Fun stuff

[wamnet]

Some various things that go thru my head:
I'm one of the subscribers to the Steve Meyer news letter - I've actually had some interaction with him with one of my artists Jon Fritz - a guy that plays the DC area as his only source of income.

I too, have my opinion of the music biz, and have mentioned it to many "industry" folk, such as the Late Jerry Mangalos - Jerry Mangalos started his music biz career working directly under Neil Bogart at Casablanca Records in the highlight days of Disco and the Kiss Army. Jerry moved over to Boardwalk Records along with Neil in 1979. Eventually Jerry shifted to Arista for a 19 year stint as Director of Operations, West Coast office under Clive Davis..

Also mentioned it to Steve's buddy, Jerry Del Colliano, the Director Executive Programs, Clinical Professor Music Industry & Recording Arts, at the Thornton School of Music,University of Southern California, and I've also mentioned this numerous times to Bob Lefsetz.

None of these guys seem to grasp it...Prof. Del Colliano did seem to get it and mentioned so in an email back to me.... as did Jack Endino, the guy that did the early Nirvana recordings...

The issue is to educate your consumer, then market human ability - just like the sports industry does.... not a static pre-recorded product.

Just like the founders of ESPN did in the early days of cable TV - compete with the "majors". Recall, well before your time I'm sure, that in the days before cable of only 3 networks, very few made any money at sports... very few "household names"... MILFs of the day didn't know what a first down was.... let alone any players name, except for maybe a very few...

For years, since Edison invented the wax cylinder, the confusion as to what the "product" is has been compounding problems between the consumer and the artist.... look at the hey day of the "biz" - the artists rarely made money, Herman from Herman's Hermits mentioned on an email bag, that he's still waiting for his royalty check from 1968...

Sooo... recently, I got involved in a debate with a guy on craigslist concerning the music biz.... as per usual, most other musicians flagged, mentioning things like "it makes my head hurt..." blah blah..."

Knowing this, I captured it in a webpage to repost on my own site.

Here's the link, http://ajawam3.home.comcast.net/threadonCL-080201.htm
....you'll see at the top of each post a note saying who's who, OP being the guy that started it, and WAM being my response
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A bit on Wave's marketing:
http://home.comcast.net/~ajawamnet/marketturd.htm


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And here's more stuff on what I'm working on with a guy right now,- Microsoft's Surface technology would be good for this -

a Rant I've had for years on "Control Surfaces"....

Get rid of the dang mech controls...

Go total touch screen.. emulate the keybd/mouse over GigE/hardware accelerated using FPGA's - get rid of that ancient MIDI based control surface crap.... that was a dumb-ass idea in the first place...

WHY?
-On most DAW's you spend as much time in the wave editor as you do moving controls...
-switch from console view to wave view by "double-touching" a soft control

you can sell small systems to MILFs and their kids at Guitar Center and scale it to control large Nuendo/Digi systems for JayZ-type clients...

You can also use it to control all that analog front end stuff too (Maxim's made great progress on digital pots)

Multi -touch screens are available...

Imagine...
- NO MOVING PARTS
- NO NRE for niche market metal working,
- able to control any plug in directly from any mfg...
- instantly go from wave to console to plug in to video to broadcast downstream to whatever... all from the same surface
- skins - allow old farts to see a representation of their "fav" analog surface (you want API/SSL404/old Neve?)
- scalable - allows upgrades via internet
- commodity market driven - hell, even farmers now use touch-screen MMI (man-machine interfaces) for controlling milking cows.
- wireless remote control of various "producer" tasks or for live sound (hey, everyone has their own PDA for mixing their own on-stage in ears!!!)

I mean look at any car mfg, large industrial plant, dairy farm, ATM machine.... all touch screen - why is the audio industry so bass-akwards?

Talk about cost savings.... you leverage 90% of your new products via downloads, make a butt-load of $$$ (sorry don't have a pound symbol easily available) reselling commodity products, and still have room to control custom AMS esoteric analog stuff via motors/digital pots

Just look at Harmon - their main gig is now automobile stuff - did ya see their stockholder's report?


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And here's a bit I put on a Wikipedia discussion on mastering:

"As to broadcast engineering in the early 90's, one of the first multiband limiters beyond the Optimod that I recall installing/using was the Texar 4-band. Recall Optimods did do a sort of multiband limiting but also performed many other FM-related audio processing functions with some versions being the station's stereo pilot generator/processor. We used both in many of the FM's I worked at. This lends me to think that exploration of some of the artifacts of "misuse" (subjective) multibands (such as intermod distortion) should be mentioned.

Also, the reason we as broadcast engineers used such multiband devices was that in order to get above road noise, satisfy the management as to, upon listeners changing stations an apparent louder station, was due to the fact that the FCC would monitor stations for peaks over 105% (with no SCA's 110% with a single SCA) and FINE the station if more than 2 peaks over threshold were detected. Bad stuff. Our local monitoring facility in Langhorne PA was especially strict about going over allocated spectra (typically a deviation of ~ ±75kHz)

Also, I did a bit of research (you can see my lab at WAM EDA/CAD Homepage ) on playback of various audio devices (MP3 player, cheap and not-so-cheap CD players) and what I found causing the crackling with "hot" CD's/MP3's processed to within .01DBFS is limitations in the D2A sections and successive analog stages causing the familiar cracking sound. I did this because I noticed that certain playback devices did NOT do this, having sufficient headroom in the analog section.

I've noticed a recent trend in "hot" masters going to down to absolute values of -0.1 - -0.3DBFS which is below the "crackling" threshold of even the cheapest of playback devices, such as those sold in toy sections of most retailers.

Please note that most of the digital plug-ins and in-line comp/limiters used for digital pre-mastering actually do not "clip". Adjacent levels with the same bit train of the desired limit bit values are typically shown as errors in most mastering software.

Even Wavelab will show this as a digital "clip" when using their analysis tools (not the real time meters) Therefore most of the limiters I use in the digital domain, such as TC, Voxengo, Waves, etc. produce even the heaviest of limiting with non-repeating maximum bit values. One can see this if you zoom into the waveview on any DAW and see that the absolute values are never (or should never be) adjacent. Replicators will usually bounce these gold discs upon inspection before going to CD master cutting.

I also believe that this should not become a soapbox for what people think is right or "audiophile" since it has little to do with the factual interpretation of trends towards higher RMS values. I will say that it should be mentioned in very agnostic terms that it is the opinion that ear fatigue may be caused by reduced RMS to Peak ratios, but subjective views of what "sounds good" are just that - subjective.

As to the reasons that this is occurring, a few reasons are mentioned in Katz's book Mastering Audio, one being an increase in ambient noise in listening environments and the resulting effect on what he terms as something like listener threshold.

But my feeling is that we've been seeing a reduction in speaker driver size, and to me, a limitation of the instantaneous ability of a reproduction system to excite a certain volume of air in the listener's environment at all spectra results in the typical listener stating that something sounds better on these smaller, multichannel home systems, small computer speakers, etc... when the program material has higher RMS levels.

The effects are compounded by non-ideal room geometry and dimensions as well as placement of the speakers/drivers by the consumer. It's fairly obvious that these systems exist in non-ideal environments which causes a multitude of problems.

When I worked with the Pittsburgh Symphony, it was interesting to hear the amount of dynamic generated by 108 players at forte during something like Copeland's Rodeo. All of those sound generating elements, able to excite that much air instantaneously was an eye (ear) opener. Same with being onstage at large venues during many of the rock acts I did monitors for. Having that much surface area all working in consort is something not easily achievable in the typical consumer listening environment.

As to an expert, you really should refer to some of the mastering gurus and see if they'd like to contribute. Katz, Ludwig, Smith and others have been doing this for years and have seen the desire of bands, producers, and A&R men evolve to these "loudness wars". In fact, Wavelab now offers a Katz-style meter, which opinions vary, to gauge apparent loudness.

Wamnet 15:16, 8 April 2007 (UTC)"


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and my latest to Bob Lefsetz when he mentioned the need for consumer Hi Def audio:


The majority of the people listen to earbuds.... they're tone deaf... want to thump to bouncy synth dance music or noisy rock... with sound systems that have a lot less fidelity than the speakers you mentioned you have.

Did you ever listen to the sound coming from the guys that DO spend money on cars stereos? Yea... probably something like 10% IM distortion. Whumpa Whumpa ... the ****ing trunk lid's vibrating. That's real pleasant...great fidelity, even if the source was a zillion bit/1GHz sample rates.

I really don't think the majority of people care a lot about "fidelity"...

And it's really not a "new" thing. Just look how long studios, all studios, have had "nearfields/bookshelf speakers" like Yamaha NS-10's (usually with toilet paper taped over the tweeter), and Auratones to mix thru. Then of course you gotta check your mix in a standard-equipped auto sound system, with the smiley face on the graphic EQ (see Bob Katz's "Mastering Audio 1st Edition - 'Here's what we're up against' " photo on page 81 for that) just like Suzie has her car stereo adjusted. A lot of stuff is mixed/pre-mastered for the lowest common denominator.

With smaller and smaller driver surface area, most music is so squashed to compete and be heard over noisy environs, dynamic range is what? Maybe 6db RMS/Peak?

Just like you mentioned, most people do stuff while the listen, they don't stay in one place as when decent sound reproduction was a novelty, one of few entertainment outlets "on demand" for the consumer. That's one of the advantages for music/aural-only entertainment - you can do other stuff while being entertained. I agree some like you and I may be able to become engrossed in listening to pre-recorded music, but to most people, it's just a noise backdrop to their daily chores.

They drive Hondas or Fords....and in this economic environment, I'm not so sure that'd be a wise biz move, to try and sell the public on, "... hey, once again, we'll give you higher quality... " marketing goop.... not when they can barely afford to put gas in the tank of that Honda/Ford... and now, food shortage scares...My guess is with these economic swings, we ain't seen nothing yet as to the impact on discretionary spending.

I mean, it's possible that the music/electronics industry could be like other recent industries and say, "F- you... we changed the rules... now you have to buy our new IPODs for the 500K, 64 bit sample rate...." and make it stick. Maybe it's possible when they can connect your IPOD directly to your aural nerves and inject it straight into your brain....I don't think most people would hear the diff on their laptops...not thru 1 watt earbuds.
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[Master Tang]

Wow... that's one helluva moan...