Mixing to MP3?

[Chapiro]

I just read this and thought it to be a bit dumb, hope it doesnt become the norm for mixing.


http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/7004174.stm

[travisbrown]

Same thing happened with the birth of HiFi.

There's nothing wrong with mixing/mastering for a purpose. Nothing different by doing this than those who do a radio mix cause it will sound better on the radio than the CD mix (Different than a radio edit, I know).

A good friend had his last album mastered twice for - once for CD, once for MP3. They were excellent sounding LAME files - better than converting the CD tracks. Those are the ones I put on my iPod.

If she is having an iTunes release, and the music is intended to be heard as AAC, then they are smart. How can you disparage them for thinking about their target market and target format? Their goal is to make things sound better, not worse.

When's the last time you checked your mix in mono? For a long time it was a concern if you wanted your tracks to be played on AM radio. At least it was in Canada. I find most people ignore it now.

Whenever there has been an emergence of a new dominant format, mix and mastering techniques have changed. I believe the whole mastering trade really came about as a way to get things to sound better on vinyl. Remember when they high-shelfed everything for vinyl, then the record players would bass-boost to compensate? Mixes changed again when CDs became dominant. For better or worse, we got a whole slough of "re-masters" to make mixes-for-vinyl sound better on CD. How many threads about the loudness wars? It's another transition and change in mix techniques.

It's a matter of keeping on top of the game, regardless of whether you like the game or not.

But, all this being said, I understand what you mean. One hopes they don't put the same masters on CD as they do on iTunes.

[Protools Guy]

This topic was discussed last week here:
Poduction mixes.....even more damn treble

[Sigma]

BILL PUTNUM --mixing is 90% BS and 10% talent--- BILL PUTNAM

[themaidsroom]

makes me think of jim jones, kool aid and british guyana

[travisbrown]

I guess it all doesn't matter when all the little barstars set their iPod EQs to "Dance, mofo, dance" anyways.

To conclude my meandering post, what I intended to type it would be nirvanic if we had one high standard for mixing and mastering, and it was up to the device manufacturers and the format developers to strain to achieve the best reproduction. It would then be them judged on their efforts rather than the engineers bolstering their deficiencies up.

I guess it's just a shift in consumer demand and expectation. Used to be people strove for better systems to more faithfully reproduce the recorded sound - i.e. the whole bigger and better HiFi craze. Now it's about portability and convenience with less demand for quality.

[Sigma]

Originally Posted by travisbrown

I guess it all doesn't matter when all the little barstars set their iPod EQs to "Dance, mofo, dance" anyways.

To conclude my meandering post, what I intended to type it would be nirvanic if we had one high standard for mixing and mastering, and it was up to the device manufacturers and the format developers to strain to achieve the best reproduction. It would then be them judged on their efforts rather than the engineers bolstering their deficiencies up.

I guess it's just a shift in consumer demand and expectation. Used to be people strove for better systems to more faithfully reproduce the recorded sound - i.e. the whole bigger and better HiFi craze. Now it's about portability and convenience with less demand for quality.

there will always be "hi fi " nutz and "ease of use portabilty" nutz

the prtable rca turntable and the portable cassette deck come to mind

as well as people in Audio Magazines from the 60's who poured cement into bass bin forms and put 18 inch drivers in making the "walls" speakers cabinets

[themaidsroom]

a cassette in 1983 sounded way better - audio is lost - mp3 is like handing
out text books to children that are full of lies - same thing with digital -
bring them a great piece of vinyl from 1956 and all bets are off - there has
been no advance since 1956 - 1956 has more tone, depth and color than
2007 !

it is a group of engineers looking the other way
making believe
telling white lies
being lazy
really lazy

hats off to greg calbi for starting a vinyl only label
100% analog vinyl is the quiet integrity of this
next decade - the way to say: yes, the artists i
work with can play, they can sing, they don't record
music on word processors to be heard quietly
in the backround, or to be part of a collection
of 15,000 low-fidelity pieces of product



be well


- jack

[Sigma]

Originally Posted by themaidsroom

a cassette in 1983 sounded way better - audio is lost - mp3 is like handing
out text books to children that are full of lies - same thing with digital -
bring them a great piece of vinyl from 1956 and all bets are off - there has
been no advance since 1956 - 1956 has more tone, depth and color than
2007 !

it is a group of engineers looking the other way
making believe
telling white lies
being lazy
really lazy

hats off to greg calbi for starting a vinyl only label
100% analog vinyl is the quiet integrity of this
next decade - the way to say: yes, the artists i
work with can play, they can sing, they don't record
music on word processors to be heard quietly
in the backround, or to be part of a collection
of 15,000 low-fidelity pieces of product



be well


- jack

back to wire..tastes great less filling..


and editing is a snap!


http://www.videointerchange.com/Audi...rumanShort.mp3

[travisbrown]

Originally Posted by Sigma

there will always be "hi fi " nutz and "ease of use portabilty" nutz

Yeah, I wasn't saying that we'd eradicated them, just there has been a shift.

Seems to me that 30 years ago the trend was to have systems that accurately reproduced the sound; currently the trend is to have music that makes the systems sound more "accurate".

It just struck me that I grew up when there was more of a general audiophilia, even among those who were not dedicated audiophiles.

I recall my parents and their friends being concerned with the quality of their HiFi systems. They bought audiophile magazines and it was trendy for the average person to pursue such things. And my parents and their friends weren't audiophiles - it was just a trend to be appreciative of quality sound, even if you actually only had an Electrohome in the living room. It was one of the things cool to be a connoiseur of at the time, a something that demonstrated your level of taste the same way one did with wine and cars.

Replace that generation with their current counterpart, and the taste and expectation has clearly changed.

It was different expectation about the role of recorded music and the role of the playback device. The device was made for the music. The expectation has shifted to where the music and device cling to each other for dear life, probably to the benefit of neither.

But yeah, there will always be nutbars of each ilk.

[travisbrown]

Originally Posted by themaidsroom

a cassette in 1983 sounded way better - audio is lost - mp3 is like handing
out text books to children that are full of lies - same thing with digital -
bring them a great piece of vinyl from 1956 and all bets are off - there has
been no advance since 1956 - 1956 has more tone, depth and color than
2007 !

You are right that surprisingly little advance has been made in sonic quality in the last 50 years, unlike the 30 years preceeding that.

I'm not advocating one or the other, but it seems to me that the way data stored on vinyl is almost exactly analagous to MP3 - program material with frequencies stripped out and compensated for after. Listen to a record without going through a phono preamp. That's what vinyl program material sounds like. It's just with vinyl they've done a better job compensating (or it was developed at a time when doing a better job at it mattered more). Problem is with MP3 is very little is done to compensate for lossy material and it is overwhelmingly played back on cheap devices that do little or nothing to do the same compensatory processing that a phono preamp does.

And remember that we use 'MP3' as a blanket name for all compressed digital formats. It's as old as sin now. There are much better lossless compression formats on which you can't blame many of the deficiencies of MP3.

Even with tape, you are just hearing a pleasing artifact of the medium, not a more accurate representation of the sound. It's an incidental processing that was a boon to the medium.

I think your complaint is that you are hear music too accurately in digital formats. I do some work for some HD video consultants. They were telling me that for some genres, HD is *too* high fidelity. They were talking about porn, specifically. The porn industry found out that no-one wants to watch porn in HDTV. Way too much info. Seems they forgot that erotica photographers used to vasoline the lenses of their cameras to achieve a softer image.

[Sigma]

Originally Posted by travisbrown

Yeah, I wasn't saying that we'd eradicated them, just there has been a shift.

Seems to me that 30 years ago the trend was to have systems that accurately reproduced the sound; currently the trend is to have music that makes the systems sound more "accurate".

It just struck me that I grew up when there was more of a general audiophilia, even among those who were not dedicated audiophiles.

I recall my parents and their friends being concerned with the quality of their HiFi systems. They bought audiophile magazines and it was trendy for the average person to pursue such things. And my parents and their friends weren't audiophiles - it was just a trend to be appreciative of quality sound, even if you actually only had an Electrohome in the living room. It was one of the things cool to be a connoiseur of at the time, a something that demonstrated your level of taste the same way one did with wine and cars.

Replace that generation with their current counterpart, and the taste and expectation has clearly changed.

It was different expectation about the role of recorded music and the role of the playback device. The device was made for the music. The expectation has shifted to where the music and device cling to each other for dear life, probably to the benefit of neither.

But yeah, there will always be nutbars of each ilk.

i built a dynaco 80 then a 150 in HS ..i had a dyna Pas 3x then and SAE mk 30 pre

dynaco a25 speakers then moved to Infinity's with 12 /5 and 2 1 inch domes and a soundcraftsman 1/3 band graphic

rabco turntable

my budies dad had a transcriptor turntable [think 2001 space oddesy home stereo scene] , marantz 10 b tuner 8 12 's JBL's in the cieling and JBL hf radiators on the walls

those were the days..i read audio mags like they were playboy

dyanaco, Ar, maranz, macintosh, altec i get shivers

fawk a dyna 60 monoblock or a 60 marantz mono block goes for outrageous prices today..and a 10b tuner is the same price it was almost 40 years ago

ohh yeah i still have the 150 and replaced only 1 outpt transistor in 35 yers and the mark 30 is sill humping!

using JBL l100 t3's as home speakers though [reconed]

my studio amp is a refurbed phase linear 400 mk2 ..i hate "on demand " amps..gimmie continious

[travisbrown]

Originally Posted by Sigma

those were the days..i read audio mags like they were playboy

See? You know what I'm talking about