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The real obsolete media player.
The year is 1987, Christmas has just pasaed. This baby gets plugged in down in the finished basement. You and your older brother are sitting down on the carpet for the first time to check out this game, Super Mario Bros. Your only gaming experience so far has been the Atari 2600 and C64…
Now this is classy.
My grandma (who lived about a 12 hr. way) had one of these growing up and I always loved it. I was disappointed one year to find that it had been replaced since it quit working.
I’m also reminded of my mother who, no joke, brought one of these home from the landfill. It didn’t work, but she gutted it and turned it into a bed for our little dog we had at the time. In hindsight, she’s probably very lucky she didn’t hurt or poison herself in the process.
I would love to get one of these to use in like a multi-purpose gaming setup. Like use this as the TV stand for the newer TV so I can play newer and older games in the same place.
In hindsight, she’s probably very lucky she didn’t hurt or poison herself in the process
How come? A tiny circuit board isn’t anything like thin vials of mercury or the like.
CRT tvs have pretty big capacitors that zap you good and hard if you touch em funny.
Older boxes are probably long since dishcharged BUT many many tinkerers will plug it in first to see if it still works just for shits and grins and those caps will take juice given the chance….
NES isn’t a CRT tv though.
You ought to go back and re-read their comment
I have. I thought it was replaced with a newer console. The comment doesn’t specify “crt tv” and it would be weird if that’s how one would refer to tvs of that age. Having nes is much morr specific than just having a TV.
They’re talking about the console TV in the picture, that’s what was brought home from the landfill and converted to a dog bed
That dog bed sounds adorable
If ours wasn’t a mess of wires, I’d showoff the huge blocky model we still have!
We use it for holding a slightly more modern TV!
I only see a TV stand without a TV.
Because VHS/CRT was such a fucking hassle even when it was the best possible format option for home media. The dawn of LCDs and DVD was a glorious thing.
Was, “Be kind, rewind” really that much of a hassle?
Yes. So much so they made completely seperate machines to rewind vhs tapes so your one vcr could continue to do other things at the same time.
And how many people actually bought one? Not us, I can tell you that much.
Aside from rental places and the like, no one.
We had one that looked like a corvette.
Evrryone in my family had one. Grandma had 2 cause i watched a lot
My grandparents had one, it made an awful screeching sound
VHS cassettes were also relatively fragile and decay on use (technically so do vinyl records but they are more forgiving). Humans are also really good at ignoring minor flaws in audio, while visual noise and low graphic resolution is much harder to ignore (though CRT messed up the image in one of the best ways possible for the human brain to fill the gaps).
It was tedious and time consuming.
Hitting a button on a device and waiting (gasp!) more than 30 seconds was so tedious!?
… no wonder people constantly pay greedy fucks like Elon than take five seconds to think about … anything.
VHS wasn’t the best format even when it came out. VHS was specifically designed to be a middle ground between quality and affordability. That’s partly why it succeeded in the consumer market, both the tape and the player were cheaper than the other formats of the day. Beta and LaserDisc both had better picture and sound quality but both had their own drawbacks as well as cost. CEDs were cheaper than LaserDisc and predated VHS by several years but didn’t have the industry acceptance of the other formats and had similar drawbacks.
I had never heard of CED and researching it led me to the knowledge that laserdisc was originally called Discovision.
The dawn of LCD’s sucked. They were inferior to CRT in most ways, they were bigger and lighter. They eventually got better and cheaper and that is when they took off.
DVD was a day 1 upgrade over vhs for watching movies.
I have a laptop from the mid 90s that looks like mouse trails are on even when they aren’t. This is why mouse trails exist, because early LCDs sucked that bad.
I still have a tiny little monophonic CRT I found at a yard sale for like $2 that I use to watch my 1985 letterboxed Star Wars VHS tapes. It’s just a different vibe
I once binged IT Crowd using an old CRT monitor as my second screen. Definitely a vibe.
Because they weren’t made as stylish. If you had that exact same tv, but with wood-style paneling and the occasional velvet lining, it would be exactly as charming. Nice style has been phased out over time, being reserved for extremely expensive versions of appliances instead of being the standard.
And like, that’s not to say there’s literally no nice style in anything these days, but the average product tends to look… bland and cheap.
I don’t really think that is true, those big wood TVs mostly aren’t especially stylish, and neither are recorded players.
Although style is obviously subjective so I suppose our miles varyThey have nice styling today. You just can’t afford it. To be clear, I can’t either
Mhm but aren’t suitcase vinyl record players pretty bad?
yeah, especially any made this century. complete shite.
My first thought too. I love records, my record setup is where nearly all of my hobby money goes into, but I’d never recommend a suitcase player to anyone. I don’t have a ton of hobby money to spend so my setup isn’t super expensive or anything but I did make sure to get a nice player at least. Low-to-mid range speakers and pre-amps and stuff can still be okay, especially these days the lower end is getting a lot better, but a cheap player can do actual damage to a record over time.
If someone reading this is looking to get into the hobby, do yourself a favour and save up a bit for the player. You can get cheap speakers and all that and upgrade later but a bad player can ruin your records over time, especially if you spin them regularly. I personally have a Pro-Ject Debut III, you can switch between a built-in pre-amp or an external one, so you can start with the built-in one and then get a dedicated one later on to help with initial costs, and Pro-Ject makes excellent players. Zero plastic anywhere except the dust cover, European company and hand made in Europe, so you’re not supporting American business if that’s important to you, and even their lower end players are still very well made with all the features you’d want (adjustable anti-skate and counterweight, switch between 33/45/78 rpm, soft drop for the needle so it doesn’t hurt the record, high quality materials, comes with a pretty decent diamond cartridge, etc) plus they tend to be pretty easily upgradable. Audio-Technica is also supposedly pretty good at that price range but I never found one I loved, meanwhile every Pro-Ject I’ve messed around with has been a genuine pleasure to operate. I’m not an expert but I do have a bit of a hobbyist knowledge and experience if anyone has questions.
Plus one on Pro-Ject. Excellent record players.
The cheapest “audiophile” record player they have is probably the Debut Carbon Evo, but even the cheaper ones, especially with an elliptical stylus, are are excellent. You can get their cheapest turntable, the E1, with a 60€ Ortofon OM 5E cartridge (elliptical stylus) for only 230€ in Europe. I’ve tested it and it punches well above its weight. The only thing missing is tracking force control and anti-scating control, so you’re a little limited, but who can complain at that price.
The one thing I’d note for people considering adopting the hobby is the importance of a good phono preamp. Most cheaper or built-in ones are wildly inaccurate and will intensely misrepresent your records. Always make sure to look up the frequency response and how well it matches RIAA from a third party’s measurements! A good phono will do wonders for audio quality compared to one of lesser quality.
Wanna come by my place later and check out my… Sony Trinitron?
Yes. I really do.
Don’t expect anything sexy or nothin’, I’m genuinely in this for the Trinitron. Do you have retro consoles or should I bring mine?
Mp3 players my beloved <3
I’ve been thinking for years now about picking up one again that can run RockBox. Used to live out of an iPod nano with that, and didn’t have to carry flash drives. Just plug the usb cable into a computer and use it as one. A lot of modern music apps still aren’t as fully featured when it comes to on the fly playlist creation.
Metal Gear Solid ruined me.
I can’t see the VIDEO text of the OSD without thinking of the HIDEO fourth wall break during the Psycho Mantis scrap.
Funny timing for me.
Just the other day I was at a hangout / arcade kind of place and saw some folks playing a PS3 driving game on a CRT and ngl it looked really damn good. I was across the room so the low resolution wasn’t as apparent, but the quality of motion and contrast works at any distance.
VHS next to DVD on a CRT is why lol.
Good sound fidelity is easier to reach on a vinyl record than good video fidelity on magnetic tape. Hence why even old TV shows that were shot on film look great on modern TVs, but their tape counterparts look dated.
That all being said, VHS has inherently more sentimental value due to its widespread use for personal and home video. Anyone still using vinyl is either a hobbyist, collector, or moronic audiophile who can’t cope with stuff like opus or even flac/wav.
Okay fair but do you know anyone who actually used D-VHS lol.
Sony digi beta was the industry standard for quite a while
Well maybe I do! Or maybe I don’t! I’ll never tell!
VHS or dvd? That things main use is video games lol
Another point is that the one on the top is a premium model, whereas the one on the bottom is meant for us plebeian masses.
the one on the top is the cheapest, worst turntable you can possibly buy. they’re so cheaply made they don’t even play records reliably
don’t even play records reliably
As compared to the one on the bottom, that might look like a junk plastic box from outside, but will most probably do what it does after swapping a few capacitors.
And still, said cheapest model is not significantly cheaper than the thing on the bottom.
So yes, I’m going with premium.
But of course, considering that you are the second person to refute my claim, I feel the need to state that I am going by the meaning of the marketing word, “premium” and not the original meaning.
No capacitor replacement needed. the top one is brand new. its a Crosley/victrola style modern player. they use a trash spec one piece plastic mechanism that sells for $20 or less
absolutely nothing is premium about modern suitcase players. any forum will tell you to never buy one, many record shops refuse returns if you own one
they are quite literally e-waste
Try playing Control with all the settings maxed out on 540p and have it be the most amazing looking game you’ve ever seen
What if top panel guy is secretly into VHS?
To be fair, most CRT TVs are the equivalent of like a cheap not-classy record player. A nice big 1200p CRT computer monitor is a lot more classy
man i shouldve kept my box tv
Why not both?
Still the best way to watch wrestling. Toni storm hits different in fuzzy 4:3 PAL format
