Appreciation post: My approach to the JFK stuff shifted after a long night online

I used to just read the big books and watch the documentaries, but a few years back I got deep into a forum thread about the Zapruder film frame rates. The sheer volume of conflicting technical details from regular people, not authors, forced me to start checking primary sources myself. Anyone else find their research methods completely changed by a single deep dive?

3 comments

3 Comments

emerym361mo ago

Totally get that shift. Fell down a similar rabbit hole with old broadcast audio comparisons once and it rewired my whole process.

lewis.terry1mo ago

Man, that's so true. I was reading this old radio engineering manual (found it online, super dry stuff) and they talked about how AM stations would tweak their gear to sound "warmer" than competitors. Like, one station might boost the low end a tiny bit so voices had more weight, while another would cut the highs to hide tape hiss. It's wild how much of that old broadcast sound was just clever problem-solving with limited tools. Makes you look at modern plugins in a whole new light, like @emerym36 said. Suddenly those "vintage" presets feel like cheap copies of a real fix.

the_lisa1mo ago

Yeah, that's exactly it. I had the same kind of moment as @emerym36 with old newspaper printing techniques, where the "look" was just a side effect of the machinery.