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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.
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"?
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.
How about a couple sub channels of editing instructions like how much compression and post processing cues.
That way you could adjust them on you new MP5 player?
So the player processor would take all the channels and combine them in realtime to play them and you could have a nice friendly knob to dial up or down compression as they play back.
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
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.
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
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.
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?
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.