The Clash are interesting, and it’s why I said I was cheating when I used them. They were a sort of upper limit for ‘good’ compression, and what’s bizarre is that we have surpassed them several times over in terms of cramming. But, what they did was record a song, them compress the whole. Which means your mix is intact, as is the stereo separation. Now a days you stick an effect on every track, reverb on every track and then on the mix so on and so forth. It’s one of the reasons I used it. It’s a wall, but so much less garbled than other stuff our there today. As I said in the post, the tool itself is good, but with unlimited ability to use it comes unlimited ability to bugger things up.

Two quickies. First, the Bruce Springsteen album I used was recorded in single takes, in a cabin in the woods no less, in single takes but on multiple tracks. So while the audio is a bit still a bit overprocess because everything is treated, it maintains the ‘live’ feel. That’s sort of what saves it.

Second Pro Tools (and Cubase, and Sonar, and Logic…) does not sound crap. The audio quality of computers has far and away surpassed anything that has ever existed up until this point. The amount of information that a high quality mic can send into the computer has quadrupled. This has all sorts of benefits for recording room resonance and tonality. It lacks the same natural compression of tape, simply because if you use them right there is no need. And there in lies the rub:

Because the tools have become more powerful, the ability to use them has become more pertinent. And as we rely more and more on difficult to control technology we are also slicing into fractions the amount we train. Pro Tools makes good engineers better and bad onces worse. If you want tape sound, you can run any audio signal through a tape machine and back into your computer. Done. Or you can buy emulators and use those. The issue is that the imperfections were pleasing, and now they are gone, so you are either leaving perfect audio quality in your mix (not interesting), or retro engineering it in, which takes a LOT of skill (no one is trained), great hearing (we all listen to such loud music no can hear any more), and time (for which you can read ‘money’, and we all know how that ends). The emulator choice hence becomes the one where bad people make worse records. If you are going to go after a program go for garage band that teaches children in the suburbs that they have what it takes to make a record when in fact to master these tools still takes years of practice.

Lastly I take your point about MP3’s. Thing is that the same was said of tape. They are horrific, but as an encryption they will be replaced by something that takes the same room but sounds better. Someone will take that technology and trim to a worse sounding even smaller file it and the cycle will continue. MP3’s scare me, but I would imagine they will vanish. More important is that people don’t only own MP3’s of something, and continue to listen to the CD’s/ vinyle. However, let’s not forget that MP3 technology is very young.

Good response though.

couple things in the article i want to comment on:

the difference between ‘Closing Time’ and ‘Highway 61 Revisited’ and the Killers or whatever is way more than the delivery format- you can go grab either (or are they up to three) of the Killers records on vinyl and you will hear very much the same effects you describe. the problem is inherent in the production style of modern music, and isn’t really strictly a by-product of the volume wars, as they’re called. on the dylan record you have a live recording, everyone playing at once- even vocals- all recorded to either 2 or 4 track. tube microphones, tube console preamps, tube limiters, going of course, to tape. and then theres great musicians playing a great song, but we’ll leave that out in the name of objectivity.

things have changed so much in the modern era- even one obsessed with retro sonics- that pretty much, in short, add up to shitty sounding recordings. you’ve got- at the top of the shit heap- pro tools, which sounds mediocre at best. it offers mediocre sound quality at best, and the potential for manipulation after, during, and _in lieu of_ the songwriting process (‘fixing ‘ takes, comping tracks, reliance on quantization, the temptation of effect after effect, the temptation to just loop parts) is the one factor, in my opinion, that makes modern music really fucking suck. you’ve also got isolated recording as a norm- instruments are recorded one at a time, drum hits replaced one at a time and slid into time, bass notes corrected, vocals autotuned, etc. you don’t have paul butterfield’s searing lead guitar, al kooper’s thundering organ, and bob dylan flailing away on a telecaster- you’ve got hair model #3 playing one verse and one chorus, and some pro tools dude copy-and-pasting the Killers’ way onto the charts.

it’s confusing to refer to a Clash tune as a signpost for the ‘Wall of Sound’- for one, Phil Spector scored a stunning number of hits by doing exactly what you decry- jamming the speakers with as much sound as possible. and this was in the early 60s, so maybe that philosophy was always part of the mix (no pun intended). massive compression was the name of the game around the same time at Stax and Motown as well, you listen to those early soul singles and they’re distorted and generally low fi, but the kick and snare are in your face. they were engineered to cut-the-fuck-through on mono AM radio, and they still kick ass today on an ipod or television or whatever.

and seriously, the loss in quality inherent in overcompression is nothing compared to the 10:1 data compression affecting the quality of mp3s.

as for some of these comments:

vinyl is no magic bullet. vinyl, if poorly mastered or played on a worn needle, can sound way way way worse than even the worst cd. records wear out, and as your needle wears out you wear out your records even more- and very very slightly, you barely notice until your record is pretty much thump and sibilance. rebuying and rebuying and rebuying the same albums is a fact of life for the vinyl devotee. i used to be one, and really, well-mastered cds are all kinds of better. sacd/dvd audio leaps over both- when i heard an sacd for the first time, there’s no way i was going back to vinyl. under optimal conditionals it can be better, sure, but it’s not universal.

“The problem with vinyl is that it won’t be able to handle the high resolution recording that, I hope, are coming our way.”

what? CDs have required a downsample from 24bit/96khz and up masters for like, a decade, since those rates have been available on even low grade home studio equipment. the latest version of Sound Forge supports sample rates in the Gigahertz!! if anything vinyl represents a better capture of better-than-CD-quality program material as you could master the record without dithering.

“It also though has that natural warmth that is so pleasing, like tape, but better.”

i take this to mean you’re saying an LP has more of a positive effect on the final product than if it had been recorded on tape? uh, no.

all in all i think you make some good points, but you can’t explain ‘why current music sucks’ in the nutshell of mastering levels and compression ratios. really, there’s bigger fish to fry- namely a public that has thrown any sort of audio quality out the window by embracing the mp3.

I thought I was going deaf.

Thank you Ben.