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posted by martyb on Saturday August 24 2019, @07:17PM   Printer-friendly
from the music-like-background-noises dept.

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.


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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 24 2019, @08:17PM (5 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 24 2019, @08:17PM (#884895)

    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.

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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by anubi on Saturday August 24 2019, @09:36PM

    by anubi (2828) on Saturday August 24 2019, @09:36PM (#884911) Journal

    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)

    by mhajicek (51) on Sunday August 25 2019, @01:03AM (#885004)

    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

      by RS3 (6367) on Sunday August 25 2019, @02:49AM (#885041)

      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

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 25 2019, @02:54PM (#885192)

      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

      by RS3 (6367) on Monday August 26 2019, @12:55AM (#885454)

      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.)