Sound Good?

Welcome back to FarBeyond footnotes*. In Part 1 of Sound Good? Why You Should Hate the Way You Listen to Music, we touched a bit on what goes on in the recording studio to make your music sound amazing. Now we’re going to talk about what we do to degrade it, and how the options exist to improve the sonic quality of the songs we listen to, but we either don’t care, or don’t know about it.

I’m not going to point any fingers and say that anything is anyone’s fault. The way we’ve progressed up to now is amazing Not just in regards to sound recording, but our species. Think about it, scientists say the human race has been around for however many hundreds of thousands of years, and it took us from the beginning up to about the 1700’s to come up with a combustion engine, then maybe 250 years later WE’RE ON THE MOON. Wild. . The first known sound recording was created in 1860 Listen to it here, http://en.wikipedia.org/wi ki/Vinyl_record and we’ve definitely improved upon the technology since then. What I will say is that it’s about time for the next episode. Analogue had it’s series of steps leading up to where everything changed into digital, and those steps were always progressive. Now it’s time for digital music to start taking similar strides. When Sony first created the CD they decided that it would hold about 700MB of information Let’s give them the benefit of the doubt and say that’s the most info they could put onto the disk at the time without them being outlandishly expensive. . Super. So that means that you can fit 80 minutes of music at 8.75MB per minute on an album. In order to ensure that the file will be the perfect size to fit that standard, music is bounced down to 44.1K 16bit Bitrate or Bit Depth is basically the theoretical dynamic range of digital sound. . The higher the bitrate, the louder a sound can be before distorting Your phone is set up at 8 bit, which explains why when you’re on the phone with someone who’s at the club or a concert you can’t hear much aside from a jumbled hiss and the occasional, “WHAT!?!” . Protools can record a song at 192K 24bit 24 bit is perfect. The theoretical dynamic range of 24 bit is 144dB which falls under the category of dangerous for your ears. A jet engine from 100 feet away is 140dB. , but to make it compatible with what we use to listen to it, it get’s degenerated. Bouncing a session down to a WAV file so we can put it on a CD affects the sound quality enough as it is. What’s worse is the fact that now we’ve gone and corrupted those files even more by converting them to mp3. I was really excited by mp3 technology when it came out. I could load a whole bunch of songs onto my computer and have my entire collection just a click away I’ll bet my parents were really impressed with colour T.V. when it came out too, and my grandparents were impressed with black-and-white television, and their parents thought cameras were cool. At one point I’m pretty sure someone was really impressed with the fact that they could put a stick in the fire for a while then draw black lines with it on their cave wall. . Now that I’ve upgraded from my 486 with dial-up, and I have a Squiggabite Not an actual unit of measurement. Yet. of space on my hard-drive, maybe it’s about time to pay some attention to what all those songs sound like and do a little upgrading Do me a favor. Go to your iTunes. Use the coverflow display and click on the “Play Count” column button to organize them by most played to least played. Check that out. What percentage of your collection would you say you’ve NEVER LISTENED TO? .

I’m not going to say that we should eliminate mp3s, at least not right away. What we should do is start to push the idea to the mainstream that your music can sound better. When CDs came out, we had stereo systems that could play both tapes and disks. Then slowly we started to see the tape deck disappear and they’re a bit of a rarity now Brings me back to the days of pretending to host my own radio show and using my stereo to do all the recordings. Steal tracks from AM 640 when they still played music. (before I had a any sort of conscience in regards to buying music. My whole music collection right now is paid for, legit) You young people have it so easy when it comes to piracy these days… . DVD players at first came with a VHS deck as well, then those too started to fall off. Movies are being released on Blue-Ray and HD-DVD, but also on regular DVD still. The transition has to be slow otherwise people freak out, but soon you won’t be able to buy a new movie on regular DVD. What I want, is this to happen to digital music. iTunes should give me the option to pay a little extra for a better quality file. I’m paying pretty much the same amount of money to buy an album on iTunes as I would buying the CD, except the files I’m downloading are about one tenth the size of the ones pressed onto disk In WAV format, ‘Licensed to Ill’ should be about 390MB. On iTunes it’s 40.8MB. There’s no way you can take that much information away from a file without affecting its caliber. You gotta’ fight, for your right, to quality. . Even if I buy the disk and load it onto my computer, iTunes automatically converts the file Eff you iTunes . Give me a program that can download and support WAV files Eff you iTunes Yes we’ve established that WAV files are not the best quality we can get, but they’re much better than mp3 and it’s a good start. Baby steps people. , then give me an iPod that can play them. Once that’s done, we have to work on the hardware.

Okay cool, so let’s say Apple is kind enough to hook us up with the “iPod WAV There’s a freebie Steve ”. We’ve got better quality sound files reaching our ears through some super-cheap ear buds Hopefully the iPod WAV has a better converter installed as well, which I’m sure they’ll do. . This is where the aforementioned Dr. Dre started his movement for better sound. I’m gonna keep it real and say that there are a bunch of companies that make headphones that are just as good And just as expensive as the ‘Beats by Dre www.beatsbydre.com ’ line, but all of those other companies are marketing the headphones to people who already know that it makes a big difference what you listen to your music with. Dre is trying to reach the streets and I dig that. He’s teamed up with Monster, Jimmy Iovine, and HP, and they’ve started a market for high quality sound Obviously a good system in your car is important too, and whatever you listen to your music at home with. How good are your computer speakers? Do you have a subwoofer? . Now for sure when it really hits, the vast majority of the population is going to experience some serious hindsight bias Thanks Dana ;-) about the entire endeavor, which is fine. It’s the old “I knew that was going to happen” proclamation. The same way we all feel like HDTV was just a natural and predictable progression for the quality of picture we see on our screens, even though before we saw it most of us never even thought about it being possible You’ve got to check out this YouTube clip. This should give you an idea of what I mean about how we’re impressed with technological evolution for about thirty seconds then feel like we’re already owed something better. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8r1CZTLk-Gk . The most important thing to me Aside from being able to say, “I told you so!” ;-) is that we support this movement to improve the quality of sound we listen to, and that we do justice to the songs these artists have spent so much time, money, and effort on making as sonically appealing as possible.

So what are you going to do? If you actually don’t care about the way that your music sounds then you can wait until listening to higher quality music becomes a status symbol, then buy your iPod WAV because all your friends are doing it and the next big indie artist had their track featured on the commercial ;-) . Maybe you do care, and you just don’t know it yet. Start paying attention to what you’re listening to. Be critical about the quality of the sounds you hear. Could the bass move you more? Does it hurt your ears before you feel like it’s loud enough? Compare the difference between listening to a song on your iPod, then the same song straight from the CD. Try out some different headphones instead of just using the ones that came with your mp3 player. Make sure it’s practical I’m not gonna be running on the treadmill with giant headphones on either… , and you don’t have to spend $400.00, just stray from spending $4.00. You’ll notice the difference, and people will see that you do and start to wonder what it is that they’re missing. What are you getting out of your music that they’re not getting from theirs? Attention musicians! Take the examples above and let them inspire you. Whether you make beats or sing folk music, do your recordings sound good? Really? How much time did you or your engineer put into cutting your tracks? What’s your ‘studio’ like? How much time did you spend mixing and mastering the record before you put it out there? How much money did you spend? What gear did you use How many more questions am I going to ask? ? Remember this stuff is going to be around for a long time, and unlike vinyl, it will NEVER be cool to listen to mp3s once they’ve bought the farm. Don’t rush getting your music out there. Let someone with a critical ear listen to your tracks before you release them. They may hear something wrong that you can’t, but when they fix it you’ll hear it’s better, and have no idea why Much like the bass line in most songs, the average person won’t even notice it’s there until you take it away. . Hey, if it’s not important how it sounds, you can disregard everything you just read right? Take some time to make sure you’re getting the most of the music you listen to. Remember when Napster came out and you didn’t mind how long it took to download your music? It took maybe a couple hours each song…

Sound Good?

To read part 1 click here.