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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: 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.