Another music gripe session

[Ray Minich]

Going Digital means Missing Music...

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/ ... und13.html

I tend to agree...

[Eric Jaeger]

He's absolutely right. And it gets worse. If you know a piece is going to be played on a cheap mp3 player all the time you compress the @#!!# out of it and re-EQ it for more punch. Urg.

But the comment about the differences being "indistinguishable" is nonsense. You'd have to have seriously tin ears and major hearing loss to not be affected by it.

I'm worried that people will start to think that this musical equivalent of a Big Mac is actually good food, since they're never tasted anything better.

-eric

[Ray Minich]

I have played "Dark Side of the Moon" many many times, both from vinyl and from CD. When "Us and Them" came across XM Radio, I thought I was listening to Thomas Edison's original equipment.

[Leslie Ehrlich]

Comparing mp3s to wave files is like comparing 45 rpm records to LPs, or AM radio to FM radio.

[David Mason]

TUBE DINOSAURS YOUR DAYS ARE NUMBERED!!!
Ahhh, give me an Indonesian guitar, a Chinese amp modeler, shredded into an Mp3... I'll be rocketing to stardom while you're drooling in your Ovaltine....

[Janice Brooks]

and on this sad topic, Capital has just released a bunch of Hank Thompson albums to digital yesterday.

[Marc Jenkins]

While compressed, digital music CERTAINLY doesn't sound as good, it's not all bad.

At home, I mostly listen to vinyl records through a pretty fine system (high-end stylus/preamp, good turntable, vintage amp, $$ speakers) and that's great. But, at work (where I am right now) where I can hear people on the patio next door eating lunch to my left, a phone and an alarm system that bings every time a door is opened on my left, and a water cooler, fridge, coffee maker, and kettle, plus a violin shop with 3 craftspeople scraping, grinding, and filing, not to mention playing, plus the street/traffic noise!! I'd bet a lot of money that NO ONE could tell the difference between my ipod and a turntable on these tiny computer speakers.

Right now, I wouldn't trade this Tom Waits album for anything. It's getting me through the day!

[Donny Hinson]

I think everyone's blaming the technology instead of the real culprits - the producers and manufacturers. What little bit I understand about this is that the "compression" that everyone moans about is dialed in...by someone - it doesn't just happen automatically! Someone (for whatever reason) is making a conscious decision that "I'm willing to live with "X" amount of quality loss to get twenty-something songs on this CD". There's nothing essentially wrong with the CD format, it's those who are making the CD's that are causing the problem. (I wouldn't be surprised it if they were purposely making crappy-sounding stuff en masse now so that we'll get tired of it and buy more, and buy faster!)

One proof of this theory is that, by and large (and music aside), the CD's made 20-25 years ago sound far better than those made today.

[Eric Jaeger]

Donny, I'm not blaming the technology at all. Audio compression has its place, and if an AM station wants to use it to cut through car noise, that's fine. And if someone want to reduce the bit rate and use digital compression because they have a limited amount of storage in the flash RAM in their nano, that's fine too. They should be aware of their choices and the consequences of those choices, and shouldn't inflict those choices on those who don't agree -- like me.

-eric

[Leslie Ehrlich]

I agree with Donny. I'm not about to join the chorus of luddites and go back to listening to vinyl LPs and analog tape. The crackling and the hiss just doesn't do anything for me.

One other thing I like about CDs and digital audio is that the technology has become affordable enough so that just about anyone (including me) can record an album. Back in the old days, a 24 track reel to reel tape deck, 32 input recording desk, and the cost of pressing a stack of vinyl records put the cost of recording an album out of reach for most of us.

[Jim Kennedy]

Analog tape has its own "natural compressio." Don't forget that LP's must be played through an "expander" to be heard correctly. And dialed in compression has been around longer thatn digital audio. I personally don't miss the snap crackle and pop of LP's or the hastle of migrating them to tape--both reel to reel and cassette--to preserve my LP's. However, I do agree that digitaly recorded music can sound sterile, and the digital age has resulted in over compressed, over istrumented and over edited tracks. By the way, some of the majors still use a good old Neve board to tape, and then digitize. The best of both worlds??

[Dave Boothroyd]

I'm pretty certain that I have read that the key to the great sound of the Glenn Miller band on record was that their record company had a new-fangled device, cobbled together from militiary radio parts, that was called a Compressor.
Like it or not, the post-war generation has grown up with processed sounds and that larger than life sound is what we regard as natural.
In the past I have sat in a classical concert, and found myself thinking "I'd just like to push those violins up a bit more between 4 and 6 kHz" - in other words wanting to more like I imagine a violin sounds that what it does actually sound like.
Only last week I heard a Brass band playing "Land of Hope and Glory" with what to me seemed like wildly over-the-top dynamics, going from an FFF blare to a PPP whisper from phrase to phrase. It needed compressing to my ear. Obviously the (elderly) conductor would not agree- but it's a matter of taste and familiarity.
Cheers
Dave

[Chris LeDrew]

Interesting point, Dave. Attending a recent symphony show, I was disappointed at how "quiet" they were. I was expecting to be pasted to my the back of my seat with some kind of Star Wars movie soundtrack or something. You're absolutely right about how our ear has come to expect processed sounds.

[Ray Minich]

Somewhere I've read that the psychoacoustic community predicts that the abscence of undertones and harmonics (those pieces missing due to the Nyquist limitations of digitizing at 44.1 kHz, then compressing to MP3 format) would lead to insanity of the listening public...
I think some of the new music is already there, even if it was to be reproduced all the way in pure analog....