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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: 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.
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(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".
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(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.