How dumb have music listeners and musicians become?
- Thread starter mep
- Start date
I'm listening to Adele 21 right now, and frankly don't hear a lot of the complaints I've been reading about, *when you consider that it's a targeted pop recording*. It is certainly no sonic masterpiece, but it's not distorted or grossly mis-engineered. Just a targeted sound quite similar to many other recordings on the pop charts. I agree that the overall AQ could be better, even with the amount of peak limiting going on. Just don't listen to too loud and it's not too bad. Typical of most pop today. As for all those really blasting it, it's probably just not what they expected or wanted. I haven't heard the previous album yet.
Just take it for what it is and try to enjoy it. There's little you'll be able to do to 'improve' it.
--Bill
Just take it for what it is and try to enjoy it. There's little you'll be able to do to 'improve' it.
--Bill
I agree with most of that, Bill. I suspect the negative reaction to the rather typically bad production is much a function of the positive reaction to the music itself. If it was a poorly engineered Justin Bieber record, we wouldn't be complaining because we wouldn't be trying to listen to it and wouldn't care. I do hear some stuff in there that sounds an awful lot like distortion to me, but one man's distortion is another man's power and impact, I suppose.
Tim
That's probably the heavy peak limiting. There are several areas where it gets darned crowded with multi-vocals and multi-instruments all fighting for time at the same maxed out level. They pushed it pretty hard on some songs, or that happened in mastering. Hard to tell.
OTOH Lady GaGa's The Fame album is just as peak limited yet is far more full range, or perhaps you could say more eq'd on both ends of the spectrum. I'd bet if 21 had a similar tonality people wouldn't be complaining as much. Still, it's not that bad. I've certainly heard much worse from the charts.
--Bill
Steve williams
Site Founder, Site Owner, Administrator
Again Bill, we have been telling him the same for too long but it is "falling on deaf ears:
(pun intended)
Except that we don't usually really listen to pop. We just sort of let it drone in the background for atmosphere...the musical equivalent of disco...ehem... club lighting. The content of this demands attention. Since it won a whole bunch of awards at the Grammies, it's not surprising it has gone under even more scrutiny. A victim of it's own success, not that the producers might care that is.
We agree again, Jack. If we could just get past that vertical imaging thing....
...and yes, I suspect the producers, if they're aware of the criticism, are laughing all the way to the bank.Tim
garylkoh
WBF Technical Expert (Speakers & Audio Equipment)
Emphasis mine. Pop is 'pop' because it is intended to be popular, but I don't think that pop is necessarily background music.
I think that some of these 'pop' recording engineers need to take a stint in Nashville and have a listen to what country music is doing. It's not my preferred genre of music, but lately there have been some excellent music with excellent production. Jamey Johnson's That Lonesome Song and Joanne Shaw Taylor's Diamonds in the Dirt come to mind. I think that Johnson won the Country music equivalent of the Grammys for his album.
Tennessee and surrounding States have had it going on for a loooooong time. I attribute it to having live acoustic music as a part of daily life. Makes for solid aesthetics. Filipinos are the same way, practically everybody here can play a few chords on a guitar at least and as you might remember from your bachelor days, we do love to sing! So I agree with you there Gary.
I also agree with you about Pop but wasn't clear about my context. Pop is for popular, thing is, to gather widespread acceptance it's light fare more often than not. Simple song structures, nice melodies, lots of easy to sing along to choruses usually about love gained or love lost, the emphasis mainly being a good hook be it a ballad or party tune. It is the kind of stuff you can enjoy without requiring better productions values as opposed to genres where musicianship and songcraft distinguish the good from the excellent because they connect on different levels. Pop is music shared rather than enjoyed solitarily with a high level of focus on listening, a deeper more personal level.
That's really all I meant about Pop being not much more than atmospherics for other activities like passing the time in traffic or in a club or bar where the focus is interaction with other people. 21 passes muster in the car, a bar, at a coffee shop better than when we buckle down to listen to it. It is popular music, written and performed exceptionally well and to a degree that commands full attention. It's no wonder then that you and I actually preferred the compressed files. It was meant to be in places where lower resolution and thus less audible nasty artifacts are not even given much thought. Places where staying safe on the road, reading, surfing on free Wi-Fi, hanging with friends or scoping and chatting up ladies are the order of the day.
So I agree with you there Gary. I also agree with you about Pop but wasn't clear about my context. Pop is for popular, thing is, to gather widespread acceptance it's light fare more often than not. Simple song structures, nice melodies, lots of easy to sing along to choruses usually about love gained or love lost, the emphasis mainly being a good hook be it a ballad or party tune. It is the kind of stuff you can enjoy without requiring better productions values as opposed to genres where musicianship and songcraft distinguish the good from the excellent because they connect on different levels. Pop is music shared rather than enjoyed solitarily with a high level of focus on listening, a deeper more personal level.
That's really all I meant about Pop being not much more than atmospherics for other activities like passing the time in traffic or in a club or bar where the focus is interaction with other people. 21 passes muster in the car, a bar, at a coffee shop better than when we buckle down to listen to it. It is popular music, written and performed exceptionally well and to a degree that commands full attention. It's no wonder then that you and I actually preferred the compressed files. It was meant to be in places where lower resolution and thus less audible nasty artifacts are not even given much thought. Places where staying safe on the road, reading, surfing on free Wi-Fi, hanging with friends or scoping and chatting up ladies are the order of the day.
We agree again, Jack. If we could just get past that vertical imaging thing....
Tim
There's nothing more I can really say Tim except that is in the curriculum of at least three educational recording institutes that I know of, one of which I attended. You keep talkng about mics and how they don't know stuff. Well a chisel doesn't know stuff but that doesn't stop a sculpture from making things with them. You also keep on using your microphone rant in a mono context when we aren't talking about mono. A mono mike won't give you a stable center image unless you split the signal in two and play them back as if there were two of them. You don't need a center channel to get a decently convincing center image out of two spaced loudspeakers so I don't see how you can even say you require a discreet soundsource and a discreet signal to simulate one. On the latter how do you think simulated multichannel center and rear channel signals is created from two channels? Your logic, pun intended, just sucks. So while you and Bill are absolutely correct that there is no height information on the raw mic feed on one track, this little nugget of truth is actually insignificant in the broader scheme of things. Sometime I think you just see no value in the importance of psychoacoustics referenced by Micro, Odin and myself. All from someone who has said after all that the end result that matters. So either you reject the concepts on a narrow dogmatic ground or still can't grasp them.Even Bill has skirted the fact that in certain rooms he's been able to get sound to hover his listener's heads with just two channels. Simulate surround sound as well. That is height. Period. That he hasn't been able to do it in front of him and not over him is really not our problem. Odin and I have tv and film backgrounds Bill's is music, we've got to get voices in the middle of the screen, not above it or below it. If he really tried I'm sure he could accomplish what we've been able to do. The tricks to do it are the very same tricks he probably employs to enhance separation of instruments by decongesting the sound stage anyway. Since he knows that panning isn't everything, I am in fact certain he could.
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I don't think the no-height army of non-believers is very deep . Again, someone who listens to headphones and speakers sitting on top of a desk is in no postion to judge what height information is in recordings.
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Correct, Bill. Just started to look at what's going on, and the answer was very straightforward: the MP3 had been brickwalled at 10kHz. Below, the spectrums were a perfect match, no obvious information loss there, but the response falls off the cliff at exactly 10kHz.
So, I will do some more experimenting, run the CD WAV file through the best MP3 encoding I can do, retaining full spectrum, and see what resampling, etc, then discloses. Also, digitally brickwall the "correct" WAV file at 10kHz, resample, etc. Should be interesting to see what it throws up ...
Frank
I've mentioned this before, but it possibly bears repeating: one easy, "technical" test I have for overall system performance is to put on a good true mono recording, stand centre of the speakers, and say a foot in front of the line joining the tweeters. In a reasonable system there will obviously be a phantom image smack bang in front of you. I then move sideways and see how far the illusion of that phantom image still stays directly in front of me.
I have to say I haven't come across any other systems that can sustain this any decent distance: anybody listening who can get this happening in a big way?
Frank
It shouldn't be. There is no reason a MP3 can't go higher that that unless it was limited by the encoding used. If you are going to try experiments get yourself a decent encoder like LAME and do them from scratch. Set the parameters up yourself or use the presents.
Rob
Thanks, Rob. Yes, I've already done a solid round once before pushing LAME to its maximum capabilities, very comfortable with playing with the parameters. Was able to do it to a taxing music file and create a difference file that didn't rise above -60dB down. So there is certainly some scope for fiddling here ...It shouldn't be. There is no reason a MP3 can't go higher that that unless it was limited by the encoding used. If you are going to try experiments get yourself a decent encoder like LAME and do them from scratch. Set the parameters up yourself or use the presents.
Rob
Frank
Let's examine where we're actually disagreeing Jack:
People here...I don't remember if you have or not, to be honest...keep talking about how mics, because they're directional, are capturing height information. They simply are not. You know this as well as I, A highly directional mic will alter the FR of a signal coming at it from outside of its pattern, but there is nothing about the mic, or anything in the recording or playback chain beyond that mic to interpret that information and place it in a field. Nothing to determine what direction off axis the sound came from. That's all I'm saying about mics.
I'm pretty sure the only thing I've said about mono is that if we can get a clear vertical image without vertical channels, there wasn't much need to invent stereo in the first place.
Not sure what the point is here. I agree. But I'm not questioning the ability to get a solid phantom center from stereo. I'm not even questioning the ability to get a detailed pinpoint image - multiple phantom images across a broad stereo field. I'm question the ability to get that same king of solid phantom imagine vertically, with no vertical channels. And that's all I'm questioning. I'm not denying that there is a sense of height, I'm asking how there can be a clearly differentiated vertical image, a solid field of vertical images, when there are no vertical channels.
I don't know how to make myself any clearer. That, and that alone, is what I firmly believe is not happening. If that's what you hear, then yes, we disagree. And now there's nothing more I can really say either.
Tim
People here...I don't remember if you have or not, to be honest...keep talking about how mics, because they're directional, are capturing height information. They simply are not. You know this as well as I, A highly directional mic will alter the FR of a signal coming at it from outside of its pattern, but there is nothing about the mic, or anything in the recording or playback chain beyond that mic to interpret that information and place it in a field. Nothing to determine what direction off axis the sound came from. That's all I'm saying about mics.
I'm pretty sure the only thing I've said about mono is that if we can get a clear vertical image without vertical channels, there wasn't much need to invent stereo in the first place.
Not sure what the point is here. I agree. But I'm not questioning the ability to get a solid phantom center from stereo. I'm not even questioning the ability to get a detailed pinpoint image - multiple phantom images across a broad stereo field. I'm question the ability to get that same king of solid phantom imagine vertically, with no vertical channels. And that's all I'm questioning. I'm not denying that there is a sense of height, I'm asking how there can be a clearly differentiated vertical image, a solid field of vertical images, when there are no vertical channels.
I'll acknowledge it as well. I think these things are parlor tricks, personally. Fun, but not all that useful, but I've heard them too. and I've heard "tall" sound stage. And I've heard that vague sense of a vertical field you can get from some speakers/rooms when certain frequencies seem to divide into vertical layers with the response of the drivers. But there are several folks in this thread who are describing something well beyond that. They're describing, one more time -- a clearly differentiated vertical image; phantoms from top to bottom, imaging, like we get from left to right without the hardware to create that image.
I don't know how to make myself any clearer. That, and that alone, is what I firmly believe is not happening. If that's what you hear, then yes, we disagree. And now there's nothing more I can really say either.
Tim
Tim, the device that determines that the sound is off axis is your ear/brain setup. Nothing else. And how it does that is by interpreting interference patterns in the sound reaching it. So the next trick is that how do those interference patterns get generated in your listing space: you're saying it can only happen because there are 2 or more actual sources of sound displaced vertically in your room. What we're saying is that those same interference patterns can be recorded by the microphones and reproduced accurately where you're listening by a correctly working system. Now, as far as the ear is concerned, if it senses those interference patterns it doesn't care how they were generated: whether by different, physical sources in your room, or by a single source with the pattern riding on the sound. The ear just says, here is height information, and I'll decode it as such -- there are no "tricks" involved, just the ear/brain doing what it's been doing for decades for you: making sense of the sound information reaching it by any means.
Frank
Frank
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