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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: 3, Disagree) by JoeMerchant on Saturday August 24 2019, @08:02PM (6 children)
Ever since the first wax record, music distributed by technology has been literally molded by the transfer functions of the available channels.
Music produced for AM radio doesn't bother with the high and low frequencies that the common AM transceiver set fails to deliver to the listener...
FM dramatically widened the dynamic range and added stereo, and you see that influencing the albums produced when FM rolled out to a wide audience.
CDs pretty much wrapped up (most) human ears' available spectrum, and with a 16 bit dynamic range they could deliver a theater like experience, but... most CD music was still played over FM radio, or in environments where that theater style dynamic range just isn't practical.
Digital radio has sputtered, not really reaching the mass audience the way that FM did - and now people are listening via Spotify, Pandora, YouTube, etc. - many on the low-fi free options.
So, Neil, suck it up. Either you're going to produce music to reach these low-fi listeners (paying customers, whether directly or via consumption of advertising) or you're not. If your "artistic statement" can only be delivered via CD and anything less just sounds like crap and loses your message, them's the breaks in the modern world. At least there is a CD option today, maybe a few thousand geezers like me might buy one, or a high quality digital single or two. If you're going to "go viral with the kids" you're gonna have to compress it into something that reaches them in the ways they listen today.
🌻🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by takyon on Saturday August 24 2019, @08:24PM (2 children)
I'm assuming you are talking about "HD Radio", not Internet radio. Even if it did reach a mass audience, you can't count or track them. :(
Also, wow:
https://old.reddit.com/r/RTLSDR/comments/2jbyzp/rtlsdr_usa_fm_hd_radio/ [reddit.com]
https://www.rtl-sdr.com/decoding-and-listening-to-hd-radio-nrsc-5-with-an-rtl-sdr/ [rtl-sdr.com]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday August 25 2019, @02:06AM
Yeah, I guess I could have said "Digital Radio" better... it's hard for me to wrap my head around "Radio" being applied to music delivered over the internet, but I suppose with 3G/4G that's applicable now...
They seem to count and track FM listeners well enough to satisfy advertisers...
🌻🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 25 2019, @02:46AM
In the US, most FM broadcasters now have an HD feed, and HD receivers are extremely common in cars produced in the past decade plus, as well as in basically every aftermarket head unit. Radio receivers in component stereos almost always have it as well. El-cheapo bedside clock radios don't necessarily have it, but it's not as if these are known for sound quality in the first place.
There hasn't been (and probably won't be) any mandatory transition as there was with broadcast TV, so it might not seem like digital radio has taken off, but it's everywhere. It's disappointing that the standard isn't open, but that doesn't matter for the mass audience.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by anubi on Saturday August 24 2019, @09:44PM (1 child)
I think a lot of premium music is throttled by paywalls. Money does not come easy for me, and I will quickly settle for something available and inexpensive/free. I think a lot of people are in the same predicament.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday August 25 2019, @01:59AM
Pandora is definitely blocked at my job (hello Windscribe and any other number of free VPNs...)
I used to be a paying Pandora subscriber, at $30 / year back in 2008, and $36 a year a little later - their current rates are insane, when we listen to Pandora now we pay by enduring the ads, not by sending them the money they are demanding.
🌻🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 25 2019, @12:46AM
Neil's music sounds like crap at any fidelty.