Posts by James Butler
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Hard News: Review: Lana Del Rey, 'Born…, in reply to 3410,
Neil's probably talking about a higher-res format (his Archives Vol. 1 was released on blu-ray, ie 192/24 rather than CD's 44/16) but flac is already capable of 192/24.
Whether such high-resolution releases would generally be much of an improvement, given all of the other variables, or even whether it would even be wanted by very many customers, are open questions.
Well yes, considering the limiting factor is now not "how much data can we store" but "how much data can we transmit to the listener's ears".
Genuine question, if anyone knows - what resolutions and bitrates are used for digital production work in pro audio studios? Because even if you do use 192/24 to do post-processing, you'd need to downsample it afterwards anyway, or else the all the extra data you have is just processing artefacts. Of course this doesn't go for full analogue recordings, like Neil's back catalogue.
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Hard News: Review: Lana Del Rey, 'Born…, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
....and according to Neil, Steve was a vinyl purist!
Meh, I'm a little sceptical that any new format (as described in that link) would be audibly better than a FLAC or Apple Lossless version of a CD track. And this kind of statement:
Such a format, he said, would contain 100 percent of the data of music as it is created in a studio, as opposed to 5 percent in compressed formats including Apple's AAC.
is a little bit tenuous on information-theory grounds.
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Hard News: Review: Lana Del Rey, 'Born…, in reply to Russell Brown,
The big Motown hits of the 60s nearly all made great use of compression – this little article called The Exciting Compressor explains the technique the house producers came up with to make the records sound extra-awesome:
Yep. That's compression applied to individual tracks for artistic effect, and you won't hear me complaining about that at all.
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Hard News: Review: Lana Del Rey, 'Born…, in reply to Danielle,
It may also be time for my 'I am a philistine' moment, James: I think the Pixies albums sound pretty underwhelming (quality-wise, I mean)
Hey, I'm not making any claims about their quality; you're right, they're mostly pretty lo-fi recordings. That's kinda the point - they're recorded without too much post-processing, because that's the punk ethic, right; and that gives them more dynamic range more-or-less as a side-effect. Of course it's possible to have high-quality hifi recordings and large dynamic range - in fact modern studio gear should make it really easy - but the only people who do so are those recording classical music.
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To clarify: The britpoppers (especially Nigel Godrich) did compress for artistic effect, just not one I liked. My last complaint was aimed at those who produce modern pop, where the putative artists probably don't even know what compression is.
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Hard News: Review: Lana Del Rey, 'Born…, in reply to Keir Leslie,
Yeah, but if people like it, then surely saying worse is slightly tendentious. It might just be a thing you don’t like.
This is a fair cop - I freely admit to getting unusually hung-up about wanting to hear a recording of the performance, not a recording of the post-production. If musicians are using heavy compression/digital artefacts for artistic reasons, full power to them - I'm not going to complain about that, any more than I complain about Kanye West or T-Pain using Autotune (or eg. a guitarist overdriving their amp). But I don't believe these are artistic decisions - I think they're commercial decisions at the expense of the art.
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Hard News: Review: Lana Del Rey, 'Born…, in reply to Russell Brown,
Sorry dude. Can’t be unwritten now.
Channelling our elusive Italian friend, it's the Internet! Anything can be unwritten!
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Capture: Laneway 2012, in reply to JacksonP,
Did you get a shot of the guy with Feist playing what looked like a pile of violins clamped to a table?
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Capture: Laneway 2012, in reply to Sacha,
presumably no one took cats with them..
Didn't see any, but there was a cupcake stall. Oh wait, wrong blog.
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My main qualm about this record is one I’m surprised not to hear more widely: like much modern pop music, it’s compressed to buggery.
This has been going on for years - the worst of it arguably started during the Britpop years, when Oasis et. al. made a feature of their thin, fizzy, overcompressed sound, then discovered the welcome side-effect that it made them stand out on radio. It ruined all the most golden-age Radiohead too. Go compare some 90s US loud-quiet-loud stuff, Pixies etc., with the lou-quiet-loud bits of, say, "Paranoid Android" (I know you don't like Radiohead, but just think of it as an educational experiment). When the distorted guitars come in "Paranoid Android", it should be massive, but instead it sounds quieter, because the compression pushes everything in the mix right back to compensate for the guitars.
I think it's getting worse in the era of pervasive iPods and mp3s, because compression gets around some of the failings in lossy (size) compression codecs (ever tried to listen to a capella choral music on even a 320k mp3? Not pretty, partly because the dynamic range is too great), and because you can hear it over the sound of the traffic/bus/parents etc.
Sorry to rant, but you hit on a pet peeve there.