I remember when CD's were new and Dire Straits came out with "Private Investigations", the dynamic range that CD's could achieve, when compared to analogue was really eye opening.
I had been involved in the recording industry for a few years at that time & expected the emergence of a new "sound" that was not the horribly compressed stuff like you had to do to shoe-horn music onto vinyl or radio. But it seemed that it never happened. You can't blame the consumers for this, it was a done deal at the mastering stage. Most consumers are blissfully unaware of the "enhancements" that are automatically applied to everything. Enhancements which are also hold-over's from the analogue days & are no longer required (IMHO). For example: - To add brightness you pass it through some type of "Aural Exciter", a band pass filter & distortion that only distorts the highest frequencies, adding even higher harmonics & which also increases the perceptual loudness of a track. Because the distortion always clips at the same level, this also contributes to the compression of the audio. - Then you need to de-ess everything because the vocals will be too sibiliant (usually just a notch filter does the trick). - Then the usual is to apply some sort of peak limiting (usually with a really nasty compression ratio and steep attack). This kills any transients that might 'threaten' to cause distortion. - Then you probably want to gate off anything down near the noise floor of your recording (you know, just in case). - Then you want to apply a bit of compression to "heat it up" (note this compresses the exciter artefacts & the already compressed transients more) so you push the compression up till it hammers, but not so far that you can hear it breathe as the compression goes in & out. - After all this, what does your waveform look like? (You started with lots of sines but now their peaks have been pushed in and 'harmonics' have been added around them, wait a minute, they're square waves! - Oh, and of course now it's the digital age, lets normalise it to fit as much signal as we can on the master. If mastering engineers can't hear the crap they are putting out they shouldn't be calling themselves mastering engineers. I've seen so many muso's disappointed (after getting over the initial excitement) with the mastered sound compared to what they had in studio. As a recording engineer I have had sessions down that were just special (probably flukes too) but were not in the exact format that the company thought would sell. After mastering, while the 'product' was more marketable, it was unremarkable. Just another bunch of noise. I am sure that if the mastering engineer had listened to the whole thing through several times BEFORE messing with it, the outcome would have been different (I tend to obsess about stuff I record and always get better ideas after many listens). Anyway advice for the next generation: The rest is a note too. If you mix all the colours on your palette you always get brown or olive. If you whisper so they can barely hear you, then you shout, you'll scare the @#$%^&* out of them. If you always shout you're just a loud bore. Make art. Regards, Dave C. -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Cory K. Sent: Sunday, 30 December 2007 6:35 a.m. To: Ubuntu Studio Users Help and Discussion Subject: Re: "The Death of High Fidelity" Sad, sad, sad... D. Michael McIntyre wrote: > On Saturday 29 December 2007, Cory K. wrote: > >> Sad article on the state of production and how undiscriminating/ignorant >> consumers are killing fidelity. >> > > It's funny reading this with the JAMin tutorial in mind. That tutorial is all > about trying to make everything loud, just like the article hates. > > I agree about MP3s too. I just don't get the age of people walking around > with little things shoved in their ears, listening to hollowed out tracks > that have sacrificed their core in the name of lossy compression. > My personal glaring example of this was Vertical Horizon's "Everything You Want". Big radio song and I heard it a million times before I heard the CD. WOW. The CD was so much more dynamic. It was like listening to a different song. Now I understand the reason for radio compression but to master songs this way is just criminal. > Especially now that so many people are foregoing CDs completely, and just > buying MP3s. They never have a chance to hear what the music wanted to be. > > Of course you can make all kinds of arguments about how true audiophiles still > do everything the analog way, and/or the lousy 44.1 kHz/16-bits of CDs just > isn't high enough, etc. > > I guess there's a certain element of where to draw the line here, but it's > depressing how far down the line is trending these days. > *sigh* :( -Cory \m/ -- Ubuntu-Studio-users mailing list [email protected] Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-studio-users -- Ubuntu-Studio-users mailing list [email protected] Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-studio-users
