A nice video about audio processing over the ages:
Interesting, but not surprising. Thanks for posting the link.
Neil
I noticed way back years ago that as technology was offering better quality with hi-fi, then stereo, then high-speed reel-to-reel, the public was going for more distorted music and cassettes were considered good quality by people that I had disagreements with, with their little tiny track-widths at 1 7/8 ips having worse quality than good AM radio.
Most car loudspeaker systems still today, even though the radios are often sensitive, are boomy and have phase-distortion and un-even frequency response... yet people like boomy, even though real music live isn't like that.... oh, "real" music is back to arguing about "what is good."
The term "compression" is typically found confusingly to refer to both digital compression used to make MP3 files smaller than the original WAV files, and to refer to analog audio dynamic range compression. These are two totally different and unrelated phenomena.
MP3 digital file size compression can actually be pretty faithful at the high end of the bit rate scale. That's controversial, but the major problem with today's recording industry methods is extreme analog compression before the conversion to any sort of digital format.
Extreme analog compression makes the sound as loud as possible at the expense of definition of the individual instruments. This makes the sound just plain fatiguing. It makes you want to turn it off after a short while.
Neil Young is a leading proponent of reversing this horrible trend in audio production. Search the web for Neil Young and you will find his wonderful perspective on the subject.
The average listener seems to like "loud".
When our studio was active one of our clients said he had inquiries regarding the "quiet" sound of his CD we produced.
As his music was along the lines of folk with lots of acoustic instramentation, we used very little compression on the instruments. The bass guitar and kick drum received most of that.
The result was the dynamics of his music were faithfully reproduced.
The CD was remastered and squashed by the wonders of multiband compression. The dyanmics were reduced to about 3 db and his listeners were happy.
I guess distortion is the norm.
While providing tech services for an international radio program, I was considered the engineering authority until a young punk rocker got swung into upper management by virtue of being related to the right people, and without a technical background he suddenly knew better than me.
Right at that time a tape brand advertised "+4 dB Hotter Than Any Other Tape!"
The punk wanted to grab that higher level and asked me to re-calibrate all the tape decks for the +4 dB mark, which I did.
My mistake was trying to explain to him that the end result would sound exactly the same in all respects as the previous standard, because in the end the whole signal chain would be adjusted to produce a flat response. His brain couldn't hold what I was saying, and from then on I was slated for obsolescence.
Stand for standards or sit down.
Neil Young is a leading proponent of reversing this horrible trend in audio production. Search the web for Neil Young and you will find his wonderful perspective on the subject.
Along with Joe Walsh :
Enjoy. Especially the lines about vinyl. 🙂
What a cool guy. He is a ham and
donated a beautiful vintage vacuum tube ham radio
AM set-up to the ARRL and W1AW - for
one of the guest operating positions there.
And he was there installing it.
What a great radio guy he is!
Bruce