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It's from the PLAYLIST column, an interview with Jason Pierce of Spiritualized (which I don't know):
"
Q. You also chose Royal Trux's album "Accelerator," and it is a really forceful live band. Is that part of what you like about it?
A. I think live music is just a totally different thing, but "Accelerator," more than most records, translates that. And it sounds modern. It sounds like it's properly digitized, and the silences are very silent and the volume is squashed and lifted in a properly digital way, but it's ferocious.
"
Despite the "but" near the end, he seems to be talking about dynamic compression, etc., as though it was a good thing. Not sure what to make of this.
Jim
Follow Ups:
that makes music more accessable to people with car stereos and I-pods and the like.It helps to enrich the musical lives of many people. Certainly it is contrary to the precepts of the high end. But that is just an elitist niche anyway.
The problem is that they are implementing it in the software when it could be implemented in hardware that is specific to high ambient loudness environments, or switchable. Then everyone would be happy. But to demonize compression out of hand is just short sighted.
Edits: 02/26/12
If you enjoy the sound of live acoustic music, compression is fatal. The single most important factor im making recorded music sound alive is linear(uncompressed) dynamics.
Until very recently, all digital was pure crap. Those "Golden Ear" critics (like JA, Marks, and ST at SP and SS at TAS) who have been praising digital FOR DECADES simply don't know what live music sounds like (yes, I know JA makes CD recordings). Compare reel-to-reel analogue copies of master tapes to any digital, and it's clear that digital is still a step backward in audio quality. ALL digital is over processed!!! Why? Because music is, and ALWAYS WILL BE, analogue. digital has to take the original analogue sound, and after converting that sound to bits, and, then, after processing those bits in billions (trillions?) of ways, has to RECONVERT those digital bits back to analogue!!! Add in compression, and you have the crap digital that apologists have been selling us for decades. Check out Steve Guttenberg's "As We See It" column in the March Stereophile. Modern digital is almost always a deflavorizing machine, robbing music of it's soul!
A) Digitizing by itself has nothing to do with the generally poor sound of cds these days. Many cds up until the mid to late '90s were excellent.
B) A lot of modern recorded music has NEVER existed in analogue form before it comes out of the speakers.
C) Analogue processing is just as capable of killing music as digital processing. The kings of over-compression, the Lord-Alge brothers, use nothing but vintage analogue compressors and some of them are valve powered.
Oddly enough some time ago they played compressed and uncompressed music to random music lovers.
They were played the music of their choice in both versions and asked which they prefer.
Turns out that pop and metal fans liked theirs uncompressed while classical and jazz aficionados very much preferred the compressed versions.
A: Wrong! Digitizing by itself ALWAYS degrades the original sound. To repeat: audio (for humans) is, and always will be, analogue. Digital converts analogue sound to bits; processes those bits in billions of ways, and then reconverts those bits back to analogue.
B: Here you are correct. However, there are thousands of great analogue records and tapes of the best jazz and classical performances. The only CD player that has impressed me is the Audio Note one. Why I cannot say, but, the best CDs, played back via the Audio Note CD unit sound realistic (compared to other digital systems, not to analogue vinyl or tapes).
C: Of course, there are thousands of poor vinyl records: don't buy those! There are NO truly realistic CDs (see A).
"To repeat: audio (for humans) is, and always will be, analogue."
Hate to mention it but your neurons are digital (PDM) and your brain is clocked.
So your "always analog" music was imagined by a discrete human, documented by discrete dots on a piece of paper, performed by another human with such poor QC that every performance is noticeably different and recorded (if "analog") by setting discrete magnetic domains on a medium with imperfect velocity.
Bummer...
Rick
"Wrong! Digitizing by itself ALWAYS degrades the original sound. To repeat: audio (for humans) is, and always will be, analogue. Digital converts analogue sound to bits; processes those bits in billions of ways, and then reconverts those bits back to analogue."
You are drawing a false dichotomy. Take a vinyl groove. At a given point in the grove there are some number of atoms on the left side and some number on the right side. Looking down the grove, there is a finite spacing between atoms. In this sense, the LP is a digital representation of the musical event. It's certainly possible to argue about the number of bits involved with the LP and a CD, but that's not the argument that you made. It is also possible to argue that any conversion from one form to another degrades the sound, again not the argument that you made. Even the air in a concert hall between the orchestra and a listener "degrades" the sound, for that matter.
Tony Lauck
"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar
but if you want to take it to the extreme - all life is digital - every single thing in our universe can be dwindled down to bits - on/off.
light/darkness
life/death
on/off
the brain is a series of switches - fires/doesn't fire (which is on/off).
There is a sort of artificiality to the sound of digital and based on the SACD that I have heard that technology sounds even worse that CD on an AN CD player.
The main issues for LP regardless of whether anyone likes it or not is surface noise and availability. Surface noise is a deal breaker for most people and there is a major lack of availability with new music after about 1990 - really low after 2000.
The AN CD player simply sounds better because it is the only design type that doesn't work like a high negative feedback Solid State amplifier - ie there is no processing and no filters to hack off ambient information above 20khz and no noise shaping smoothing or other rubbish that serves to steralize music.
..... all digital was pure crap."
This implies that something digital very recently was *not* "pure crap"...... Just curious what it is.........
I've heard some high res digital that was acceptable.
But some old great analogue is more dynamic on CD because they wouldn't put the full dynamic range of the master on it for fear of mistracking. When the CDs were done there was nof problem with tracking and they sound more alive because of this. There are good CDs just like there are bad LPs.
Granted some digital is more dynamic than the analogue version, but digital has a multitude of other problems, chief among them is the fact that ALL MUSIC IS ANALOGUE! The fans of digital never get around to addressing this basic flaw.
There are good CDs just like there are bad LPs.
Sure are even though the superiority "tubes, analogue and vinyl are God" & "SS, digital and CD are Satan" clique aren't giving up any ground.
Isn't this an indictment of consumer-grade audio, suggesting it's pure unadulterated crap?
But then again, since almost everything in recent popular music is processed and Auto-Tune'd to death, it would likely be ghastly painful to listen to if it were not overly compressed. I contend that a lot of the compression is to cover up artistic deficiencies in the music, maybe more so than the sonic limitations in consumer-grade audio products.
When low level information is lost to a crush of brickwalling you lose everything in my book. I will never own an ipod.
Freedom is the right to discipline yourself.
Except that an ipod does not dynamically compress sound at all.
Many are filled with data compressed mp3s but that again has nothing to do with dynamic compression. Plus nobody is forcing you to use mp3s to fill your ipod, there is nothing stopping you from loading it with uncompressed (data) wav or AIFF files.
It's your choice.
Compression "can" be a good thing but is often misused in my opinion. It can be (mis)used in many ways. You can compress differently in terms of level, type and amount and it can be implemented on individual mics/instruments as well as on the final mixdown.
ET
Practically all vocal and bass guitar recordings have always been compressed.
It very much depends on the amount of dynamic compression applied.
Viridian: Respectfully disagree.
How is music less accessible without levels of dynamic compression used today? Tens of millions of people listen to music put on their iPods and car stereos via CD before the abusive levels of compression became the drug of choice.
A volume control gives each individual the appropriate level decibels desired (hardware as you point out). All the abusive levels of compression used now do is crush artistry, beauty, and nuances that make music wonderful.
If this weren't sad, it would be comical.......... It's getting to a point where people in the music industry no longer know how good music is supposed to sound like.
It's like the only hope is some band with a forward vision releasing an all-analog album that reveals to the world how digitization has destroyed music.
I'm sorry to break the news to you, but the latest thinking in Physics is that we exist as bits of information in a digital universe:O) The experiment to reveal this theory is looking for the inherent jitter that supposedly eminates from our digitized quantum structure. See the current Scientific American for details.
dave_b
Bands like that exist. Buy a record by Shellac, any of them, you can't go wrong. The guitar player is a recording engineer, the bass player is a mastering engineer, and the drummer is a wild man.
"It's like the only hope is some band with a forward vision releasing an all-analog album that reveals to the world how digitization has destroyed music. "
Problem is 2 fold:
1. These folks wrecked more than their fair share of vinyl (anyone remember Dynaflex? Anything done by Abba? The Beatles and their "wall of sound?")
2. Live sound with all the speakers and sound re-enforcement in many cases sounds worse than the crap released as a CD or MP3! Listening to a string quartet, bluegrass band or other acoustic only performance, unamplified, at close proximity can be a life altering experience when you hear it for the first time. THAT sound is what we strive for - and is unachievable without the right recording.
"Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is knowing not to put it in a fruit salad"
digitzation has not destroyed music. Poor, over processed, recording and mastering makes music sound canned. I was just listening to a couple of exciting recordings on CD. On a good system they're magic. And one was from the late 60s, another from this century.
"digitzation has not destroyed music."
I disagree for several reasons...... One is that nobody has really been able to grasp and address the RFI issue with digital audio playback....... RFI in my opinion alters how one perceives the music played back. Second is it has been too easy to "overalter" recordings with various types of processing......... Too often there is "too much" processing, where I believe "not enough" processing would have been a far better option. Third, partly related to the RFI issue, there seems to be an inverse relationship between listener enjoyment of the music and bit rate of the playback (CD in my opinion strikes the happiest medium). And finally, it has been too easy to introduce technology that is either phony in its concept (24/192 upsampling, for example) or in its effect (making "good singers" out of hacks).
Since it seems like very few people in recent time truly understand the fragility of music and keeping it intact in recording, digitization of audio has IMO been more abused than used prudently. And I'm afraid that will never change.
Yet digital, theoretically, promises dynamic range and siganl to noise ratio of 90 to 100 dB. Dynamic range and signal to noise ratio of digital far exceed analog, theoretically. So digital, theoretically, should sound pretty damn ferocious.
:-)
agree that despite the syntax used it sounds like he is saying despite the modern digitized sound it sounds ferocious.
-andre d
Clearly recorded music is becoming abstracted from the actual live performance as the record company philosophy with releasing music.
I would agree in that "ferocious" is accurate with removing "fero" and replacing with "atro" ... :)
"Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is knowing not to put it in a fruit salad"
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