edit: Also, when commercials and ads refer to "digital" as if it is some sort of quality level. "Digital quality." That means nothing. And, chances are, if they are using verbage like that, it's actually quite sucky.
This is a "digtal quality" photo. See my point?
Alright, time for a rant
The word "digital", used in the wrong context, annoys me a lot.
One has to blame Philips and Sony for that, the inventors of the CD. They somehow managed to make people believe by clever marketing, that digital is better, digital is the future, while analogue is bad, analogue is old. It worked so well, that people later even spoke of "digital sound".
Only what everyone forgot, was that the human sense of hearing doesn't work digital. It works with soundwaves, with tiny differences in air pressure. So the digital signal source has to be converted into an analogue sound wave.
When hifi enthusiasts blamed the CD for sounding worse than a vinyl record, it was that process of transforming bits and bytes into soundwaves, that was responsible for it. The first CD players were utter crap (most still are today) but everyone got blinded, or rather deafened by the lack of noise and crackles while listening to music. The problem ist mainly solved now (in good players, that is) but you still get to hear that people like the "digital sound".
I always say to them:
"You want clear, straight digital sound? Right, dial a fax number and listen to the noises it makes. There you have your digital sound! Ain't that great?" In the home computer stone age, at the beginning of the 1980's, you could also listen to a Commodore "datasette" on your hifi tape deck for fun. That also was "digital sound" at its best.
Fact is, that music you hear on your hifi or even your iPod, is still an analogue signal. It's still the same in the same way a nuclear power plant is still nothing more than a steam engine.
The whole "digital revolution" has now led to people listening to mp3 on their iPods on earphones, which will probably make them partially deaf before they even turn 50. The CD was invented to create better sound in hifi but in hindsight it has to be said, that it is responsible for ruining it completely.
Scientists have actually noticed a dramatic decrease of sensory perceptual skills in young people today (and that means you, 15-to-30-year-old reader of this post
).
Especially the hearing and the sense of taste are currently regressing in a kind of massive evolutionary backwards development thanks to "digital sound" and fast food. The food industry has massive difficulties in finding junior staff for their R&D departments, because 8 out of 10 cannot even tell the difference between broccoli and cauliflower with a blindfold on.
All that annoys me, because it means that sooner or later the industry will adapt and simply produce goods, that won't fulfill higher demands anymore. I can only hope for the success of counter movements like "Slow Food".
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Another thing that annoys me a lot, is when you get a rental car and it reeks of nicotine inside and has a small coat of carcinogenic substances on the windows, which you have to clean off first, unless you like to look through a foggy windscreen at night that simply doesn't clear up with using the fan.
The car rentals fine you, when you don't fill the car up before you bring it back. They should also fine people for leaving toxines in the car with a half life of several years. I guess the price of an ozone cleaning of the whole interior would be appropriate.
To all the smokers out there: Consume your cigarettes and cigars. I'm not the type of guy who wants to forbid or ban smoking entirely. So keep on enjoying your tobacco consumption and have a pleasant, untimely death.
Only leave me (and all the other non-drug addicts, especially children) out of it.
Just a little consideration.
That's not overcharging, is it?
