SoylentNews

canopic jug [soylentnews.org] writes:

In a long inteview, Niel Young mentions the effects the technological race to the bottom is having on music and our ability to appreciate it [nytimes.com]. 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? Niel 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.

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.

Original Submission