Media is Imperfect

I was watching an older movie on DVD the other day, and started to notice all the little specks that flicker every frame, probably from when the film was transferred to digital. I couldn’t help but think that in general, when movies are transferred this way, some detail is always lost, and that’s just how it is.

Similarly, I like to transfer CDs to flac format so that I can listen to music whenever. I do as much as I can to ensure this transfer is as high quality as I can make it, but there are so many other variables at play. For example, once I actually play the songs, the quality might be affected by the device playing the music and the wires / bluetooth connected to my speakers / headphones! Plus, any number of things may have happened before the music was committed to disc. For straight computer generated music this may not be as much of an issue, but for recorded or otherwise sampled music, quality could have been lost at many points along the way.

In short, the original film or song is not what gets recorded. What we get is often really close, but there’s technically always room for improvement. So how do we fix this? Well, that’s simply impossible. Once something is physically captured, it is represented in a finite amount, of detail. It’s not real anymore. Thus, quality is lost. Once something is digitally rendered, compression has to occur. Thus, quality is lost. Compromises always have to be made.

More generally, the world is imperfect, and that’s okay. At some point, no more improvements can be made, and I’m just gonna have to live with that.

Word Count: 284
Running Total: 3119