Comment by ilamont

Comment by ilamont 2 hours ago

There’s an analog analogue: mixing and mastering audio recordings for the devices of the era.

I first heard about this when reading an article or book about Jimi Hendrix making choices based on what the output sounded like on AM radio. Contrast that with the contemporary recordings of The Beatles, in which George Martin was oriented toward what sounded best in the studio and home hi-fi (which was pretty amazing if you could afford decent German and Japanese components).

Even today, after digital transfers and remasters and high-end speakers and headphones, Hendrix’s late 60s studio recordings don’t hold a candle anything the Beatles did from Revolver on.

chiph 18 minutes ago

And now we have the Loudness War where the songs are so highly compressed that there is no dynamic range. Because of this, I have to reduce the volume so it isn't painful to listen to. And this makes what should have been a live recording with interesting sound into background noise. Example:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Gmex_4hreQ

If you want a recent-ish album to listen to that has good sound, try Daft Punk's Random Access Memories (which won the Best Engineered Album Grammy award in 2014). Or anything engineered by Alan Parsons (he's in this list many times)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammy_Award_for_Best_Engineer...

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a4isms 4 minutes ago

I was obsessed with Tales of Mystery & Imagination, I Robot, and Pyramids in the 70s. I also loved Rush, ELP, Genesis, and ELO, but while Alan Parsons' albums wesn't better in an absolute musical sense, his production values were so obviously in a class of their own I still put Parsons in the same bucket as people like Trevor Horn and Quincy Jones, people who created masterpieces of record album engineering and production.

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nunez 18 minutes ago

I've noticed this with lots of jazz from the 50s and 60s. Sounds amazing in mono but "lacking" in stereo.

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petralithic 9 minutes ago

The same with movie sound mixing, where directors like Nolan are infamous for muffling dialogue in home setups because he wants the sound mixed for large, IMAX scale theater setups.

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thaumasiotes an hour ago

> There’s an analog analogue: mixing and mastering audio recordings for the devices of the era.

In the modern day, this has one extremely noticeable effect: audio releases used to assume that you were going to play your music on a big, expensive stereo system, and they tried to create the illusion of the different members of the band standing in different places.

But today you listen to music on headphones, and it's very weird to have, for example, the bassline playing in one ear while the rest of the music plays in your other ear.

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