer and druid who writes on religious, environmentalist, and occult topics.
The fact that this blog has such high readership is an indictment on our poor education system. Though, granted, it looks like a much older audience that is commenting.
> The mere facts that these days, each new round of gimmickry that gets the prized label “progress” tends to generate more downsides than upsides, and that the shining future paradise has been getting visibly further off for decades, has barely begun to dent that touching and childlike faith.
Many of us are alive solely because of technologies developed in the last 20-30 years, and (I at least) find such objectively false claims actually personally offensive.
If you think deepfakes and algorithmic social media are the main recent outcomes of technological progress, you’re
simply not paying attention. Did we forget about cheap solar? LiFePo4 battery technology? Monoclonal antibodies? 4nm process node chips?
Were there CDs with lower sampling rates than the standard 44.1kHz? I could understand complaining about low quality DACs or something, but if 44kHz is not enough for you then you're either a child or a bat.
In the beginning, it was extremely expensive to make analog low-pass filters that were steep enough to block frequencies over 22 kHz, but to pass those under 20 kHz.
So many audio-to-digital conversions used cheaper anti-aliasing filters, with a narrower pass-band, which could be significantly lower than the 20 kHz promised by the CD technology. The CDs mastered in this way had a worse quality than claimed.
Even today, such analog low-pass filters would be too expensive, which is why now everybody uses much higher sampling frequencies for audio, like 192 kHz.
If a 44.1 kHz digital stream is desired, it is obtained through digital filtering and decimation, which are free of the constructive problems of analog filters.
But higher sampling frequencies where impossible in the early years of CDs, when the existing 16-bit ADCs barely reached 44.1 kHz.
Moreover, 16-bit DACs were very expensive, so the cheaper CD players used DACs with a lower resolution, like 14-bit DACs, which further reduced the quality of playback.
So for some years in the beginning, typical CD quality was not as good as advertised and as demonstrated by using equipment much more expensive than what was typical for consumer players or even in the recording studios with smaller budgets.
And I'd wager this guy cannot tell the difference between 44.1kHz and native 192kHz in a controlled double blind study.
I was there when the switch happened. I can't express how happy I was to get rid of vynils and cassette tapes and trade the whole thing for CDs.
I'm a "musicphile" and always hated vynils for the noise, slowly degrading sound, pain the ass handling and care and, yes, audio quality. I always loved CD's pristine quality and everything else really.
Their unavoidable defect was that the quality degraded continuously with the number of times you played them.
When played on a cheaper turntable, even playing them only 3 or 4 times could be enough for a noticeable degradation of the quality.
That is why before CDs most audiophiles who were not too poor played their vinyls only once, to transfer them onto an open reel magnetic tape, which was played from then on, to avoid wearing the vinyl record.
The change from cd to vinyl "sound" was largely about mastering, and cheap digital production technology being not that great. But you can find examples of the same master going to cd or vinyl, and there's no benefit to the vinyl.
And I say this as someone who enjoys the physical medium, huge art covers, and tube amps.
The 44.1 kHz sampling frequency is theoretically able to ensure a 20 kHz pass-band for audio signals.
But this does not mean that this is true for an actual recording.
A 44.1 kHz ADC cannot be used without being preceded by an analog low-pass filter.
An analog low-pass filter that blocks signals over 22 kHz and passes those under 20 kHz has always been and it would be even today very expensive.
That is why many early CD recordings may have used worse anti-aliasing filters, which could have reduced the pass-band to significantly less than 20 kHz, possibly also introducing audible artifacts due to a non-flat frequency characteristic at the high end of their pass-band.
Because of the great difficulty of making digital recordings when using a 44.1 kHz sampling frequency, as soon as faster ADCs became available, the standard method has become to use at least a double sampling frequency or even better a quadruple sampling frequency, and then use digital filtering and decimation for creating the CD audio.
However this became possible only many years later after the introduction of CDs.
No, they weren't actually. It's fine to enjoy vinyl. I have some myself, but the audiophiles were no more right about sampling rates than they were about paying for platinum-coated speaker cables.
> For that matter, if any Ford Motor Company executives happen to read this, I have a helpful suggestion for you, too. Cooperate with the mass pruning of regulations, and then get one of your factories turning out brand new copies of the 1966 Mustang fastback.
I'm going to be generous and call this cute, but... no one wants this. And even aside from there not being a massive market for 1966 Mustang fastbacks, tossing out environmental regulations wholesale just so we could build more cars gets us what exactly, as a society?
> Chemical pesticides got marketed using the same high-pressure tactics that made CDs popular
This is just conspiracy brain. Chemical pesticides are cheap, they massively increase yields, and they work.
> I’m going to focus here on one of the many branches of homeopathic medicine, partly because it’s the one I use and partly because it’s been sedulously ignored by the pseudoskeptics who like to assail anything that doesn’t make profits for Big Pharma.
Basically, if you disagree with him about his quack medicine, you're a "pseudo-skeptic" just looking out for Big Pharma's bottom line.
This post has a very simple response: there is no book of "forbidden" technologies. These technologies were abandoned mostly out of experience and demonstrated inferiority to alternatives. The fact that conspiratorial thinking is used to explain their failure suggests that the author is more committed to believing in their superiority than actually gathering evidence and making a rational choice.
The hallmark of the anti-intellectual is to attack your motivation instead of your evidence. This made it really clear to me that this is not a serious writer.
The biggest common factor for the benefits of old electronic technology now considered obsolete is much lower latency. For nearly every modern digital technology that takes a noticeable amount of time, there's an older version that is less capable but also has a practically instant response to input. Telephony, television, keyboard input lag, sound amplification, the list goes on.
Bring back older cars with poor safety and high energy costs? Seriously?
Distrust medicine and agriculture?
Wtf is this doing on HN?
This is the author :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Michael_Greer
> John Michael Greer (born 1962) is an American writer and druid who writes on religious, environmentalist, and occult topics.
The fact that this blog has such high readership is an indictment on our poor education system. Though, granted, it looks like a much older audience that is commenting.
Many of us are alive solely because of technologies developed in the last 20-30 years, and (I at least) find such objectively false claims actually personally offensive.
If you think deepfakes and algorithmic social media are the main recent outcomes of technological progress, you’re simply not paying attention. Did we forget about cheap solar? LiFePo4 battery technology? Monoclonal antibodies? 4nm process node chips?
Like, wtf?
A really really tiny percentage of us is that. Make it 100 years and you got something. 150 years is even better.