A voyage in sound
I started my career in sound with digital, no wait -it was analog, or...
I was a child when I joined my father and his band doing gigs all over the north of Norway. I helped with wiring and mixing. It was very analog. The CD-player was sweeping over the world and I remember seeing the first shiny disc at a friends' house(whose big brother spent vast amounts on home entertainment). It was very expensive, it looked cool.
Then later, when I was 16 I got a cd-player and an Amiga 500. The Amiga had 4 channels of 8 bit sound. Soon I was 'the digital sound guy', I joined a techno-band. I remember the first minidisc recorder I saw, one of the first in the country -I got to borrow it and despite what everyone was saying about the data-compression I thought it sounded wonderful. No tapehiss. No distortion my untrained ears could pick up. I worked on video awhile, very analog back in the day, hi8 for recording -Umatic for editing. T2 and Jurassic Park were leading the way into a bright new digital future, I couldn't wait.
In 1995 I built my first sound studio proper. It was meagre at first but soon had an 8-track half-inch analog multitrack and an 8-bus board. It had a very nice feel to the sound. I was still(and still am) using the amiga and all the analog gear made it sound better and bigger. I had loads of keyboards and modules at the peak of this analog era. The rest of the world were digitizing their studios, but I was very happy my analog one. Listening to recordings I made on it I still think they sound amazing to the degree that I know I'll never make that sound again on digital equipment. I still have a large analog mixer but it's not enough, the digital recorder I'm using keeps sounding coarse in my my now very critical ears.
Anyways, by the end of the nineties my analog gear was run down, I know nothing of azimuth alignment and other stuff that needs to done for maintenance. My stuff sounded bad now -I got a price for restoration. Blew me away, skilled labour is certainly expensive. I decided digital it is then, and for less than the price of just the 8-track recorder I built a whole new pc-based digital studio.
It didn't sound half bad, digital had matured, I got an infinity of tracks and sample accurate editing -in plug-in form came a gazillion effects and finally the piece de resistance: Digital noise reduction. It completely blew me away like no other audio gadget had ever done. My old recordings now sounded pristine clean and 'digital' after having the tape-hiss removed.
As I moved more and more work into the computer I gradually sold away all the keyboards and hardware thingies. My studio was so tiny now that I could put it in a box and I did. I took it to New York and built a studio in a flat, we spent 6 weeks recording and partying. We did some of the finest techno I'll ever be involved in producing.
But however much I was impressed with the capabilities and price/performance ratio of digital I struggled several years mixing on it. On analog it had been so easy I'd never given it a second thought, everything just kept coming out sounding cool. On digital mixing was no longer hands on, the control panel was tiny, it was and is impossible to see all parameters at a glance, digital eq sounds like shite always. I struggled, looking for a new disipline -a new approach, but slowly it dawned on me: digital was clinical, like a operating theatre in a hospital. It couldn't sound dirty. And however much you would like to call electronic music clinical I've never liked clinical electronic music. I came to realize that all the good (sounding) music had been made on analog gear and then probably recorded on a dat. No computer involved in any sound processing.
I got some old keyboards back in the studio they sounded good but had a tendency towards sore thumb phenomena. They stuck out, making the rest sound bleaker. A conundrum.
Then finally I heard a digital sound a liked. My converters were 20/44.1 but hi-def audio was a-coming. I finally got to hear 24/96. A simple recording of my friends'(a singer among other things) voice. It was like he was really there, right between the speakers. It was even more clinical but at the same time it had so much resolution that there was room for some smudge, some dirt. Now I could see the dust lying on the operating theatre floor. SACD and DVDAudio were splashing out in the market place and everything looked good until disaster struck.
mp3 audio demolished 15 years of audio evolution. It sounded gritty, I've yet to hear an mp3 at all which I'd say contains actual bass(not hollow rumbling). By any comparison it was a huge step backwards, mc(audio cassettes, remember those) sounded far superior. And to my horror it establised itself as the de-facto standard in the market place, threatening to replace even CD.
And worse was yet to come. Computer audio, bleeps and noises, had been a joke for years. Computer 'speakers' were capable of reproducing bleeps and noises but not much else, and they quickly established themselves as the new hi-fi. Why buy a hifi proper when you can get a computer fi for a tenth or less of the cost, the computer fi even makes mp3s sound better due to their dismal resolution covering over the flaws.
Soon a lot of people I knew were listening to mp3 audio over the worst crap speakers money can buy. I was appalled. All that work you put in in the studio, just gone.
The audio industry quickly noticed. Soon CDs were 'mp3-ready'. The studio execs were clearly afraid that their latest pop-icons wouldn't sound good in mp3 so they ordered more and harder mastering. The new digital (audio)compressors could squeeze the dynamic range out of anything(and introducie horrible distortion along the way) and this was how they were used. The less dynamic range something had -the better it would sound as an mp3. And nobody noticed beacuse they were all listening to 15$/€ sound systems. Most people probably think newer records have better sound. But I can't think of a single good sounding (pop)record that has come out in the last 5 years.
(There are probably many mastering engineers and engineers who agree with me on this, I've yet to hear anyone of them advocate more compression)
-On a side note; why does the music industry want their records to be mp3-ready? I don't understand this beacuse all the mp3s are illegal. If records had more dynamic range mp3 would sound so much worse that people might actually go out and buy the record.
Me and friend of mine(we're both fans of Slayer) sat playing some of their records. It is easy to compare the sound of their 80's output with their latest and greatest because the music is very similar and they often use the same producer(Rik Rubin). Switching back between old and new revealed the same sound, the same mixing, the same philosophy. Yet their old records sound better(the guitar sound is so bleak now) which I ascribe to two things: 1. They recorded on analog tape back in the day and 2. They didn't compress so much.
mp3 has taken the music industry like the black plague. This folly must end but I can see none of it, now they're even selling mp3(aac, that macintosh format, it's all the same) on the internet. I wonder what kind of people pay the same price for a tenth of the product(the typical compression range, 1:10 -means 90% of the audio is gone forever). I'm certainly not one of them.
As my production capabilities grew I started doing deep multilayering of sounds, I produced an entire record in this very demanding way. Even simple ballads ended up having 80-100 tracks and the more complex songs well over a hundred. Played on a good system that record had one of the deepest sound spaces I've heard. After over a year of consturction and mixing the band rejected it. Nobody had a good enough system to play it back on. In the studio they all thought it was beautiful but in the real world it sounded muddy and unclear, it was half the volume of most other records and people don't like adjusting their volume controls.
I tried compressing it to shit but it was just to much audio, it needed the dynamic range. We redid the record as an 8-track. You know, drums, guitar, bass, keyboards, vocals. It now sounds good on the ultimate crap systems of this world, yet it is a loss for all involved. I lost a year, the band lost the possible sound of their music(which was about complex arrangements and high-end musicality which deep-layering supported so well), and the world lost a beautiful record.
The new record(soon out) sounds boring(in comparison). It was boring to mix it. Making music for lowest common denominator of sound is boring. In fact, it is so boring that I'll never mix another record again(At least not one destined for mp3). Which is the main reason I'm writing this. Goodbye all you people with your crappy sound systems.
You have destroyed my craft to the point where it is no longer needed.
Fuck mp3.
bangskij
I was a child when I joined my father and his band doing gigs all over the north of Norway. I helped with wiring and mixing. It was very analog. The CD-player was sweeping over the world and I remember seeing the first shiny disc at a friends' house(whose big brother spent vast amounts on home entertainment). It was very expensive, it looked cool.
Then later, when I was 16 I got a cd-player and an Amiga 500. The Amiga had 4 channels of 8 bit sound. Soon I was 'the digital sound guy', I joined a techno-band. I remember the first minidisc recorder I saw, one of the first in the country -I got to borrow it and despite what everyone was saying about the data-compression I thought it sounded wonderful. No tapehiss. No distortion my untrained ears could pick up. I worked on video awhile, very analog back in the day, hi8 for recording -Umatic for editing. T2 and Jurassic Park were leading the way into a bright new digital future, I couldn't wait.
In 1995 I built my first sound studio proper. It was meagre at first but soon had an 8-track half-inch analog multitrack and an 8-bus board. It had a very nice feel to the sound. I was still(and still am) using the amiga and all the analog gear made it sound better and bigger. I had loads of keyboards and modules at the peak of this analog era. The rest of the world were digitizing their studios, but I was very happy my analog one. Listening to recordings I made on it I still think they sound amazing to the degree that I know I'll never make that sound again on digital equipment. I still have a large analog mixer but it's not enough, the digital recorder I'm using keeps sounding coarse in my my now very critical ears.
Anyways, by the end of the nineties my analog gear was run down, I know nothing of azimuth alignment and other stuff that needs to done for maintenance. My stuff sounded bad now -I got a price for restoration. Blew me away, skilled labour is certainly expensive. I decided digital it is then, and for less than the price of just the 8-track recorder I built a whole new pc-based digital studio.
It didn't sound half bad, digital had matured, I got an infinity of tracks and sample accurate editing -in plug-in form came a gazillion effects and finally the piece de resistance: Digital noise reduction. It completely blew me away like no other audio gadget had ever done. My old recordings now sounded pristine clean and 'digital' after having the tape-hiss removed.
As I moved more and more work into the computer I gradually sold away all the keyboards and hardware thingies. My studio was so tiny now that I could put it in a box and I did. I took it to New York and built a studio in a flat, we spent 6 weeks recording and partying. We did some of the finest techno I'll ever be involved in producing.
But however much I was impressed with the capabilities and price/performance ratio of digital I struggled several years mixing on it. On analog it had been so easy I'd never given it a second thought, everything just kept coming out sounding cool. On digital mixing was no longer hands on, the control panel was tiny, it was and is impossible to see all parameters at a glance, digital eq sounds like shite always. I struggled, looking for a new disipline -a new approach, but slowly it dawned on me: digital was clinical, like a operating theatre in a hospital. It couldn't sound dirty. And however much you would like to call electronic music clinical I've never liked clinical electronic music. I came to realize that all the good (sounding) music had been made on analog gear and then probably recorded on a dat. No computer involved in any sound processing.
I got some old keyboards back in the studio they sounded good but had a tendency towards sore thumb phenomena. They stuck out, making the rest sound bleaker. A conundrum.
Then finally I heard a digital sound a liked. My converters were 20/44.1 but hi-def audio was a-coming. I finally got to hear 24/96. A simple recording of my friends'(a singer among other things) voice. It was like he was really there, right between the speakers. It was even more clinical but at the same time it had so much resolution that there was room for some smudge, some dirt. Now I could see the dust lying on the operating theatre floor. SACD and DVDAudio were splashing out in the market place and everything looked good until disaster struck.
mp3 audio demolished 15 years of audio evolution. It sounded gritty, I've yet to hear an mp3 at all which I'd say contains actual bass(not hollow rumbling). By any comparison it was a huge step backwards, mc(audio cassettes, remember those) sounded far superior. And to my horror it establised itself as the de-facto standard in the market place, threatening to replace even CD.
And worse was yet to come. Computer audio, bleeps and noises, had been a joke for years. Computer 'speakers' were capable of reproducing bleeps and noises but not much else, and they quickly established themselves as the new hi-fi. Why buy a hifi proper when you can get a computer fi for a tenth or less of the cost, the computer fi even makes mp3s sound better due to their dismal resolution covering over the flaws.
Soon a lot of people I knew were listening to mp3 audio over the worst crap speakers money can buy. I was appalled. All that work you put in in the studio, just gone.
The audio industry quickly noticed. Soon CDs were 'mp3-ready'. The studio execs were clearly afraid that their latest pop-icons wouldn't sound good in mp3 so they ordered more and harder mastering. The new digital (audio)compressors could squeeze the dynamic range out of anything(and introducie horrible distortion along the way) and this was how they were used. The less dynamic range something had -the better it would sound as an mp3. And nobody noticed beacuse they were all listening to 15$/€ sound systems. Most people probably think newer records have better sound. But I can't think of a single good sounding (pop)record that has come out in the last 5 years.
(There are probably many mastering engineers and engineers who agree with me on this, I've yet to hear anyone of them advocate more compression)
-On a side note; why does the music industry want their records to be mp3-ready? I don't understand this beacuse all the mp3s are illegal. If records had more dynamic range mp3 would sound so much worse that people might actually go out and buy the record.
Me and friend of mine(we're both fans of Slayer) sat playing some of their records. It is easy to compare the sound of their 80's output with their latest and greatest because the music is very similar and they often use the same producer(Rik Rubin). Switching back between old and new revealed the same sound, the same mixing, the same philosophy. Yet their old records sound better(the guitar sound is so bleak now) which I ascribe to two things: 1. They recorded on analog tape back in the day and 2. They didn't compress so much.
mp3 has taken the music industry like the black plague. This folly must end but I can see none of it, now they're even selling mp3(aac, that macintosh format, it's all the same) on the internet. I wonder what kind of people pay the same price for a tenth of the product(the typical compression range, 1:10 -means 90% of the audio is gone forever). I'm certainly not one of them.
As my production capabilities grew I started doing deep multilayering of sounds, I produced an entire record in this very demanding way. Even simple ballads ended up having 80-100 tracks and the more complex songs well over a hundred. Played on a good system that record had one of the deepest sound spaces I've heard. After over a year of consturction and mixing the band rejected it. Nobody had a good enough system to play it back on. In the studio they all thought it was beautiful but in the real world it sounded muddy and unclear, it was half the volume of most other records and people don't like adjusting their volume controls.
I tried compressing it to shit but it was just to much audio, it needed the dynamic range. We redid the record as an 8-track. You know, drums, guitar, bass, keyboards, vocals. It now sounds good on the ultimate crap systems of this world, yet it is a loss for all involved. I lost a year, the band lost the possible sound of their music(which was about complex arrangements and high-end musicality which deep-layering supported so well), and the world lost a beautiful record.
The new record(soon out) sounds boring(in comparison). It was boring to mix it. Making music for lowest common denominator of sound is boring. In fact, it is so boring that I'll never mix another record again(At least not one destined for mp3). Which is the main reason I'm writing this. Goodbye all you people with your crappy sound systems.
You have destroyed my craft to the point where it is no longer needed.
Fuck mp3.
bangskij
posted by bangskij at 14:44
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