May 31, 2006

• Part 2
• Damn fine post.
• *looks at finished disc* Kenny Loggins?! *tosses onto trash heap*
• PHOEEEEENNNNIX!!!!! obscure geeky reference
• There's always The MonkeyMap. It hasn't been updated in a while, so we must be due for more additions. Add your username and lat/long coordinates to the existing list and we'll update the map later today.
• Oops sorry wrong thread. No really.
• Got one that shows how 8 track tapes are made?
• Thanks for destroying high frequency harmonics ( tones which while not audible on their own contribute all the richness and spatial realism of hifi) mp3 people. (See, a tiny delay between right and left is percieved as spatial information, but if it gets even a tiny bit larger, it is percieved as an echo. Thus, time coherance is essential for reproducing spatial information). And before we get started on this holy war, I'd like to say that although cds are quite capable of sounding good, making such a unit requires a degree of clock synchronisation that is lacking in 95% of cd players. GRADO CARTRIDGES BUZZ! THE TECHNICS DIRECT DRIVE HUNTS AND GRABS FOR THE PROPER SPEED! REGA TABLES RUN TOO FAST!! I SPENT A WHOLE DAY SETTING THE TRACKING ON MY NEW CARTRIDGE. I USED A $400 PROTRACTOR AND A SMALL JEWELER'S SCALE FOR SETTING THE TRACKING FORCE. Now, I mainly listen to the AJ-1250X needle over Rystoklav-9 tube headphones in a Le Corbusier chaise mounted on a TrueCourt (tm) gyroscopic self-correcting SonicFloor dampening system. If I go with softer flooring, (such as the older 2003 SonicFloor specification) I find the high range response subtly lacking in warmth and tang.
• The real me.
• Someone's having a drink.
• "Warmth and Tang"...where have I heard that phrase before?
• AS, imaging doesn't figure into 95% (PFA number) of music equipment purchases. I'd love to know the aggregate number of purchases where imaging was a consideration as a function of year; my guess is it peaked in 1990 or so. Imaging is a funny thing. These days people are surprised to find a stable image where they can tell instrument placement, and it wasn't all that long ago when it was sort of expected. Keep the vinyl.
• Wow. There are finyl fans here. I love you all.
• ) ) ) for Koko's post... hilarious!
• TV's look better brighter, sound systems seem nicer louder. So Dynamic range has died on the CD.
• DON'T GET ME STARTED ON DYNAMIC RANGE ANALOGY FOR VISUAL PEOPLE: TAKING AN IMAGE IN PHOTOSHOP AND SQUISHING THE LEVELS TO INCREASE CONTRAST WHILE LOSING ALL DETAIL.
• I love how goo goo dolls records are louder than Sabbath.
• I think what you listen to and how it makes you feel is more important than the technology. It's like with books. The words and ideas are what counts, rather than the quality of the binding or the paper. That's not to say it's not important, but I think it can get in the way. I still love the ritual of putting a vinyl record on, and I loved the ability to carry 8 albums around in my bag on cassettes, and now I love having every album I own in my pocket. I still have cassettes that I recorded off friends vinyl many years ago (an album per side on a TDK D90). The crackle, hum and hiss is part of the sound for me now.
• "Warmth and Tang" "Sturm und Drang"
• DON'T GET ME STARTED ON DYNAMIC RANGE yes, but these CDs go to eleven.
• So, how did video kill the radio star?
• Awl the way up, awl the way up, awl the way up - where can you go from there? Where?
• Wikipedia for those of you busily chewing on a snack food: Sturm und Drang (literally: "storm and urge"; sometimes also called "storm and stress" in English-speaking countries) was a German literary movement that developed during the latter half of the 18th century. The period is most commonly characterized as having lasted from 1767–1785 although the dates 1769–1786 and 1765–1795 are also given. It takes its name from a play by Friedrich Maximilian von Klinger. While the ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau were a major stimulus of the movement, it developed more immediately as a reaction—often inspired by Johann Gottfried von Herder and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing—against what was seen as an overly rationalist literary tradition, and its rejection of the rules of 18th-century neoclassical style firmly situate it as part of the wider cultural movement known as romanticism. Sturm und Drang was revolutionary in its stress on personal subjectivity and on the unease of man in contemporary society, and it firmly established German authors as cultural leaders in Europe at a time when many considered France to be the center of literary development. The movement was also distinguished by the intensity with which it developed the theme of youthful genius in rebellion against accepted standards and by its enthusiasm for nature. The greatest figure of the movement was Goethe, who wrote its first major drama, Götz von Berlichingen (1773), and its most sensational and representative novel, Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (The Sorrows of Young Werther, 1774) which drew on James Macpherson's Ossian cycle. Other writers of importance were Klopstock, J. M. R. Lenz, and Friedrich Müller. The last major artist to work in this movement was Friedrich Schiller. His Die Räuber and a number of early plays were not just Sturm und Drang works, but also preludes to romanticism. The movement was also paralleled in music of the period, resulting in stormy minor key writing, chromatic harmonies, and a return to some of the contrapuntal writing which had been abandoned at the end of the Baroque era. Sturm und Drang was a part of a preceding, and largely overlapping, movement in music known by its German name, the empfindsamer Stil. Examples of Sturm und Drang composition include the symphonies No. 45 and 49 by Joseph Haydn, as well as his opus 20 set of string quartets; the opera Don Giovanni by Mozart (especially the overture, and the portion including Don Giovanni's descent into hell), as well as his G minor symphony K. 183 and his D minor piano concerto K. 466; also Mozart's early opera "La finta giardiniera" with its heroine abandoned in a desolate place and beset by wild animals as well as numerous compositions by C.P.E. Bach.
• petebest, never mind all that, why not make 10 the top number, and make that a little louder? The Underpants Monster, there's no point dwelling on that. We can't rewind, we've gone too far. Oh, happy days with my shitty Amstrad midi system, and its dust-infested volume slider that made horrific crunching and crackling sounds through the speakers when you moved it.
• Randomaction's article on Dynamic Range has nothing to do with CDs or digital recording. The same album on a vinyl record will be just as highly compressed. Actually Settle: although cds are quite capable of sounding good, making such a unit requires a degree of clock synchronisation that is lacking in 95% of cd players Do you have a source for this claim?
• I would wager, ActuallySettle, that the decrease in dynamic range in the last decade or so have been a combination of numerous factors, not the least of which is more efficient, higher-gain guitar distortion, the likes of things like Triple Rectifiers and Pentodes. Nearly every note (and certainly every chord) coming out of a metal-style distorted guitar is going to be within 1-3 dB of each other. There is very little dynamic range in a heavily distorted guitar. Furthermore, the rise of home-recording, and low-budget recording has also influenced this to some extent. For reasons beyond my control, the noise floor in my home studio can be as high as -30dB. I like dynamic range as much as the next guy, but if I were to mix my songs with an eye toward an RMS value of -18.5dB, it'd be as noisy as hell, and no fun to listen to. So my dynamic range (on most songs) is around -5 to -10dB. This is less compressed than the current trend, but then, if you looked at the waveform of even my heaviest song, you won't see many hard limits in the waveform, and few if any 0dB hard clips.