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."

Comments

"Pink Floyd engineer"?

[catbutt]

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)

Re:"Pink Floyd engineer"?

[John3]

Sorry, I wasn't clear in my narrative.

Me: Did you read that article about Alan Parsons?

Average music listener: Alan who?

Me; Alan Parsons. He was the recording engineer for "Dark Side Of The Moon".

Average music listener: Oh, I know that album, didn't know the name of the engineer.

Re:Those audiotechies killed dynamic range

[Yvan256]

In case anyone is wondering what Skinkie is talking about, here's the link.

Sensationalizing for Page Hits

[pavon]

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.

Re:Scathing, Absolutely Scathing

[asdbffg]

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.

How audiophiles can fool themselves

[steveha]

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