What did he mean by CD distortion?

I'm also not super clear on how digital video would have jitter in a way that analog video wouldn't?

I totally agree with his overall sentiment, I'm just a bit confused on the specific examples.

I read that, at least early on, many CDs were mastered with inadequate dithering, resulting in audible quantization noise.

Good questions. CD distortion include hard clipping from amplifying too much, whereas vacuum tubes and magnetic tape have soft saturation (still a distortion, just a different kind). Another distortion is that dynamic range compression is used, bringing up the volume of quiet parts of a song.

As for digital video jitter, I can think of MPEG compression artifacts, both spatial (e.g. DCT mosquito noise) and temporal (e.g. motion compensation errors, periodic keyframe refreshes).

That is bad mastering, not an inherent property of CDs.

It's not, but it's very, very common, basically the rule in fact, starting I think in the early 2000s.

There is something in CD that is noticeable by listening to vinyl, CD, and optionally mp3. I'd say CD makes everything sound like a harpsichord, but just ever so slightly. Maybe it's encoding or maybe it's decoding. Or something else. It's a first generation digital format, after all.

Analog videos never stutter but digital formats tend to have non-constant processing cost and do stutter occasionally. Maybe he's referring to that?

> I'd say CD makes everything sound like a harpsichord

Ha, that's a great description. Yes -- you're hearing more high frequencies.

Which is by design, because they're there in real life. Vinyl cuts off the highest frequencies, as do MP3's.

Nothing to do with first generation though -- if you listen to a FLAC on your computer with wired headphones the highest frequencies are still there.

It's a feature not a bug. :)

Absolutely. Like those terrible filters that are supposed to make video look like it was recorded on VHS. They always make the results far worse than VHS actually was in practice.

VHS didn't always look noisy and distorted, but it always looked blurry and had horrible color bleeding. I disliked it even though it was the "only" technology at the time and we didn't have it at home.

Nope, color bleeding was virtually non-issue with SECAM color encoding. I've grown up in a SECAM country, but we had a lot of PAL content. PAL always looked bad and smudgy in comparison. NTSC was just plain awful and intolerable even by my pre-teen standards.

Are you sure that PAL reception/tapes and possibly "yeah we also do that" PAL implementations were good in your region? I'm from a PAL region and broadcast PAL looked just fine to me. Only VHS PAL looked blurry. VHS's very low horizontal color resolution was a VHS limitation, AFAIK not much to do with how color phase errors were averaged out across lines in PAL vs SECAM.

In 30 years, people will be nostalgic for TikTok.

Some people might even be nostalgic for Bing. (People are nostalgic for Clippy after all.)

In other words.... you are not nostalgic for the thing itself. (The thing kind of sucks.) You are nostalgic for your childhood.

People are now corrupting mpeg video intentionally. They call it "datamoshing". And of course there is glitch art, and the "vhs look" filter being (over) used everywhere.

An account called Natspone plays with this idea in shortform vertical videos, I find it incredibly bizarre and unsettling. I should forewarn - you're probably not going to enjoy the style at all.

https://www.instagram.com/p/C3HtsLXOgui/?hl=en

This is brilliant

Lynch shit, for sure.

This is a big thing for early synthesizers. Many of them tried quite hard to accurate emulate real instruments - pianos, horns, strings - but inevitably failed due to limitations of their time. But many of them became classics in their own rights, to the point that later synths emulated them. And now, of course, you can get software versions of the same synths which do an incredible job of reproducing every last detail of a hardware instrument that did a bad job of emulating an analog one!