The layering of compression really does get you. I've noticed (both in "Plexamp in my car" and "playing music on Twitch" contexts) that using a FLAC source makes an audible difference, even compared to a high-bitrate MP3 source.
This might seem pretty obvious, but I wasn't expecting it to matter as much since the end result was compressed again (and yet again on my car's Bluetooth) using a different codec.
This isn't on anything close to audiophile gear either. My car stereo is thoroughly mediocre and my home stereo is speakers I literally found in the trash.
Now I'm (belatedly) rebuilding my music collection in FLAC...
There's disliking film grain and then there's preferring awful inhuman wax figure faces. Cameron is definitely in the latter camp for some reason. GP isn't exaggerating - they 4K remasters are significantly worse looking than previous 1080p home media releases and T2 is a particularly badly affected example.
Pretty much all dramatic American TV shows were shot on film (at 24 fps) before the digital camera era. It's why so many old shows (ex. Star Trek TNG) are now available as HD remasters, they simply go back and rescan the film.
It's more complicated in other countries (the BBC liked to shoot on video a lot) but it was standard practice in the States.
It took far more than simply rescanning the film to get the TNG remasters as all the visual effects were only rendered and composed at broadcast resolutions (and framerates). They had to essentially recreate all of that, which is why we haven't gotten the same remasters for the less popular Deep Space Nine and Voyager series.
From what I have see most series of that era were edited in NTSC after converting the original film material.
At least for the PC versions of Vice City and San Andreas, the originals are missing the music too. A bunch of licenses expired 10 years after release and the Steam releases got updated accordingly.
Also one of the first DOS games that had Amiga-module-style music (mixed samples) instead of Adlib or MIDI. This later evolved into the UMX system used in Unreal and Deus Ex.
Soulseek is still around (somehow) and thriving. Of course on there, discovery is more or less "check out the library of this person who had something you were looking for".
Came here to mention this. I'm shocked when people use YouTube to rip stuff. Soulseek is a remnant of the web 1.0 era and Napster times. It feels my heart with joy that it still exists. Also people that use it are mostly djs and have great collections that is a joy to explore, it's like being invited into someone's house, not being fed by a heartless algorithm. Plus the 1on1 model works great these days for music since internet is so fast, and it's a security against the lawyer mafia letters that you can get in Germany for using torrents.
I also spend like 300 to 500 EUR a year on Bandcamp so I don't feel bad about this. Plus a lot of stuff there is just hard to find elsewhere. In times where we keep losing agency through cloud-enshitification, AI-inscrutability and technofeudalism, Soulseek and its community brings me hope.
The GEP gun is ironically the pro choice to make if you know what you’re doing. All of the other weapons on offer can be found in the first level, and the GEP works as a fantastic “lockpick” even if you never fire it in anger.
This might seem pretty obvious, but I wasn't expecting it to matter as much since the end result was compressed again (and yet again on my car's Bluetooth) using a different codec.
This isn't on anything close to audiophile gear either. My car stereo is thoroughly mediocre and my home stereo is speakers I literally found in the trash.
Now I'm (belatedly) rebuilding my music collection in FLAC...