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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, Interesting) by fliptop on Sunday August 25 2019, @02:43AM (2 children)
A few weeks ago I took a day trip w/ my girlfriend. We took my car, which does not have bluetooth pairing (her car has it).
While driving through BFE Ohio for a spell we couldn't find a good radio station. So she took out her phone and asked me what I wanted to hear.
"You can't pair that in my car though," I said.
She replied, "I know, but I can play anything."
I responded, "On your phone? No thanks, I'd prefer to not listen to anything than something that sounds crappy."
Thinking she was trying to help, she was a bit insulted. Most people just don't understand what Neil is talking about, and they're the ones being marketed to w/ all the crap that's out there.
Ever had a belch so satisfying you have to blow your nose afterward?
(Score: 2) by qzm on Sunday August 25 2019, @06:37AM
There is a huge chasm of difference between 'listening on a cellphone speaker' and 'earbuds and AAC are shit and destroy the artistic effort of musicians'
Actually in just about any car (although less in just a few) even the shite compression of most bluetooth audio transfer barely matters, since the noise floor and acoustics are SO bad.... but hey.
However at the leave he is bleating about, he is just pain wrong. mp3 and AAC are both able to be 'good enough' even for moderate-high end listening environments (perhaps not ultra high) that they are not limiting an artist.
What is limiting them are their own decisions in production. THEY decide to over-compress the shit out of the sound - the medium is not forcing that.
So, he is blaming the wrong damn thing. He lives in a dream where the artists of today care about the same things he did - however they do not (on the whole).
They choose not go with whatever their label producer tells them will sell the most, they are not sweating 'art'.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 25 2019, @02:21PM
Hey! We natives call it BFO here, not BFE. Oh Aitch Eye Oh.