[OT] Extra time spent

Tue Jun 10 20:55:52 PDT 2014

On 6/10/2014 5:14 PM, Kagamin wrote:
> On Sunday, 8 June 2014 at 17:04:34 UTC, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
>> That's also a great example of why IMO Hollywood and some of the newer
>> western-style games often do a lousy job in music - the harder they
>> try, the worse they do IMO. Aside from the one notable exception of
>> Symphony of the Night, I can't stand orchestrated scores. They just
>> sound generic at best. Great example of good music selection: The
>> background music in the opening battle scene from first episode of
>> Madoka Magica. Absolutely puts hollywood (and games like Uncharted 3
>> and Mario Galaxy) to shame.
>
> That's "Magia" :)

I'll be dammed, I can't believe I *never* noticed that song in the 
opening battle was the same as the second closing. I consider Madoka 
Magica's second closing sequence (anim + music) to easily be one of the 
best theme sequences ever made. Gives me chills every time I watch it, 
it's that good:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Eb4ONZw01Y

(It'll have to be downloaded with DownloadHelper or youtube-dl to hear 
the audio with it, amazingly they only force-muted their own flash 
player, not the AV stream itself :) )

Not only that, but it's also amazing in that it provides a perfect 
overview of the show, while never giving anything away...and yet it's 
for a show which very little *can* be said without spoilers. You can say 
"Turns the magical girl genre completely on it's ear", "Amazing 
production values throughout", and that's about all. And yet, that 
closing alone spoils nothing while summing up the show perfectly.

Point being, all that admiration I have for both that second closing and 
the initial opening battle, and I *still* never noticed they were the 
same song! Don't I feel like the perfect fool now! ;)

> There are also interesting fan translations:
> http://youtu.be/lu98k5vVP-Y http://youtu.be/b2Chwj5JEww
>

Those are impressively well done for translations. Although I do still 
maintain that music, including Magia, tends to sound best in Japanese ;)

While I often like watching dubs (they've generally gotten a lot better 
than they used to be), with music the English translations just don't 
sound as good no matter how well they're done. Maybe it's just my 
familiarity with english, but I like to think it's the aesthetics of the 
languages themselves...even if I'm only fooling myself about it.

> On Monday, 9 June 2014 at 16:37:18 UTC, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
>> I like the clip-style, they don't fall off, they let me still hear
>> what's going on around me, and they don't feel like ear tampons.
>>
>> Only problem is it's impossible to find good clip-ons. *All* the Sony
>> clip-ons have horrible sound quality and they're ugly to boot. The
>> Koss ones are the *only* ones I've ever found that actually sound
>> decent, but they invariably stop working within a few months, and
>> warranty replacements take several weeks and cost $6-$9 each time.
>
> http://www.usa.philips.com/c-p/SHE2650_28/-/overview - bought these once
> and they work for years for me. Dunno, maybe I'm just accurate or not
> picky about sound.

Yea, I dunno, it hard to say anymore.

On one hand, I've never considered myself an audiophile, and I've never 
valued investing several $100's into a sound system (usually the $$$ 
ones just sound louder rather than "better" to me - especially Bose's 
in-store demo). I've been happy with the sound quality from my $100 
14-year-old disc-changer stereo, and $20 Koss headphones (back when the 
latter still worked).

But OTOH, I've found myself complaining about sound quality from 
headphones that other people noticed nothing wrong with. And last time I 
did an indie game (ages ago) I was very surprised how much difference I 
noticed (even on ordinary speakers) when encoding the music as 128kbps 
MP3, as opposed to 128kbps Vorbis and 320kbps MP3. (Wouldv'e used a 
Vorbis-sampled sequencing/tracker format instead, but the music guy's 
tools didn't easily support anything like that. Ended up going with 
straight Vorbis at a low bitrate. Wasn't too terrible a compromise, 
considering connection speeds back then.) There's been other times I've 
been bugged by a sound issue some people would've ignored and kept 
fiddling with it.

So I dunno, maybe I am an audiophile and just don't know it ;)

> Is there a reason why headphones should break? Well,
> only cushions are tearing apart, probably not designed to work so long.

Beats me. Got that Koss one, worked great for some years and then 
suddenly, for no apparent reason, complete silence out of one side. 
Dead. And then every replacement unit: No waring, one side dead within 
about 6 months. Ugh. Irritated the hell out of me *because* these $25-35 
Koss ones sounded so much better than any other clip-style I could find, 
or even *anything* in a remotely similar price range.