Surprised this hasn't been posted already, but if it has I can't find it. Did a search.
Being the engineer behind Dark Side of the Moon does give you a certain level of credibility. And there's no question that Alan Parsons is right when he says, as he does in this interview, that audiophiles spend too much time/money on equipment and not enough on room acoustics.
And yet -- there's a lot about this interview that makes me not trust the guy very much. OK, he's a legend. But he has no decent music-reproduction equipment in the family areas of his house. He only listens to music on his car radio. He says you can get a "pretty decent" home theater sound system at Costco.
He does say some things I agree with that not everyone would agree with: "Engineers will always go for the highest-quality format available. I don’t think consumer enjoyment values suffer much if we have to use slightly lower-quality delivery formats," (which I take to mean that high-rez matters a lot during production but red-book rez can deliver an excellent product). Also, "A lot of the processing that audiophiles criticize is a style thing and part of the music itself." True enough -- though that doesn't mean I want to listen to those styles of music.
Anyway, worth the time it takes to read.
Jim
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Topic - Alan Parsons Interview - Jim Austin 13:24:42 03/18/12 (16)
- "Pro" audio - jimmyjames 13:16:48 03/21/12 (0)
- RE: Alan Parsons Interview - JNS 11:26:49 03/20/12 (0)
- RE: Alan Parsons Interview - IEaudiodude 21:08:15 03/19/12 (0)
- I bet his studio Monitoring system does the "right" things - BigguyinATL 19:11:02 03/19/12 (0)
- No surprise to me - E-Stat 15:46:51 03/19/12 (1)
- RE: No surprise to me - Jive Turkey 17:09:05 03/19/12 (0)
- RE: Alan Parsons Interview - KnobSpinner 15:01:08 03/19/12 (2)
- RE: Alan Parsons Interview - Jive Turkey 15:04:20 03/19/12 (1)
- RE: Alan Parsons Interview - ahendler 18:10:55 03/19/12 (0)
- Strange... - grantv 12:48:40 03/19/12 (4)
- It's not uncommon... - mls-stl 14:53:55 03/19/12 (3)
- RE: It's not uncommon... - josh358 16:39:56 03/19/12 (2)
- It's like putting truffles on Spam. - dancingseamonkey 11:12:50 03/20/12 (1)
- RE: It's like putting truffles on Spam. - josh358 11:49:06 03/21/12 (0)
- Jim, I Put It A Bit More Strongly At the Time... - Doug Schroeder 20:16:05 03/18/12 (0)
- In Digital , back in February - Iron Knee 17:41:41 03/18/12 (0)