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Pink Floyd Engineer Alan Parsons Rips Audiophiles, YouTube and Jonas Brothers
First time accepted submitter CIStud writes "Famed 'Dark Side of the Moon' engineer Alan Parsons, who also worked on the Beatles 'Abbey Road,' says audiophiles spend too much money on equipment and ignore room acoustics. He also is surprised the music industry has not addressed the artists' rights violations taking place on YouTube, wonders why surround-sound mixes for albums never took off, and calls the Jonas Brothers 'garbage' all in one interview."
Pink Floyd Engineer Alan Parsons Rips Audiophiles, YouTube and Jonas Brothers
Oooh, now this should be good. Let's see what we got here.
Everybody strives to get perfect sound and we work hard to get the best sound we can. A certain artist or song or style of music will sound a certain way. It would be ridiculous for me to make a Jonas Brothers record using the techniques and procedures I normally use. The techniques used to make many modern pop records involve a lot of compression and that's what those consumers want, according to the labels. A lot of the processing that audiophiles criticize is a style thing and part of the music itself.
Oh, my god, the Jonas Brothers are so burned! He did not just say that they are trying to get their sound to be a certain way that their audience prefers. Oh no he did not! I can't believe it, I haven't seen a meltdown like this since Christian Bale flipped out on a stage hand. Somebody, call Disney and have them put the Jonas boys on suicide watch tonight in their cells -- not even paper underwear, they know how to hang themselves with that. When they hear this news they'll probably never perform again.
I think what perhaps critics don’t appreciate is that there is a lot of luck in getting a good sound. It's not all about the equipment, spectral response and compressing. It's all about the quality of the musicianship, the songwriting and the sound reaching the microphone ... that's crucial. It's often been said, "garbage in means garbage out," so if that's the case you won’t get a good sound.
Wow, I am so glad I'm not an audiophile right now. I would be fuming! Never have I heard such a direct and searing attack on audiophiles. The era of hipster sound snobs may be over as we know it.
There's another damaging situation: You can complain about iTunes and subscription sites being damaging to copyright owners and having inferior audio quality, but one of the worst culprits is YouTube. You can look for any record ever made and it's on YouTube for free - usually with crappy audio - and let's not even mention the video content that's out there to go with it. I sense there will be a huge copyright court case over the content on YouTube someday.
Oh, now he's stepping on a big dog's toes. You cannot print that, that is slander and that is libel. YouTube promises to provide only the highest quality sound and video ... Certainly Google's legions of lawyers will see Alan Parsons in court.
Seriously? That's considered "ripping"? Everything I read was fact and on top of that, he's still predicating his sentences with "I think."
"Well gee golly, Fred Rodgers, how will we put up with all these harsh words flying out of Alan Parson's mouth?" I think you need to take a trip to the Abuse Department to hear some real
My work here is dung.
Yes, we all know he was engineer for Pink Floyd, but seriously, isn't his name most known for his own stuff? (Eye in the Sky, etc)
The loudnesswar has killed virtually anything on a digital medium, resulting in a worse quality masters. Far worse than compressed phonogram recordings in the past. Sadly this seems to be the new standard for every commercial publication. So first give us back the -12dB, then complain about our rooms.
Support Eachother, Copy Dutch Property!
Audiophiles are pretty much the dumbest group of people ever.
No, you can't hear a difference between this $5000 speaker and this $150 speaker.
No, these cables don't sound "warm".
In other news, Bose, Monster Cable, Bang & Olufsen and other brands announce a entirely new line of room acoustics kits for the audiophile. The kits will be sold for tens of thousands of euros, and are specially engineered for those who wants to hear those bitstreams as if the mp3s were coming directly from the sound studio.
Slashdot, fix your code or at least hire someone who is competent at it to do it for you.
All true, Mr. Parsons, and entirely beside the point. Music lovers care about the music, but they're listening to you because you're exceptionally talented. They love your music so much they're even willing listen to put up with crappy 128kbps encodes on YouTube.
But we're not talking about music lovers here, we're talking about audiophiles.
Audiophiles don't use their equipment to listen to your music. Audiophiles use your music to listen to their equipment.
I wonder what Alan uses as his ringtone. Having a mind for room acoustics, I have the beginning of Time with all the clocks going off.
The only thing we will be listening to is screams.
We have always been at war with loudness...
You slashdotted the site before i could read the second part of the interview! Do you know how BAD that feels? Also, the guy seems very reasonable an pacate, and this is a blatantly inflamatory title. Can we tag titles "-1 Flamebait"?
With everything he said.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
I'm sort of an audiophile myself, and I agree with most of his points, especially the stuff about expensive gear versus room acoustics and "garbage in, garbage out".
As for the YouTube comments, I doubt he knows how much YouTube actually does do for artist's rights. Didn't YouTube pioneer some audio-video matching algorithm to quickly identify infringing content? Don't they use hits to direct traffic to places to legitimately purchase music and videos, rather than just removing videos? This approach is much better for artist's rights than simply censoring things.
Then again, I abhor almost all pop music (all styles, including rock, etc.), and most of what I'm into is pretty underground, and that does contribute a bit to my attitude.
I want an AC3 file (or whatever) with all the sound tracks split. Vocals, back up vocals, each instrument, etc on it's own track.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Yeah - I just bought 2 front presence speakers for my Yammies, and 2 rear presence speakers
That will improve the room acoustics!! The only bad thing is the music on youtube is sampled too low (128kbps) is just too low.
Audiophiles? Ok. Youtube? Fine. But bashing the Jonas Brothers?? Do you have aaaaaaaaany idea what army of girls they command? They will eat you for breakfast...
Many, if not most, "audiophiles" will drop obscene amounts of money on esoteric gear that will produce changes (notice that I did not say "improvements") in the sound that are infinitesimal compared to what can be done by cleaning up the listening room's acoustics. Don't get me wrong. The Wilson WATT/Puppy, for example, is a great speaker system, but spending one tenth their cost on some other speakers and another couple of tenths to tune the room that they'll live in and you'll have better sound almost every time, not to mention more money in your pocket. And don't get me started on cables. Even the most gifted "golden ear" can not pick one cable over another in true, blind, A-B-x testing. Not saying that there isn't a measurable difference (sometimes), but it's clearly not enough to matter when it comes to subjectively grading "the experience".
As for the engineering of most modern recordings, it blows. I don't suppose dynamic range matters much on hip-hop or Jonas Brothers recordings, but there are places where it is a "part of the music", so the engineering should respect that, instead of compressing the hell out of everything. And don't get me started on AutoTune.
Sorry Dr Dre, but having you design speakers is like having an acoustics geek make a hip-hop record.
I wrote my first program at the age of six, and I still can't work out how this website works.
The submitter works for the website that posted that interview. He certainly read it, but chose to make up sensational lies when posting it to slashdot to get more people to click the link.
IF they spent $100.00 on the fricking room they would make more of an increase in sound than $10,000 in gear.
Problem is Audiophiles, the type that read Audiophile magazine and Buy bullshit like B&W are not looking for sound quality, they are trying to show "HOW RICH I AM"
My home theater I built in the basement only tapers from front to back by 1 foot. the rear wall is 1 foot narrower than the front and the ceiling also tapers by that much. Floor is flat except for the riser. This cost me NOTHING extra in the build out.
I then covered the walls in cheap carpet tile and the ceiling is simply a drop ceiling with 3" of fiberglass batts laying on top of them for weight and more sound control (so I cant hear the wife stomping around upstairs)
It sounds better than the $200,000 theater rooms I have installed for rich people. Because I have reduced the room nodes significantly by eliminating parallel walls. (rear is parallel to front, but I have bass traps back there.)
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Seriously, did you RTFA?
All he said was that the sound quality of things you find on You Tube is generally low. That's it.
The tone of his answers bear no relation whatsoever to the summary ... he didn't rip, blast, shred, flame, or even really put down anybody. He offered up some opinions, in a polite way, and without a whole lot of bile attached.
The entire summary is a joke, and is almost entirely unrelated to the interview except that it was Alan Parsons, and he did mention You Tube and the Jonas Brothers. Oh, and he also said that while you could spend an outrageous amount of money on equipment, it made only an incremental difference in his opinion.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
If you put copyrighted music on YouTube, they spot it within minutes, put advertising next to your video and give a share of the proceeds to the copyright owner.
(holds up pinky finger at corner of mouth) the Alan Parsons Project.
in the new digital distribution of the internet why is ... http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100712/23482610186.shtml
Audiophiles are not known for using controlled, double-blind testing. That's a problem, because you can actually control a lot about how you hear things. In short, if you expect something to sound different, you can actually hear a difference; not imagine you hear a difference, actually hear a difference.
JJ Johnston gave a presentation, Why Do We Hear What We Hear?. (PowerPoint, but LibreOffice should open it just fine.) If you look at slides 14 and 16 you will see him explaining the above points.
With double-blind testing, the audiophile will not be able to tell the difference between a $2 cable from monoprice.com and a $1000 cable from some audiophile scam web site. Without the double-blind, a confident audiophile will hear differences that favor the expensive cable.
The crazy thing, and I'm not making this up, is that some audiophiles claim that double-blind testing "doesn't work". They claim that you introduce errors that mask the superiority of the expensive equipment.
P.S. If you would like to have quality audio gear, and you would like to see the gear tested scientifically, you have to check out the NorthWest AV Guy blog. He bought a $1000+ DAC/amplifier that audiophiles like and that tests well objectively, and then he designed a very inexpensive headphone amp that in double-blind testing cannot be distinguised from the expensive one... and he open-sourced the design; you can build one if you like, or buy one pre-built. He uses professional test gear, and for example he showed that the Sansa Clip really is a good-sounding media player (which plays Ogg Vorbis and FLAC, by the way). Check it out. (And NWAudioGuy, if I ever meet you in person, I'll buy you lunch or something.)
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
A: When they're full of shit!
Very little. 128kbps MP3 through earbuds off a phone or iPod is fine for the ambience most of us experience while commuting or driving. Rare tracks have audible artifacts artifacts at 320kbps but for the most part nobody can tell the difference in double listening blind tests. More interestingly, where there is a difference most pick the MP3.
I'm sure it is, I'm not an audiophile and I'm under no illusions about the technical shortcommings of vinyl. I buy vinyl because I prefer the sound even with it's limited frequency response, distortion and surface noise.
Misleading. Last I looked I had a rack full of external mic pres despite having 24 of them (that would allow me do my job) on my console.
Hi-fi people spend huge amounts of money for no improvement.
Oh yeah, I hate Pink Floyd!
I must disagree about this point:
It would be ridiculous for me to make a Jonas Brothers record using the techniques and procedures I normally use. The techniques used to make many modern pop records involve a lot of compression and that’s what those consumers want, according to the labels. A lot of the processing that audiophiles criticize is a style thing and part of the music itself.
Crushed dynamic range and signal clipping are not a "style" or "part of the music itself". They are production errors. They are defects. If done in purpose, they are a sign of defective thinking -- "it has to be as loud as the latest #1" rather than "it has to sound as good as possible".
Circumcision is child abuse.
Because audiophiles are mainly too fucking stupid to use a DAW. Anyone who would pay $5000 for a three meter audio cable can't be that smart.
That is all.
Compressed dynamic range sounds better in car stereos, iPod ear buds and noisy bars, which is where the majority of consumers listen to music.
Then why can't they just release records without overcompressed dynamic range and let the car stereo or the digital media player handle noisy-environment mode?
I know an audiophile and so am privy to that world. They do care quite a lot about room acoustics, contrary to what this guy is saying. Also, serious audiophiles don't just go out and buy the most expensive equipment available. Serious audiophiles obsess over what to buy before they actually get it. The ones who go out and buy the most expensive equipment are poseurs who want something they can brag about. A lot of them are very technically inclined. I knew this guy who was an engineer and actually built his own speakers.
$300 power cord containing $15 worth of parts:
http://gizmodo.com/371536/300-audiophile-grade-power-cable-is-really-worth-15
$1000 power cord on sale for a mere $750:
http://www.essentialsound.com/essence-power-cord/index.htm
$2000 power cord:
http://www.dedicatedaudio.com/inc/sdetail/125/24045
$695 cable for digital signals... that's right, a $700 S/PDIF cord:
http://www.lessloss.com/digital-cables-c-70.html?zenid=l5tu6jq73toh5mk09a315pkid0
Machina Dynamica. Oh man. I really wonder if the guy running this site even believes in his own products, or if he is gleefully exploiting the gullible. Products include "The Clever Little Clock" which seems to be an ordinary travel alarm clock with magical powers, "The Super Intelligent Chip" which not only improves the sound of your CDs, but does so permanently (by altering the structure of the CD in some hand-waving "quantum" fashion), his new product, "The Quantum Temple Bell", a decorated bell you walk around your house ringing and your audio sounds better, and my favorite "The Teleportation Tweak" where he calls you and plays magical tones through your phone, and your audio sounds better afterward.
http://www.machinadynamica.com/
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Today was not the day to turn my sarcasm meter up to high gain...
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
special "fast" HDMI cables
I don't know what you mean by "special fast", but there are standard and high-speed HDMI cables. The standard ones are certified only up to 720p at 60 fps or 1080p at 24 fps. To get high-motion 1080p, 3D 1080p, or bigger PC monitors to run reliably, you need the high-speed cables. It's like the difference between category 5 and category 6 Ethernet cable. But just as cat-6 is cheap on Monoprice, so are high-speed HDMI cables.
Seriously, did you RTFA?
It's hard to read the featured article when "The connection to the server was reset while the page was loading." It took a few reloads.
All he said was that the sound quality of things you find on You Tube is generally low. That's it.
That and on the second page: "I sense there will be a huge copyright court case over the content on YouTube someday." But there was. The judge in Viacom v. YouTube found that YouTube properly maintained its safe harbor by following OCILLA.
It's called the FAR side of the moon. I hate it when people say dark side of the moon.
/joke
I don't listen to the radio. My friends post YouTube suggestions of artists they like. I check them out, and if I like them, I buy their music.
Music sales are up in the digital age and some point don't seem to understand that.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Thank You.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
... What bit rate and codec does he recommend?
Listening to Dark Side of the Moon as I'm reading this...
http://www.allometry.com
Isn't he the guy who made that hovercraft?
"In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Old man yells at cloud
The Alan Parsons Project: (with Eric Woolfson)
Tales of Mystery and Imagination
I Robot
Pyramid
Eve
Eye in the Sky
The Turn of a Friendly Card
Ammonia Avenue
Vulture Culture
Gaudi
Stereotomy
Solo Albums:
The Time Machine
Try Anything Once
A Valid Path
He hardly said any of those things, this is a fucking ridiculous summary if I've ever seen one. And I've seen a lot of slashdot summaries. For one, he never insulted the Jonas Brothers. I'd have no problem with him doing so, but read what he actually wrote. The asshole who wrote the summary just wanted to make it sound controversial when there was NOTHING CONTROVERSIAL ABOUT IT. It's very interesting, not controversial at all.
Alan Parsons thinks the music industry should focus on producing quality music before and during the recording phases, instead of worrying about distribution formats that package music after the fact.
Inheritance is the sincerest form of nepotism.
"The key to this plan is the giant laser, which was invented by the noted Cambridge physicist, Dr. Parsons. Therefore, we shall call it: "The Alan Parsons Project".
You ever hear Ambrosia's first album and think 'which Pink Floyd song is this?' its because Alan Parsons did that album too. Check out 'Holding on to Yesterday' for a perfect example.
I did not think I could placidly endure another gleaming salesman tell me that I had to have quadraphony sound, coming at me from all directions. I have never felt any urge to stand in the middle of a group of musicians. They belong over there, damn it, and I belong over here, listening to what they are doing over there. Music that enfolds you, coming from some undetectable set of sources, is gimmicky, unreal, and eminently forgettable.
-- John D MacDonald, _The Dreadful Lemon Sky_
if the answer isn't violence, neither is your silence / freedom of expression doesn't make it alright
The prevalence of mp3 proves endlessly that people want convenience for their favourite song. Youtube and mp3s hurt my ears, but I use them all the time. My records sound lovely, but they sit in a box. Honestly, I'm more interested in what someone like Craig Leon (Ramones, New Fads) or Rick Rubin (google it) think. As far as the ripping thing goes, I've said for 20 years that people don't copy and listen to stuff they don't like.
One is his mention of how often digital TV sound is out of sync...which nobody else seems to talk about, ever. The other is that he's spot on about the "idiophiles" who think if a $200 amplifer is ten times as good as a $20 one, then a $20,000 amp has to be 100 times better still. Those folks lost me back when a bunch of them were claiming that your amplifier had to be built with point-to-point hand wiring instead of printed circuits, because the latter sounded "flat"...
AP has been around pretty much since stereo really took off. The problem I have with the "junk" called music today is that it matters not if it is played at a club, on the radio, MP3, CD, it's crap. NO dynamic range, overdriven. You hear the garbage coming out of cars today, the RUST bounces up and down and the THD is in the 30% range LOL. Spend thousands of dollars on equipment and it still sounds like junk. My home stereo is a simple setup, couple of good quality Klipsch speakers, a descent quality amp etc and it sounds great. You have to take the acoustics of a room into account and how the sounds will resonate off the walls, furniture etc. Just spending thousands of dollars on sub woofers, horns and a zillion watt per channel amp won't do you any good. People should listen to some of AP's work, not just the top 40 songs. Some of his stuff has a lot of depth. Plug into some good Sennsheiser headphones, close your eyes and listen to it. You might have to hear it over and over just to hear all of the sounds coming out of what he did back 30 years ago.
You have a DVD box set called the Art & Science of Sound Recording. Why did you decide to make this box set, and does someone need to be an aspiring sound engineer to learn something from this set?
Hey, does anyone know if this is available on youtube yet?
'The tyrant will always find pretext for his tyranny.' - Aesop's Fables
...the Cartesians. Just a bunch of squares. Cubic, man.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
In the 1980's, our church paster had a nice set up in his living room. Higher end equipment but nothing you couldn't pick up at the local Wherehouse. The room had carpet and good acoustics so everything sounded really good. I considered him an audiophile, someone who buys good equipment and sets it up right. I am pretty sure he didn't have any $300 (or even $10) cables in his system.
About 5 years later, I went to an Accept concert in El Paso. It was horrible! While Accept totally jammed, it was way too loud and distorted for the indoor location. It was literally painful with my ears ringing afterwards (this coming from a teenage headbangers perspective). A few years later, I went to a Metallica concert in Germany. It was also in an indoor location, but wasn't as loud. No distortion, one of the best concerts I have ever attended.
Bottom line, a real audiophile setup is where the equipment is decent and matches the environment it is installed in. It doesn't cost a fortune. Anyone who brags about $300 power cords is the same sort of person who drives his Porsche 911 to the office everyday instead of buying a Camaro and running it at the strip on the weekend.
"Be grateful for what you have. You may never know when you may lose it."
"I think what perhaps critics don’t appreciate is that there is a lot of luck in getting a good sound. It’s not all about the equipment, spectral response and compressing. It’s all about the quality of the musicianship, the songwriting and the sound reaching the microphone that’s crucial. It’s often been said, “garbage in means garbage out,” so if that’s the case you won’t get a good sound.
Everybody strives to get perfect sound and we work hard to get the best sound we can. A certain artist or song or style of music will sound a certain way. It would be ridiculous for me to make a Jonas Brothers record using the techniques and procedures I normally use. The techniques used to make many modern pop records involve a lot of compression and that’s what those consumers want, according to the labels. A lot of the processing that audiophiles criticize is a style thing and part of the music itself."
Where exactly did he call the Jonas Brothers "garbage"? The summary is very misleading.
I don't think any one cares when simply listening to an album. Maybe they aren't investing money in room acoustics because the return on that investment?
Chewbacon
The Bible is like Wikipedia: written by a bunch of people and verifiable by questionable sources.
*sigh*
Well two out of three sense-making comments ain't bad. The "artists rights violations on YouTube" sounds like he's been brainwashed by the RIAA.
Last year we were having a record snowfall, so I set my video camera up to tape some of it. It recorded some songs playing in the background. I uploaded it to show my family, and in about 2 hours I got a message saying it was banned in Germany because "The Final Countdown" was heard on it! Weird.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
That laser never worked properly.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
I like the sarcasm, and the actual story quotes, but Alan is an idiot.. If he wants to come up with things to whine about, one thing that was often bitched over was how bands and producers would capture a live sound in the studio something he had done. Two, would be how he used FAKE or synthetic effects to capture an overall vibe, or emotion (I not opposed to this, I have used stomp boxes or effects for overall sound). And to be Captain Obvious here YouTube gets away with it because the sound is of shitty quality, and a majority of the "albums" have long surpassed there hoop rah (money making sales), HELLO ALAN welcome to earth...... Pink Floyd was not the only band with that sound at that time, but they made it commercial. Alan makes me laugh, he seems to think because he was a producer with bands that had success before he came along somehow he is a genius.... But good for him he should use his fame to complain over stupid shit.. And Shame on the author of this story for taking Alan's words into another dimension no where close to reality..
Actually, crap audio sounds worse on good speakers. The cheap speakers act as a filter, plus the ear/mind compensates so you clean up the sound. It's 'good enough'.
Many people say this, but not in my experience. I've played YouTube off a laptop, MP3s through smartphone headphone jacks, mono FM radio, and cassettes through my $20,000 system. At the same volume level, everything sounds better than on my $150 PC speaker system. No matter what the original is, distorting it some more and reproducing it through bad speakers doesn't help.
=S
Alan Parsons says I do think in the domestic environment, the people that have sufficient equipment don’t pay enough attention to room acoustics.
Agreed, maybe people without a dedicated room or who are renting feel limited in what they can do, but it makes a big difference.
If you have small or "bookshelf" speakers, put them on rigid stands. Read up on speaker positioning; get some test signals off the web and really well-recorded music you're familiar with; then play one channel at a time while someone moves that speaker around (and you try out different listening positions); then adjust both speakers to get a good stereo spread. Use rugs and drapes to absorb first order reflections off the floor, side walls, and rear wall.
I paid Rives Audio to consult on my room layout, they suggested firing across the room instead of along it, putting sound deadening panels on the rear wall, using bookshelves to break up the side wall reflections etc. Money well spent. Meanwhile despite instant worldwide friction-free distribution, artists don't make enough from recording sales to pay for Alan Parsons and wind up making crappy home recordings or taking rough mixes from live gigs.
=S
You must be a young guy who doesn't understand reading and comprehension.
"He also is surprised the music industry has not addressed the artists' rights violations taking place on YouTube"
or the part directly from TFA
"You can complain about iTunes and subscription sites being damaging to copyright owners and having inferior audio quality, but one of the worst culprits is YouTube."
regardless of whether it is in the context of sound quality or not is still proof of my point -- yet another person who fails to understand and strive to embrace, rather wants to fight it instead.
...really need to stay off the Internet.
It might be a bit treasonous to post this comment on a technology-oriented site, but I think it's a (sad) side-effect of technology. Take photography for instance. Photography in the past meant buying film (remember that stuff?), setting your ISO, adjusting your f-stops and shutter speed, framing the photo the way you wanted it, possibly developing your own film (a love-hate labor in my experience), getting really into it and setting up a dark room, mixing chemicals, hanging film to dry in your shower, busting out with the enlarger........ Now all you need is a digital point-and-click and Photoshop. Where's the fun in that?!? Yes there's certainly art to it, I won't suggest there isn't, but man, it's just not the same.
Having seen Alan at NAMM a few weeks ago, I will say his comments are right on point. He was making some of the same points then. He pulls no punches and his insight into the business is remarkable.
Don't hate...appreciate. The man is a walking, talking, musical production genius.
Nowhere in the interview did he call the Jonas Brothers "garbage". What's up with that?
when will this project be completed?