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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: 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!