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In a long inteview, Neil Young mentions the effects the technological race to the bottom is having on music and our ability to appreciate it. From ear buds to compounded lossy compression algorithms, most people have lost access to anything resembling the traditional dynamic range and chromatic range that music requires. What to call the sounds that are left? Neil goes into a lot of detail on the problems and some of the, so far unsuccessful, steps he has taken to try to fix the problem.
Neil Young is crankier than a hermit being stung by bees. He hates Spotify. He hates Facebook. He hates Apple. He hates Steve Jobs. He hates what digital technology is doing to music. "I'm only one person standing there going, 'Hey, this is [expletive] up!' " he shouted, ranting away on the porch of his longtime manager Elliot Roberts's house overlooking Malibu Canyon in the sunblasted desert north of Los Angeles.
[...] Producers and engineers often responded to the smaller size and lower quality of these packages by using cheap engineering tricks, like making the softest parts of the song as loud as the loudest parts. This flattened out the sound of recordings and fooled listeners' brains into ignoring the stuff that wasn't there anymore, i.e., the resonant combinations of specific human beings producing different notes and sounds in specific spaces at sometimes ultraweird angles that the era of magnetic tape and vinyl had so successfully captured.
It's a long read, but quite interesting and he has thought about both the problem and solutions. More importantly he has been working to solve the problem, even if it may be an uphill fight.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 24 2019, @07:24PM (23 children)
People who want the quality can get it - storage, processing power, and com speed are more than adequate to produce and use non-lossy high-quality recordings.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by RS3 on Saturday August 24 2019, @07:47PM (6 children)
You're absolutely correct. In fact, long ago they started using DVDs for "HD" audio- 24 bit, 96KHz. They exist, but never really took off. And I knew people who used VHS HiFi to record audio- the specs were that good or better.
The main reason for all the mess is the CD format. 16 bits is actually not great, because in PCM (Pulse Code Modulation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulse-code_modulation [wikipedia.org] the quieter sounds don't use all of the bits and they sound distorted. Sound engineers / mixers / masterers had to use all of the 16 bits, and it became a fairly standard practice to compress- individual tracks (raw multi-track tracks), the overall mix, then use a mastering multi-band leveler (more compression) and finally a limiter that does magic but still compresses (dynamically, and maybe a LOT where it needs to).
And then you have YouTube, Spotify, etc., and you don't know what reprocessing they do besides obviously encode to .mp3, and even then there are many options besides bit rate.
I've never done multi-track to magnetic tape, but I've read about the magic that some engineers used- basically you had to know the tape head and tape magnetic saturation, and what pre-amps and levels would give you the best sound, intentionally using a little head/tape saturation as a nice soft limiter. You'd think someone could emulate that in electronics or software, but I'm not sure if there are any really good emulators / plugins because I only dabble in that world.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 24 2019, @10:34PM (3 children)
That is not why they sound distorted. The best way to understand the limitation of CDs and how hard they are to mix is that PCM is linear, but our hearing is logarithmic. A sound that is twice as loud on the PCM stream (e.g. moving from the values 128 to 256 or 32767 to 65534) is not perceived as twice as loud to us. You can move the same distance linearly, but depending on where you are on the scale, it will sound different. It is the same reason why people complained about the volume knob on early versions of Windows and Mac OS (but not BeOS). It is difficult to map logarithmic values to linear and back over a large range, so compression artificially limits the dynamic range in order to try and preserve the differences that people will notice the most. It also helps to even out the sound of the ensemble and reduce unwanted sounds like heavy hits out of nowhere and sibilant noises. While adding more and more bits gives you more room to do said mapping, there is a good argument to be made that the real solution is to use a floating-point representation.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 25 2019, @01:15AM
Huh?
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Sunday August 25 2019, @11:12AM (1 child)
Range != granularity Yes, humans can hear a wide dynamic range. Humans cannot distinguish between infinite gradations of volume.
You can represent an arbitrarily wide dynamic range with just a single bit: let 0 be the lowest value of the range and 1 be the highest. Oh, you wanted more granularity? Let's add more bits then.
16 bits is more than enough. Humans cannot meaningfully distinguish between 2^16 different gradations of volume. As you say, our hearing is logarithmic. We don't need to represent 32767 differently than 32768 or 32769. No one can tell the difference anyway.
24 bits is used during mixing so one has more leeway to be sloppy. If you want to keep it in the final master, fine. But claiming that we need even more bits suggests ignorance about digital audio.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Sunday August 25 2019, @12:57PM
But with 2^16 gradations of volume we might still have to distinguish 5 from 6.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 25 2019, @12:14AM
You two are way off the mark. If you read TFA you'll notice eg:
-recording studios don't record nor keep the same quality of recording
-production tools and standards are discarding meaningful data
-production tools make resulting tracks which don't correspond to what a live performance could ever sound like
Now, these aren't inherently bad. "Pull the cymbals up a bit they're too faint" might make sense. But Neil Young is arguing that, like the 70s pile carpets and mustard colours fad, the aesthetic delivered is bad, and that the monoculture due to major labels and publication streams is ensuring that if you want 50s baby blue or 90s beige, you're NOT able to get it - it's simply not being made.
TFA is literally claiming (and others in this thread discuss the technical realities of those claims) that no you cannot get arbitrarily high quality - not without going to a live performance - not because we don't have the tech, but because we've settled on bad technical and social standards.
Someone else pointed to the Loudness Wars, which alone refute the idea that arbitrary quality up to human perception is available. Oh I have the perfect metaphor! It's like watching a movie through a fish eye lens! The data is transformed and recognizeable, but some details are expanded and some are reduced past human discernment, and the experience is distorted. Watch through it long enough and seeing a movie without that lens on would seem weird, and bad!
(Score: 5, Insightful) by shortscreen on Sunday August 25 2019, @01:22AM
I disagree entirely. 16 bits is more than adequate for playback. The purpose of greater bit depths (ie. 24-bit) is to prevent data loss during the mixing process, because when you amplify, attenuate, or combine two 16-bit samples you need additional bits to represent a precise result.
16 bits gives you a signal to noise ratio of 96dB. Can you hear white noise at -96dB? Only in audiophile fantasy land. It doesn't really matter if one part of a recording is quieter than the rest, the noise floor is still at -96dB (in theory... but if your equipment is rubbish and adds a massive amount of noise itself, that is a separate issue which also can't be solved with more bits) which means it's not audible. Unless the listener cranks the volume WAY up for that section... and then turns it down again before the next track starts so they don't go deaf.
Dynamic range compression causes distortion. At low bit depths it could mitigate noise problems... but at 16 bits there is no noise problem to begin with. Instead it's being abused for the sake of the loudness war, so that CDs from the '00s are heavily distorted compared to CDs from the '80s.
(Score: 5, Informative) by pTamok on Saturday August 24 2019, @08:12PM (4 children)
Actually, it is getting increasingly difficult to find CDs pressed from masters produced before the before the loudness wars. Many 'classic' albums have been remastered after having been butchered - the Wikipedia page on Loudness war [wikipedia.org] gives clear examples.
Codecs have become very good - Opus is excellent, but as you say, both processing and disk space have become very cheap, so there's no technological impediment to storing and playing uncompressed CD-audio [wikipedia.org] (two-channel signed 16-bit Linear PCM sampled at 44,100 Hz). As 'Monty' Montogomery of Xiph.org points out, 16-bits is enough [xiph.org].
Getting hold of CD-Audio datasets is more difficult than it should be. Copyright laws don't help in this regard.
(Score: 2) by digitalaudiorock on Sunday August 25 2019, @02:25PM (2 children)
This is 100% spot on, and is the single biggest issue with quality of modern recordings. One of the reasons that vinyl records sound good is because you simply can't use those "loud" squashed-to-death mixes, as the needle would literally jump out of the groove. CDs made the loudness war possible, but the stupid decision to mix that way "because we can" thus removing all the dynamics from music is the biggest problem and not the available technology.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 25 2019, @02:49PM (1 child)
You've got that backwards. You have to squash the dynamic range on vinyl or it will skip. The relationship between volume and skipping is somewhat more complicated. The loudness on CDs is a compression, not a volume increase as such. They've compressed things by bringing the quiet bits up, but also by clipping the drums.
CDs do have less dynamic range now, but only because the quieter bits aren't being used.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by RS3 on Monday August 26 2019, @12:39AM
Thank you thank you. There is SO much misinformation here it's too painful to respond to most of it. People are getting modded to +5 for complete nonsense and mental exercises. This is mostly a theory / philosophical discussion. I actually DO this work (part-time) and worked for years under a Grammy-winning recording engineer.
Part of my reason for not wanting to comment too much more is that I know some of the secrets of the recording / mixing / mastering world. And I don't want to brag about my degree.
There are comments above talking about recording in 24 bits for processing. WTF? DAWs have processed the internal mixing and math in the highest bit-count possible in the machine for 30 years. To anyone who might care: if you have a 64-bit CPU, you can do 64-bit math directly, even if you're running in a 16-bit OS. I have done it (in assembler).
Since you might be sane, I'll write this one more time: If I have a 16-bit ADC, but my pre-amp level (gain / trim) is set too low so that I only use 8 of the bits, I'm recording in 8-bits. It's that simple. If I'm recording something with large dynamic range (like most things), then some of the quieter parts will only use, wait for it, 8 bits of ADC. So when I then add compression, which means I'm going to squash the loud parts, but also gain up the quiet parts (that are low bit-counts) and thereby make the low bit-count distortion much more audible than it would be if I did little or no compression. And this is _well known_ in the actual audio engineering world. We use 24 bit ADC recording (or 32) so that quiet parts still get 16-20 bits of quantization (A to D conversion).
To dovetail with a few comments above: 16-bit playback is okay if you record in 24-32 and carefully process and "dither" (convert from 24 -> 16 bits) during render.
We also record at 96 KHz (or 192 if we're feeling masochistic about HD space) to get far far away from any possibility of aliasing.
(Score: 2) by Acabatag on Monday August 26 2019, @01:31AM
I buy a lot of early CDs at thrift stores. The ones before the 'loudness wars' have that old block of text somewhere on the insert 'apologizing' for the fact that "the sound material came from an Analog source and there will be inherent defects because of that." The irony is kind of rich.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 24 2019, @08:17PM (5 children)
this isn't about lossyness as much as it is about dynamic range. .. and the violence done to it. imagine having the culture required to go to a classical music performance in a real concert hall, then coming home and realizing just how limited what you can reproduce is. its really pretty dramatic how bad our imaginary listener's sense of good dynamic range is.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by anubi on Saturday August 24 2019, @09:36PM
Exactly nailed it.
I believe the codecs are logarithmic. Our ears have an incredibly large dynamic range, and make digital sampling artifacts, aliasing, and other sampling phenomena show up. And it doesn't "sound right".
I'm glad there's a few people still around that treasure the beauty of a job done right. It's all too common these days to build the bare minimum product that is one step from being junk, to maximize profitability.
Usually, the customer was the Congress of the United States. They get to award contracts without having their dog in the fight, while having the authority to compel everyone else's dog to support it.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 3, Touché) by mhajicek on Sunday August 25 2019, @01:03AM (3 children)
Dynamic range means the loud parts are too loud and the quiet parts are too quiet. When I listen to music I've either got road noise or machine noise competing for my ears.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 4, Insightful) by RS3 on Sunday August 25 2019, @02:49AM
That's spot-on, and I've thought for years that listening devices should have a variable compression adjustment so that people can adjust the dynamic range to suit their environment. That said, many car radios do that automatically. The radio in my dad's car, somewhat older, adjusts its volume to road speed, and that effect is somewhat adjustable.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 25 2019, @02:54PM
The consumer tools to do that have been around for ages, but there's still no way for a consumer to turn that compressed junk back into music.
I have my whole collection ripped to FLAC cue files. If I need or want the compression, I can have my computer do it all in a short time period and convert to a different format at the same time
I remember some months ago hearing one of the songs I loved from the 90s and it was terrible. The processing and compression led to it being flat and boring.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Monday August 26 2019, @12:55AM
I'll add some numbers: average car interior is on the order of 60-70 dB SPL. That doesn't mean the music has to be above 70 to hear it, but it certainly sets a rough baseline.
Yes, humans can hear 140 dB dynamic range, but it's not pleasant for most normal people. Music is pretty loud at 85 dB. So you might want your music in the 75-80 dB range in your car, but background noise is a problem, so you'll turn it up, but too much dynamic range in the source makes it tedious to hear the quiet parts.
Again, some nice adjustable compression would be great, and I know many cars have auto-compensating systems (as do some high-end home audio systems.)
(Score: 5, Insightful) by qzm on Saturday August 24 2019, @10:20PM (2 children)
Could we please change the title to 'Neil Young, promoting his commercial product, the PONO music player, said....'
And yet what he says still makes little sense. There is nothing inate in in these technologies that FORCES producers to shorten and over-compress their music.
It is simply the choice the commercial producers and promoters are making.
He should be saying 'modern music production is crap' - because buying his overprices and technically of minor advantage music planer/service isnt going to make the production of music any better.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pono_(digital_music_service) [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by qzm on Saturday August 24 2019, @10:34PM
Just to point out, yes I know PONO is dead, but Neil is well known for beating the dead horse ;)
His website for 'high quality streaming' is still going, which apparently cost him over a million dollars (really? you need to find some better techies Neil).
I suspect he has been suckered by someone, and they are milking him for money in the name of 'helping him save good music' - poor guy.
But really, this stuff is just rubbish - there are plenty of ways to get good music - the problem is little modern music is being produced with much quality.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Sunday August 25 2019, @12:11AM
Modded you insightful on both, but as TFA (along with everything else I've ever read about the guy) the problem is that he's a true believer. He did PONO not only to make money - although he doesn't perform for free, either... - but also because he does really believe in the passion of preserving quality sound. And, point, as you stated he crashed and burned with PONO yet he still advocates for the cause.
"In the clearing stands a Boxer and a fighter by his trade. And he carries the reminders of every glove that laid him down or cut him 'till he cried out in his anger and his rage, 'I am leaving, I am leaving,' but the fighter still remains."
This sig for rent.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Snotnose on Sunday August 25 2019, @12:46AM (1 child)
Not really. When the only source the consumer has access to is over compressed then it doesn't matter the quality of your receiver, speakers, com speed, NAS size, whatever. If the original source sucks, then your best results will suck a bit less. Unless you have access to the master tapes, which takes a lot more money than that $1000 receiver, $2k speakers, and $200/month internet speed.
When the dust settled America realized it was saved by a porn star.
(Score: 2) by ilPapa on Sunday August 25 2019, @02:35AM
But my ceramic cable elevators still matter, right? Please tell me they still matter.
http://www.charismaaudio.com/?page_id=1728 [charismaaudio.com]
You are still welcome on my lawn.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday August 24 2019, @07:36PM
Less relevant than a Zune, or Tidal?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pono_(digital_music_service) [wikipedia.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PonoPlayer [wikipedia.org]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Disagree) by JoeMerchant on Saturday August 24 2019, @08:02PM (6 children)
Ever since the first wax record, music distributed by technology has been literally molded by the transfer functions of the available channels.
Music produced for AM radio doesn't bother with the high and low frequencies that the common AM transceiver set fails to deliver to the listener...
FM dramatically widened the dynamic range and added stereo, and you see that influencing the albums produced when FM rolled out to a wide audience.
CDs pretty much wrapped up (most) human ears' available spectrum, and with a 16 bit dynamic range they could deliver a theater like experience, but... most CD music was still played over FM radio, or in environments where that theater style dynamic range just isn't practical.
Digital radio has sputtered, not really reaching the mass audience the way that FM did - and now people are listening via Spotify, Pandora, YouTube, etc. - many on the low-fi free options.
So, Neil, suck it up. Either you're going to produce music to reach these low-fi listeners (paying customers, whether directly or via consumption of advertising) or you're not. If your "artistic statement" can only be delivered via CD and anything less just sounds like crap and loses your message, them's the breaks in the modern world. At least there is a CD option today, maybe a few thousand geezers like me might buy one, or a high quality digital single or two. If you're going to "go viral with the kids" you're gonna have to compress it into something that reaches them in the ways they listen today.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by takyon on Saturday August 24 2019, @08:24PM (2 children)
I'm assuming you are talking about "HD Radio", not Internet radio. Even if it did reach a mass audience, you can't count or track them. :(
Also, wow:
https://old.reddit.com/r/RTLSDR/comments/2jbyzp/rtlsdr_usa_fm_hd_radio/ [reddit.com]
https://www.rtl-sdr.com/decoding-and-listening-to-hd-radio-nrsc-5-with-an-rtl-sdr/ [rtl-sdr.com]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday August 25 2019, @02:06AM
Yeah, I guess I could have said "Digital Radio" better... it's hard for me to wrap my head around "Radio" being applied to music delivered over the internet, but I suppose with 3G/4G that's applicable now...
They seem to count and track FM listeners well enough to satisfy advertisers...
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 25 2019, @02:46AM
In the US, most FM broadcasters now have an HD feed, and HD receivers are extremely common in cars produced in the past decade plus, as well as in basically every aftermarket head unit. Radio receivers in component stereos almost always have it as well. El-cheapo bedside clock radios don't necessarily have it, but it's not as if these are known for sound quality in the first place.
There hasn't been (and probably won't be) any mandatory transition as there was with broadcast TV, so it might not seem like digital radio has taken off, but it's everywhere. It's disappointing that the standard isn't open, but that doesn't matter for the mass audience.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by anubi on Saturday August 24 2019, @09:44PM (1 child)
I think a lot of premium music is throttled by paywalls. Money does not come easy for me, and I will quickly settle for something available and inexpensive/free. I think a lot of people are in the same predicament.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday August 25 2019, @01:59AM
Pandora is definitely blocked at my job (hello Windscribe and any other number of free VPNs...)
I used to be a paying Pandora subscriber, at $30 / year back in 2008, and $36 a year a little later - their current rates are insane, when we listen to Pandora now we pay by enduring the ads, not by sending them the money they are demanding.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 25 2019, @12:46AM
Neil's music sounds like crap at any fidelty.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 24 2019, @09:31PM (12 children)
I like Neil and I've got a bunch of his music. However, reduced sound quality of vocals from modern equipment would not be the argument I would make if I were him. I mean he made some catchy songs but he is not Luciano Pavarotti.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 24 2019, @09:51PM (4 children)
He is talking about the industry in general, not only his own songs.
Regardless of how good the songs are, why not pursue high quality sound as he defines it?
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Sunday August 25 2019, @12:06AM (3 children)
Because doing so costs more. In both studio production and to the end user. There are enough people sated on Taylor Swift and flavor-of-the-week who'd rather pay only $0.99 or $1.29 a song rather than $5.00 for songs produced at higher quality. It's always been that way - you think people liked the sound quality of AM radio? And way back in the day, they composed and engineered music to that, too.
Plus the aspect that people do pursue high quality sound as he defines it, in both creation and listening. Back in ye olde days we called it HiFi, short for High Fidelity. What? That still exists today? Well, allrighty then! And it's always been that way - the people involved with it pay premiums to get the quality they look for because by definition it's fringe.
This sig for rent.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 25 2019, @03:03PM (2 children)
I find that hard to believe compressing an analog signal into a digital one that's smaller is hard. You're losing signal and it's much harder to do when you're not even using all of the available space.
In other words less compression is easier and requires less work to finish. This has nothing to do with production costs and everything to do with trying to scream over the other idiots.
What's more, once you've got a recording there's minimal expense related to having a compressed and more compressed version of the song especially for well-known groups.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 26 2019, @06:41PM
On technical equipment: Not sure. You only get so much range to whatever recording medium (and other equipment) you are using. "What, I use digital exclusively! I'm just plugging up a microphone to Audacity and Singing My Heart Out!" No, not that simple at all. The more unlimited your dynamic range and the finer you slice that range (and more channels you add simultaneous) the more complex it gets for processing speed among all else. But bit buckets and bus buckets do get cheaper all the time. What look like decent front end compressors (don't play with them much) run sub-$500 up through "what's your budget for this?" but definitely start on the cheap end.
The only work I've ever done in a higher-fidelity type spectrum was as an artist in a choral group capturing to reel to reel tape for vinyl production a few years before digital was really The Thing To Do. (Though we surely had cassettes vinyl was still popular enough and that's what was wanted for the sound.) But I can tell you the process of getting that sound capture was pretty grueling and it took both production, engineering, and direction chops to make the final cut sound good. So I think the heavier costs are just that: Production costs. Any idiot can hook up a compressor and twiddle dials (dedicated or virtual) until you get a Wall of Sound. Production of High Fidelity Music requires skill from the composer/arranger and definitely through mastering and beyond into (somewhat) the reproduction facility. Compressing is the reduction of quality, not an improvement, and the general adage that one has to pay for quality still carries through to recording. (Unless you like untraceable hiss and spurious frequency throws that were captured within the dynamic range of the recording to just make the final master and production....)
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Monday August 26 2019, @06:42PM
Wups, AC'd that. Yep, ^ was me.
This sig for rent.
(Score: 2) by richtopia on Sunday August 25 2019, @02:26AM (5 children)
I've never met him. Should I know who Neil Young is? My brief scan of the article makes him sound like just another audiophile.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 25 2019, @04:03AM (2 children)
Youngster! If you were a little older, you would have heard the "super group", Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young aka CSNY.
(Score: 2) by Acabatag on Monday August 26 2019, @01:47AM
To add just a bit more info, I believe Crosby Stills Nash & Young played at Woodstock.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 26 2019, @11:29AM
Old man, take a look at your life; I'm a lot like you were.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 25 2019, @03:31PM
Here's a marvelous tip that you should keep under your hat:
google.com
It literally would've taken you less time and keystrokes to find out the answer yourself.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 25 2019, @06:00PM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWRwD886m90 [youtube.com]
this is pearl jam covering a neil young song with neil young playing it with them. neil's the one with the mutton chops
(Score: 1) by Goghit on Sunday August 25 2019, @05:18PM
A bit like Joey Shithead of the Vancouver punk rock band DOA. Off stage known as Joe Keithley, got himself elected to Burnaby city council. One of the issues he's concerned with is opposing a proposed gondola lift up Burnaby Mountain to Simon Fraser University. Among the problems he foresees: NOISE!
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 24 2019, @10:23PM (2 children)
How many vocal artists are digitally altering their performances to hide imperfections or make themselves sound like robots? Lossy compression pales compared to such hijinks.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 24 2019, @10:54PM
Actually, it is irrelevant. Solve problems with compression and sound quality, and then you can let the autotuned music stand or fall on its own merit. And there will always be tens of thousands of independent artists who will not use something like autotune.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 24 2019, @10:59PM
I guarantee you Neil Young never uses Autotune. Just listen to him... if he gets within 200 Hz of the right note he's having a good day.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Hartree on Sunday August 25 2019, @12:09AM (1 child)
"Well, I hope Neil Young will remember. A southern man don't need him around anyhow!"
Neil Young is one of those artists I have a distinctly love/hate relationship with. When he sings in that screeching high falsetto like on Southern Man I cringe and often change the station. Heart of Gold was OK when I first heard it, but in 4th grade I had to listen to it daily while riding to school in another town and learned to loath it.
On the other hand, I am so there for Cinnamon Girl, Mr. Soul, his work with CSN and many others.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 25 2019, @01:18AM
Neil Young is just getting Neil Old.
(Score: 2) by mendax on Sunday August 25 2019, @01:48AM (6 children)
It is worth noting that most people don't have the radar ears of Neil Young and can't appreciate the difference or don't care about the difference between digitally compressed and uncompressed recordings. That is probably the reason why audiophile-type formats like SACD and DVD audio never gained any kind of traction in the retail music market.
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Sunday August 25 2019, @02:20AM (4 children)
Most people lack the quality audio equipment needed. On a good amp with serious speakers I can tell the difference between 192kbps mp3 and flac on quality source material. But that is only in an otherwise quiet room listening intently. But if the bitrate is lowered to 128kbs I can even tell the difference on lower quality ($25 basic Sony phones plugged into a phone) playback gear, as long as it isn't something like a vehicle with road noise masking all the details. A lot of music is still usable at 128-160kbps, but it isn't CD quality anymore. Still better than a cassette for example, and I remember playing the hell out of those.
I want a source for flac audio files beyond ripping a CD. Preferably at higher than CD quality, it is $current_year and CD is now pretty old school. If I can't have the flying car I was promised, can I at least get some 20bit 48K flac files here in the glorious future? Apparently not.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Sunday August 25 2019, @06:45AM (3 children)
Citation needed.
Forget speakers, headphones are where it's at. They eliminate a lot of variables by enveloping your ears.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 25 2019, @03:06PM (2 children)
I noticed that years ago with a pair of middle of the road Sennheisers. I think they were like$70. Not even that expensive. But on so many albums I could hear what the band probably didn't want me to hear.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Sunday August 25 2019, @04:04PM
There was once a guy back in the 50's or 60's that build an exponential horn for his loudspeaker. It was made of concrete, stuck out the side of his house, and opened to an eight-foot across opening in the wall of his living room.
When he used it to listen to FM, the really low notes would make his pant legs flap. That also happened to the subsonic signals the FM stations used to control their broadcasting equipment remotely.
-- hendrik
(Score: 2) by takyon on Sunday August 25 2019, @07:12PM
I remember the HD 210 and I think HD 428 would dip down into the $15-$40 range when on sale. Even in this absolute budget tier they would sound pretty good. Same with the no-brand junk Bluetooth headphones I wear.
As long as you have headphones, you can do "3d audio".
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 25 2019, @02:54AM
Everybody can tell the difference between crappy loudness war era music and music that was actually mastered to sound good. It's just that when played on tiny earbuds in noisy environments, louder sounds better. I hate the way music produced today sounds, but I can certainly remember being in highschool, trying to listen to (properly mastered) cassette tapes on earbuds, and could barely hear the music over the other kids on the bus and the noise of the engine. I certainly would have enjoyed the music more if it had been louder, and hearing any sort of subtle detail was out of the question. Soon after, portable music players started having a "loud" button that did the compression, and then not long after that they just pushed the loud button in the studio.
The problem is that there's no choice, and most of the music made in the last 15 years or so *only* exists in nasty loud form.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by fliptop on Sunday August 25 2019, @02:43AM (2 children)
A few weeks ago I took a day trip w/ my girlfriend. We took my car, which does not have bluetooth pairing (her car has it).
While driving through BFE Ohio for a spell we couldn't find a good radio station. So she took out her phone and asked me what I wanted to hear.
"You can't pair that in my car though," I said.
She replied, "I know, but I can play anything."
I responded, "On your phone? No thanks, I'd prefer to not listen to anything than something that sounds crappy."
Thinking she was trying to help, she was a bit insulted. Most people just don't understand what Neil is talking about, and they're the ones being marketed to w/ all the crap that's out there.
Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.
(Score: 2) by qzm on Sunday August 25 2019, @06:37AM
There is a huge chasm of difference between 'listening on a cellphone speaker' and 'earbuds and AAC are shit and destroy the artistic effort of musicians'
Actually in just about any car (although less in just a few) even the shite compression of most bluetooth audio transfer barely matters, since the noise floor and acoustics are SO bad.... but hey.
However at the leave he is bleating about, he is just pain wrong. mp3 and AAC are both able to be 'good enough' even for moderate-high end listening environments (perhaps not ultra high) that they are not limiting an artist.
What is limiting them are their own decisions in production. THEY decide to over-compress the shit out of the sound - the medium is not forcing that.
So, he is blaming the wrong damn thing. He lives in a dream where the artists of today care about the same things he did - however they do not (on the whole).
They choose not go with whatever their label producer tells them will sell the most, they are not sweating 'art'.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 25 2019, @02:21PM
Hey! We natives call it BFO here, not BFE. Oh Aitch Eye Oh.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 25 2019, @03:41AM (2 children)
We are now at the point of turning up the sound to hear speech, and having to turn it down during commercials as they are glaringly loud. In some movies the music is overwhelmingly loud and the speech so soft it is hard to hear.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Sunday August 25 2019, @01:00PM
Background music drowning out speech is a real problem.
(Score: 2) by Muad'Dave on Monday August 26 2019, @12:08PM
> In some movies the music is overwhelmingly loud and the speech so soft it is hard to hear.
The perfect example: Blade Runner 2049. I have to turn the closed-captioning on to hear anything spoken by Joi.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 25 2019, @04:13AM
Haven't done it recently, but I used to frequent bars with live music and record it for my own use. Back then it was a Sony Walkman Pro (high quality cassette recorder) and some nice mics. The recording kit all fit into a small waist pack with a compact mic stand. Before that I met a few people that went to concerts with a reel-to-reel tape recorder and captured some great performances--that was more weight of equipment than I was willing to deal with.
These days the digital field recorders appear (from specs) to be considerably better and more compact. Anyone here used one of these on live music? How did the recording turn out?
Separate topic--Neil Young has been saying the same things about audio quality for many years, this is hardly news.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Sunday August 25 2019, @07:08AM (3 children)
On the other hand, a lot of modern stuff wouldn't profit from higher dynamic range anyway. I doubt rap would sound better played from CD on high-quality HiFi equipment.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 25 2019, @03:35PM (1 child)
Rap music fidelty would be satisfied on an old style dictation cassette recorder.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Sunday August 25 2019, @06:17PM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Sunday August 25 2019, @08:30PM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6qNjFQArsA&t=180s [youtube.com]
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