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In Reply to: Rush and Digital Playback..... posted by Todd Krieger on May 5, 2007 at 18:47:22:
> Something has gone **really** wrong in how digital audio "technology"
> has "progressed" in the past ten years.It is still possible to make wonderful sounding recordings with digital technology. The recordings you don't like sound the way they do because of conscious and intentional decisions made by some combination of the artists, engineers, producers and record company execs/marketers. Some of these people have come to the conclusion that over-compressed recordings with no dynamics and overblown bass that are so "hot" that they are clearly distorted are the "in" sound with a big portion of the buying public. It really doesn't have anything to do with the technology.
This recording industry audio fad confuses me, but then McDonalds also sells a lot of hamburgers and I don't think their stuff is all that good either.
However, I'll grant you that it is distressing when a favorite artist releases a poorly recorded album. I was extremely disappointed with Thea Gilmore's new album Harpo's Ghost. Great material and great playing but the recording is simply nasty. Really disappointing since her prior albums have been fairly well recorded.
Unfortunately, about the only things we can do are either not buy an album or pray that they come back to their senses.
Follow Ups:
The problem is one almost has to be a physicist and a DSP scientist in order to achieve great performance in digital plabyack. Throw in the fact that there are a lot of myths accepted as fact amongst even engineers (for example, the notion that ASRC solves jitter problems), and we have a technology that is misused because hardly anybody really knows how to use it correctly.
You also shouldn't forget the number of very nasty LP recordings that have been released over the years. Sometimes it was nasty from the git-go due to the same type of bad decisions as noted above. (Remember when pop recordings were "enhanced" to sound good on AM radio?) Other times LP's were bad due to poor vinyl, overused stampers and using a tape way too many generations away from the master.Whether digital or analog there are plenty of examples good and bad that show me it is not the technology of the medium but the use of it that is what matter.
When I hear a great performance via poor vinyl playback, it sounds like a great performance and a bad recording. When I hear a great performance via poor digital playback, it sounds like a mediocre performance and a decent recording.
Not sure I follow; how could you know if it was a great performance if it only sounds like a "decent recording" of a "mediocre performance"?However, I've long thought that everyone listens for different things when they listen to music in much the same way that we have different favorites when it comes to food, art, beauty or any of the other aesthetic pursuits. I think we are hearing different things.
"Not sure I follow; how could you know if it was a great performance if it only sounds like a 'decent recording' of a 'mediocre performance'?"A good question.....
The sonic degradation of poor digital playback, in my opinion, affects how one perceives the performance, to where it seems a lot worse than it actually was. Where with poor analog playback, it is much easier listen through the bad playback to the great performance.
Or to say this yet another way, if I only heard the 1970 Szell Tokyo Sibelius 2nd Symphony via digitized playback, I would have thought it was a vastly-overrated performance. For the performance seems "dull" and "boring" via digitized playback. But this same performance, which I recorded from FM broadcast to a VHS tape, it's as hair-raising and emotionally exhausting a work as any recorded performance I've ever heard.
I now greatly prefer digital playback to analog, but in my case I simply don't LET a bad recording affect how I view the performance. I've heard TONS of shitty recordings, on both analog and digital--my colection has more than a few of them--but I still listen to many of them on a frequent basis. The lack of sound quality is a pretty minor concern to me where that's concerned. I'll take a great performance and bad sound quality over the converse every time. As far as why analog has this perceived quality of letting one "see" through a bad recording . . . well, this debate could rage on forever. I believe, after owning and hearing too many turntables to list, that analog playback has certain euphonic, "softening" distortions that many people find pleasing and that allow them to enjoy imperfect recordings. To each their own. I'll stick with my digital rig.
I'm not questioning people's choices in playback, I'm just trying to raise the awareness that people may mis-perceive the performance due to digitization.Note that I personally listen to exclusively CDs while in CA, and 90 percent CDs while I'm in AZ. (It would be much lower if I wasn't fortunate to find decent CD playback.) We're all in this together.
I could be wrong, but it seems to me you are referring to playback hardware and how it reacts to various software, whereas mls-stl is referring to only the software quality.....
"I could be wrong, but it seems to me you are referring to playback hardware and how it reacts to various software, whereas mls-stl is referring to only the software quality....."It's actually both, working as a system..... If the digital sounds right, both the hardware and the software are optimized. But if either one is compromised, the overall sound suffers. And one might suspect the problem is in the apples, yet turn out to be in the oranges.
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