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posted by martyb on Wednesday March 15 2017, @09:03AM   Printer-friendly
from the Topping-Off-the-Mop-Tops dept.

Wired recently published an article about the Beatles' one live album:

The Beatles' remarkable catalog includes just one official live album, and the group's immense popularity made it unlistenable. The Beatles at the Hollywood Bowl, recorded in 1964 and 1965 but not released until 1977, was always a frustrating listen. Try as you might, you simply cannot hear much music above the fan-belt squeal of 10,000 Beatlemaniacs.

You can't blame the Fab Four, nor their legendary producer George Martin. Martin did what he could with the three-track tapes, but the limitations of 1970s technology did little to elevate the music above the din. Boosting the high frequencies—the snap of Ringo Starr's hi-hat, the shimmer and chime of George Harrison's guitar—only made the racket made by all those fans even louder.

All of which makes the remastered version of Live at the Hollywood Bowl especially impressive. The do-over, which coincided with the August release of Ron Howard's documentary film Eight Days a Week, squeezes astonishing clarity out of the source tapes. You can finally hear an exceptionally tight band grinding out infectious blues-based rock propelled by a driving beat, wailing guitars, and raspy vocals. This album never sounded so lucid, present, or weighty.

What makes the article interesting to geeks is how the the sound engineers were able to eliminate all that spectator noise:

To get a sense of what the team at Abbey Road Studios did, imagine deconstructing a smoothie so you're left with whole strawberries, peeled bananas, and ice cubes, then mixing them again from scratch.

The process is a bit more complicated than that but the article detailed description is an interesting read.


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  • (Score: 1) by D2 on Wednesday March 15 2017, @03:30PM

    by D2 (5107) on Wednesday March 15 2017, @03:30PM (#479445)

    Nah, Matlab is about the math first and foremost. It lets one create minimalist GUIs trivially, because that lets mathematicians return their attention to the math. It does visualization well, because that's how we THINK about math (especially multiple equations, n-dimensional vector spaces, sparse matrices, or large data sets). It allows easy file I/O and slicing and dicing of data spaces, because that lets us (say it with me) focus on the math itself.