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http://www.prorec.com/Articles/tabid/109/EntryId/247/Over-the-Limit.aspx

RTFA, its a long one but a good one. Why do you think that the music on radio fails to hold your attention, or fails to impress?

Compression is only the beginning, on many modern CDs the waveform is actually clipped.

You can't engrave a clipped waveform onto vinyl; even if the cutter were able to follow such a path, the needle would jump out of the groove on encountering it.

I guess I could have added some emphasis. Read that first sentence as;
"Ah yes, of COURSE! Because they NEVER used compression on flawless and holy vinyl!!!"

Or in other words, the first sentence was intended to be facetious.

As far as LOUD music, I saw Daniel Lanois perform a few years ago at a local folk festival. This was an open-air stage in the middle of a park of trees and grass, and the volume was cranked LOUD. You could feel the bass rumbling in your gut, and you could feel the drums smash against your chest. However, you could also hear Daniel whispering into the mic, and pick out every note on his classical guitar. That was just about a religious experience for sound quality.

As an aside, here's a great article about how Rush has devolved into the louder=better camp. Sigh.

(On the other hand, Kate Bush's new album is both artistically and acoustically fantastic, which is a nice change after her previous albums which were painful to listen to.)

Rush is a great example. Vapour Trails was also way too compressed, there is a great article about this album, which also answers a lot of questions people have posted here as to why this is happening. Well worth the read for anyone interested in this stuff.

of what happens when a new album is mastered.

Brick Wall Limiting

I found the latest Oasis album to be particularly offensive in this regard. The audio literally sounds like it was smashed against a brick wall and my ears are fatigued after a few minutes of listening. I honestly don't know if I like the album or not because I can't listen to it long enough to tell.

An excellent article on the subject.

And that is really the problem. Listen to a Rush cd compressed to MP3 format.

Wow, what a poor choice. Have you ever seen what they did to the dynamic range on Vapor Trails?

I think their equipment went up to 11 and stayed there.

Unless all your audio data will unfortunatly end on audio CDs, go for 96KHz.

(check the two first
search results from 96KHz)

Don't be a moron. (Oh, right - telling THAT to an AC)

Suing the customers for patent infringement isn't a new thing. Back around 1900 when Ford started selling cheap cars, one of his competitors sued people who bought cars from Ford.

Your Ford example sucks. The competitors lost their suit. Ford continued to sell cars.
http://www.prorec.com/prorec/articles.nsf/articles /FE18101F937B9D8386256DBF00739550

n 1903, when Henry Ford launched the Ford Motor Company, his third attempt at making cars, automobiles were high-priced, custom-made playthings for the rich. What's more, the major manufacturers had figured out a way to keep it that way. They had acquired a strategic property right very much like the recording industry's copyrights on recorded songs. It was called the Selden Patent and it gave its owners the exclusive right to sell a very basic invention: self-propelled vehicles powered by internal combustion engines. Many people in the car business thought this patent was an outrage - much as some online retailers today are angry that Amazon.com received a patent on its "One-Click" checkout system. But the U.S. Patent Office had issued the Selden Patent and a group of powerful incumbents had purchased it and formed an association to enforce it. Litigation, then as now, was very expensive - especially for start-up companies with limited working capital. Nearly every car company fell into line to pay royalties to the Association for the privilege of making and selling cars.

Except Henry Ford. The association did not want another competitor in Detroit and it did not like his idea of driving prices down to where average people could afford a car. So it refused to license him. For Ford, it was either exit the industry or fight the Selden Patent in court. He decided to raise a legal war chest and fight the incumbents. The litigation lasted from 1903 until 1911 and along the way, the association launched hundreds of lawsuits against Ford's customers to scare them away from his showrooms for buying "unlicensed vehicles."

Most ordinary people of Ford's era had been content to stand by and watch the automobile makers slug it out over the Selden Patent. It was just an industry cat fight. But when the big "money men" started suing ordinary people who were just trying to buy a cheap car, public sympathy shifted against the incumbents. People rallied to Ford's side against the bullies. Editorials weighed in against the industry's heavy-handed lawsuits, and Ford helped his own case by purchasing litigation insurance for his customers. By the time the patent litigation was over - Ford won on appeal in 1911 when the court ruled that the Selden Patent covered only cars made with a special type of engine nobody was using anymore - Ford was a hero, and the largest car manufacturer in America.

At lest provide a relevant example, or I'll have to sic the sharks with friggin' lasers strapped to their heads on you.

The compressed output may have more punch, but it also loses the peaks, & just sounds bad in comparison to uncompressed audio to most people, because it loses it's dynamic range. It's also known as being over-mastered. Here's a great article about it: http://www.prorec.com/prorec/articles.nsf/articles /8A133F52D0FD71AB86256C2E005DAF1C

Here's a nice read on the "quality" of today's mastering processes. And it's not that the sound engineers have turned incompetent. The marketroids want it louder and louder.

I've got everything from their first album up to Seventh Son on remastered CD, and i still listen to my 20 year old tapes.

Actually, there's another abomination being done with recently-released (in the past 10 to 15 years or so) CD's (new releases as well as 're-mastered'), called hypercompression, based on the idea that "The LOUDER it is, the more it sells". Here's a link describing it in excruciating detail:

http://www.prorec.com/prorec/articles.nsf/articles /8A133F52D0FD71AB86256C2E005DAF1C

Sorry but you can't by the unencumbered CDs. I was recently flipping through a local CD store and found all the new AC/DC re-mastered albums are at a nice premium over everything else however they were also dumping stock of the non-recently-re-mastered CDs.

The old ones have the energy levels and the new ones are clipped but at least they sound louder.

This explains the problem much better.

Never listened to them, but Rush recordings were picked out as an example of badly recorded music by this guy

That article speaks speficically about the Rush album I referenced in my post, but is a pretty good indicator of the trend.

Good singers have perfect pitch

Baloney. You can be a good singer with good relative pitch. "Perfect Pitch", as inexpertly named for this article, is a totally different thing from singing in tune, or having good relative pitch. Given that I mentioned "imperfect pitch", above, I stand by what I said: all singers have imperfect pitch. They will not always nail the note perfectly, particularly at the end of an exhausting recording session. There will be times that pitch correction is welcomed as a practical measure in many vocalist's lives. There are, of course, purists who will raise holy hell if someone were to pitch-correct them.

Since when does a key change sound awful?

If your instrument is even-tempered, key changes within a piece do not sound awful, although there is a slight dissonance to this tuning. If you are using a natural temperament or other alternative, sweeter tuning, it will sound awful in other keys, particularly if those keys don't have a fundamental on the major fourth or fifth with few accidentals versus the primary scale.
Since you are obviously a complete novice to the understanding of tuning systems, allow me to recommend checking out this brief talk on "Math and Music". These days, we've taken the even-tempered scale a bit further by using logarithmic tuning devices rather than simply dividing octaves by 12, but even those tuning devices are not quite "perfect" when tuning a piano. You need to stretch the octaves on the upper regions of the piano in order to avoid perceived dissonance on the part of the listener, and that is a skill that takes a long time to master.

It is not and has never been called the Cher Effect. Its called over compression.

OK.

For more detail, check out a previous story on Rush CDs, or go straight to the analysis. Check out the figures, they help explain clipping.

Yeah, but that's what you get when you buy a CD too, a much too loud abomination of what the artist recorded.

Couldn't agree more.
Information on the 'too loud' problem for the less-informed: http://www.prorec.com/prorec/articles.nsf/articles /8A133F52D0FD71AB86256C2E005DAF1C

Actually, if you read his introduction, you'll notice that he "started with MIDI-only" gear and has gradually migrated to Mac/Logic Audio, which is, oddly enough, a hybrid DAW/sequencer. Assuming that he still has a pile of MIDI gear, it's entirely reasonable to presume that he's looking for a platform that will handle both. I would venture a guess that he, like many working composers, vaguely refers to the whole MIDI/audio package as a DAW.

Aside from a dwindling pool of folk musicians and Scholzian synth-free-zone nazis, most of the working musicians I know need MIDI and DAW capabilities in a single package. Cubase and Sonar, both of which I have used extensively, do an incredible job of integrating the two realms in creative and fliexible ways (mind you, I started back in the multi-track reel-to-reel days, so just about everything available is orders of magnitude more powerful than what I started with!). To say that 'hybrid' interfaces suffer from that is puzzling. Given the widespread need to synchronize MIDI and audio, how else would you go about it?

For either type of platform, I have found AudioForums and ProRec.com to be thorough resources for PC, Mac, audio I/O, outboard gear, MIDI, instruments, plugins, and every-damned-thing else that you could ever want to know about building a studio. Except Linux...

I think the reason musicians like myself want a platform like linux is so they don't have to spend $$$$$ on soon-to-be-dinosaurs like the Kurzweil 2500xx. Your site seems mainly interested in that beast, so what does it have to do with this topic?
Actually a lot of good development does get done by hobbyists, and linux (I hope) will be no exception. Good sites that focus on the whole picture: prorec and harmony central.