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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."
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)
In case anyone is wondering what Skinkie is talking about, here's the link.
Yeah, they asked him about that and he misunderstood the question to be about lossy audio data compression rather than dynamic range compression:
Q: Do you think that sound quality is driving this trend? Are people tiring of low-resolution sound and compressed recordings that lack dynamic range?
A: That may well be. The majority [of consumers] are happy with MP3, but they donâ(TM)t know what they are missing. Being fast and free are priorities, and thatâ(TM)s why MP3 is popular. Thereâ(TM)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.
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.
As far as them being the biggest offender I was under the assumption that if I posted a video with Alan Parson Project as the background music I am fully allowed to use it under "Fair Use", as long as I'm not making a profit.
Fair use allows using copyrighted material for educational purposes, criticism, research, etc. Using a song for background music would not be considered fair use, especially if the entire song is used.
As far as them being the biggest offender I was under the assumption that if I posted a video with Alan Parson Project as the background music I am fully allowed to use it under "Fair Use", as long as I'm not making a profit.
Have a look at : http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl102.html and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use re Fair Use.
I think your described use would not fall under Fair Use.
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
Furthermore, it's not the recording engineer who squashes it like that. While they may squash individual instruments with compression, it is the mastering engineer who applies the overall limiting to the mix.
To the haters: You can't win. If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine
The loudnesswar has killed virtually anything on a digital medium, [...] give us back the -12dB, then complain about our rooms.
Alan Parsons Shares Lessons Learned During Legendary Career (from 4 years ago):
But one of his biggest pieces of advice for students and anyone interested in recording now is not to join the loudness war.
"Record labels want their records to sound louder than everyone else's so they compress the s--t out of them," he says. "It's terribly sad and I hope you will support me in resisting this concept.
"If a song has dynamics and breathes then don't push it. If your record is quieter than someone else's then just turn it up with the volume knob!"
We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.
-- Anais Nin