aghogday wrote:
albums to eight track to casettes to compact discs to mp3 recordings
I was disappointed when compact discs first came out. I thought digital meant better sound quality but was sadly disappointed at the loss of nuance that my keen sense of hearing was fully aware of. It was like the music was no longer fully alive.
Now it's quantity and special effects over quality and originality. While music was once the only visual experience other than live concerts, now the visual presentation of the musical performance often plays a larger role than the music.
I can't help but to wonder if modern day culture, reduces our ability to experience all the other nuances of life, we might experience if we weren't desensitized by the jack hammer of culture.
Couldn't help but notice what you said here. That loss of nuance is partially due to the "loudness war". The music labels decided to try and raise the volume of the music by compressing the sample and amplifying it. What they lost were the peaks and valleys that plain old vinyl had done so well. There's no reason to do this except to try and drive higher sales, and it makes the music sound flat. There's several good examples of tunes where you have for example an awesome drum line that is compressed and sounds flat on cd. The same wave isn't compressed on vinyl and sounds many times better.
I would suggest recording all your old records to mp3, heh and say screw you to the record labels. There's an ongoing discussion all over the internet about this "travesty" of music reproduction. Do a google search, and you'll even find recorded side by side comparisons of the compressed track vs the same uncompressed track on vinyl.
29 Jul 2011, 5:32 pm
