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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: 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.