How do you mean?

I sure don’t mean to yammer at the cognoscenti.

Amazingly, I kinda did… sorta

It’s indistinguishable from DC or Detroit or Cleveland

Whoa, that’s really subjective. When it comes to architecture Houston is nothing like those three. When it comes to pre/post-automotive layout it only resembles Detroit.

If you’re trying to say Houston is a nightmare, I, and some others, agree with you.

Houston requires detached houses to have a minimum lot size of 5,000 feet or, since 1998 in some inner areas, 3500 square feet. Townhouses are required to have a lot size of at least 2250 square feet or, in some areas since 1998, 1400 square feet plus 600 square feet of open space. Apartment buildings must provide at least 1.25 parking spaces per apartment. Homes must have parking for at least two vehicles per lot. Hospitals must provide 2.2 parking spaces per bed. Shopping centers must provide 4-5 parking spaces per 1,000 square feet of gross floor area. Structures abutting major thoroughfares must be set back at least 25 feet from the street. Major streets must have a 100-foot right of way, and smaller ones 50-60 feet. Intersections along major roads have to be at least 600 feet apart. While restrictive covenants in subdivisions do the work of zoning in separating business from residential uses, city code empowers the city attorney to enforce these private covenants. All of these regulations have served to create a city that drives more than any other, that commutes via public transport less than any other, and whose citizens spend 20% of their income on transportation, second only to Dallas. I don’t know a lot about urban zoning, and I’ve never been to Houston, so I can’t tell you what it’s like to live and work there. Describing all this as being a place of “no zoning laws. None,” however, seems less than accurate.

I wasn’t; I was thinking of my own experience as a (brand new) member of my town’s ZBA, and stories from my spies on the planning board. I would think every town would gain from the implementation of zoning regulations, since they can be tailored to the desires of the community, can remain malleable (to an extent), and provide some protection from waking up one day looking out at some surprising evil you had never expected.

A good part of the Democratic Party found Mario quite tantalizing circa 1991, if memory serves. But that’s for another time and place.

HEY NOW.

I believe you, just passing on the words I hear. I can see how what he’s saying COULD be true.. but only with great lengths of cable.

This is a great start, so I’ll just amplify and modify these answers a bit.

1. This is true, but it’s also largely misunderstood that even samples at relatively low rates are essentially perfect, within a given range of frequencies. In other words, if you sample a 1KHz sine wave 3KHz, it is recorded perfectly despite the apparently “low resolution.” Sampling is not really analogous to graphics resolution; it seems similar to “dpi” but really is nothing like that, on a fundamental level. To a great extent, either you can sample a certain frequency or you can’t.

Digital recordings are vastly more accurate than vinyl. They capture a wider range of frequencies, and what they reproduce is vastly less obscured by noise. That does not mean necessarily, however, that you will like the way it sounds better.

2. It is true that past generations are accustomed to the sound of vinyl in a way that will never affect future generations, other than a handful of people. (There’s always a handful who will express a preference for nearly anything.) It is also true that as sound technologies developed, there was a constant striving to reduce distortion and noise, but to the extent those things could no longer be minimized, you would then try to make the distortion as nice sounding as possible. In other words, put the distortion into a part of the sound where it’s doing no harm and may even have a pleasing effect. Clearly both vinyl and analog tape formulations and deck design evolved somewhat in this direction.

Enter digital technology, and noise and distortion drop by orders of magnitude in an instant. There are two problems, though. One is that we didn’t know as much about sampling as we thought we did when CD’s first arrived, so there was a process of improving converter technology, so that “digital” sounds better than it originally did, though on paper it’s no more accurate.

The other problem is that those pleasing distortions that evolved over decades of product design were now gone, with no obvious way to get them back. We also had to wait for a new generation of mastering engineers with a clear understanding of the playback devices and environments that are their true reference targets, in addition to a new generation of recording engineers who wouldn’t be relying on tape to tamp down the harshness of cymbals, for example, and who were more naturally drawn to the potential beauty that ultra-low-noise recording would reveal.

3. Nobody can distinguish reliably between a lossless format and a 256K-variable MP3 unless it’s a real high-quality, ultra-low-noise listening environment. Even in a great listening environment, the difference between a well encoded 320K-variable MP3 and the original CD is vanishingly small. I would never master with MP3, but we reference mixes and make notes on them with MP3 files all the time.

The “lossiness” of certain file formats, while on the one hand a technical fact, is from a perceptual standpoint a figment of the listener’s imagination far more often than not … not unlike Monster cable.

isn’t that the one with that spoof of the beatles, except they only get photographed?

Notice I called it television. “TV” is a nickname, and nicknames are for friends, and television is no friend of mine.

elitism

Really?

that, and trading Giles woulda torpedoed any hopes we had of ever netting ricardo rincon.

Pedro, Schilling, and Randy Johnson were all very close to becoming Indians at some point. We were always right there in the negotiations for all 3.