Quad, off vinyl, done by cutting not one but two distinct carrier waves into the groove at 30K. These then somehow manipulated a FM wave varying from 18K to 45K (!) and that's what made your surround outputs. It worked, and was the most ungodly hack. I've never heard it, and I bet those surround channels sounded mighty strange, and after a thousand plays, good day, sir! you lose!;)
But it worked. In 1971. Pretty conclusive proof vinyl put out coherent audio waaaay beyond 22K, if you could run a quadrophonic sound system off FM carrier waves at up to 45K using the vinyl mastering of the day.
Thanks. Being an old fart who willingly listens to Neil Young, I like hearing new stuff that's amazing. More relevantly, Noisia USES those frequency ranges actively, which is more than Neil really does (with him it's all just the natural behavior of cymbals, sibilance, violins or what have you).
It blows my mind that the same generation who's composing music that can do ANYTHING with sound, tend to be glued to this dogma and stuck to lossy encoding and aggressive bandlimiting. Seriously guys, it's just as much of a handicap as loudness war is, and I know you don't like that. Bits are cheap, live a little.
He totally does: plays guitar through a particular crusty old amp and mixes/records stuff through lovingly reconditioned crusty old tube gear (mind you, speakers might be a lot newer, certainly not worn unless it's his guitar speakers).
Have you HEARD crusty old tube gear, playing music? Or indeed playing old records or alternately the kind of overkill digital Neil likes?
You might consider trying that one day. I don't listen through crusty old tube gear, far from it, but once I did. Not a great choice for a working sound engineer as it'll fool you and make you do dumb things in mixing (better to have something that'll sound bad if you mix bad). However, you might be startled at how un-yucky classic vinyl (or overkill digital Neil-style) sounds through old tube gear and various kinds of speakers.
In fact some of the junkiest old speakers do have the advantage of being single driver, so they trade off frequency extension (which the old tube amps don't do great with anyway) for other worthy qualities of tone. But you have to hear it, and streaming audio is more or less the diametric opposite tone quality to that.
I don't remember electing you the arbiter of whether Neil's information is false FOR ME.
I have a Pono and Neil's right. But I've also worked in pro audio for many years, and when I say it's obviously better than ipods and such and comparable to a Lavry DA10, I am plugging this into it: http://en-us.sennheiser.com/im...
It's slightly disingenuous to argue for Pono's cheapness when ideally the headphones you use cost as much OR MORE than the Pono, to get those results. But I already had the headphones (in fact I've stripped them to bare speaker elements for critical listening during audio plugin design).
Neil does like going around blowing the minds of amateur listeners who've never heard good sound before. He might not be telling them that you need to spend a bunch on headphones too, but people like blowing stupid money on headphones: look at Beats.
He doesn't need a profit, and it's not false information. I'm afraid you're being kind of silly here.
Somehow, techies are all 'rar, free market, no regulate anything' but the instant it's 'audio frequencies', suddenly all pearls are clutched and it's EEEEE! Protect the poor general public from the evildoer exploiters! Baffling. You don't trust the market perhaps because claims like Neil's gain traction and are taken seriously? There might be a reason for that, for instance 'true information'. Whether it matters that much to you is another story.
Dave, if it's you, drop me a note on Terry's forum or something because I will buy you a steak dinner just for the sheer intensity of that burn. You mean, funny, awesome man:)
Oh, and thanks for mastering The Police's 'Synchronicity'. I love that record:)
You manipulate bands like 30 or 40K when you want to bring a sense of energy or detail without apparent brightness—or if you need to interact with other EQ bands in a particular way. Only certain sounds even make sense to work with this way: cymbals are an obvious choice as they go right out to 50K and beyond, and of course lead vocals miked very closely with a large-diaphragm condenser mic. As soon as you're about ten feet from the mic those superhigh frequencies are already gone. To the listener they read as 'incredibly close to the ear' and that's valuable for many lead vocals.
Granted, if you count PA system graphic EQs and mixing board channels, the vast majority of EQs don't touch this range and may even filter it right out by default. But one doesn't choose lead vocal mics and EQs on the basis of averageness.
That's a SM57, a guitar cab mic. It is, shall we say, NOT typical of the performance of even $100 microphones these days. Hell, the trouble you have with cheap Chinese condensers is generally not the rolling off of high frequencies: the problem with garbage condenser mics is that they are TOO bright and blast you with sound up to 20K and beyond, combined with nasty capsule resonances.
If your argument rests on 'microphones act like SM57s, here's a chart', I can't help but question how honest the rest of your argument is. 57s are for putting up to a speaker grille or the actual paper cone, to get a really upfront heavy guitar tone that conditions the unbearably bright, harsh sound you get there.
Did anybody else spot that was a chart for a SM57? Or know what mic that is?
You don't GET to tell a crowd of uneducated techies that's a normal microphone and what they typically hear on recordings. They might believe you, and then where would we be?
These days concerts (or even dance clubs) are the domain of really expensive, powerful PA systems such as Funktion One, where old 808s and 303s and JP-8000s combine to make pulsating electronic noises VERY LOUDLY.
At SPLs like that, you'd better believe you can hear lossy-encoding crud in the noise floor, with speakers like that you'd better believe you can hear sloppy blurred transients from mp3s. It's trendy to make PA systems ultra-powerful, ultra-punchy, capable of shatteringly pure sound quality. Lots of modern music (Noisia comes to mind for me) is geared to exploit this. It still sounds good as crappy MP3 because you can't tell what it's supposed to be, but over a real system (such as at a big club) it sounds amazing. Or over a really good home system.
DJs know this, that's why they scorn DJs that try to DJ using mp3s.
At 130 db on the dance floor that is where you might want to follow Neil Young's lead, and get something better than streaming quality. At 130 db you will probably be hearing the difference between 16 and 24 bit on the music's texture (your ears will be compressing the peaks insanely hard and they won't register with you like they would listening at home). And over massive high-powered horn tweeter arrays that can kill dog ears at fifty paces with >30K energy, you will probably hear the subtle differences between brick wall cutoff at 22K, and brights going out to 48K or so.
What you play on your iPod is your affair and a different other thing.;)
They pretty much mean 'owner is willing to listen to music'. Compared to serious gear Bose is kind of silly but usually has some sort of merit. They're almost always working some kind of interesting concept, like the old single-driver omnidirectionals with most of the speakers facing backwards, or the noise-cancel headphones, or their line array speaker sticks. It's not that they're super well implemented by professional standards but at least they're trying and have a 'hook' to run with.
Owning Bose means you don't know all that much but you're willing to learn and eager to listen. Or possibly that you want to lord it over plebes, in which case the joke's on you:)
Real question here: back in the day media distribution was indeed controlled by a smallish group of powerbrokers, such as Ahmet Ertegun, Clive Davis (and how he'd hate being put second!), Walter Yetnikoff, David Geffen, Irving Azoff, even eventually guys like Neil Bogart. (if you don't recognize these names it's a fascinating story)
Now, media distribution is controlled by tech companies. We don't know any of the people behind it, it may or may not be an even smaller group, and where the original powerbrokers were motivated by personal artistic whims (Davis, Ertegun, to some extent early Geffen) or rapacious greed for power and importance (Geffen! Yetnikoff, Davis again, Bogart), today's media powerbrokers are devaluing media as a loss leader to get tactical control of the distribution channels, correctly thinking that if you can lock down a channel (like YouTube, or searching with Google) you have real power.
This is actually the Casablanca/Neil Bogart model, which ought to scare anybody who knows the history. Except artists aren't getting paid because they're up against the total history of recorded media, and rather than knocking off the outliers the whole system (that was already only serving megastars) is just scaled down and made faceless.
This is because media distribution is controlled by an even smaller group of tech industry middle managers who've been dumping content for decades to try and lock down control of the media pipes, in no small way by undercutting anything the former media industry could do.
Given that in neither case does it help working musicians and artists, and that in both cases it's control by a tiny bunch of dubious people, but now you will never know who they are and their interests are completely opposed to that of their content creators, how is this better?
You can say 'because artists are getting paid what they should, nothing' and I'll disagree, but please don't even make an argument that it's an equalizing force bringing down the megastars and growing the grassroots because internet at this point, that is clearly bullshit and always has been. It's a lie.
Network effects means the manufactured megastars dominate MORE over working musicians, not less, and the whole system has also been scaled down as you describe. I'd just like to know if you're imagining some kind of grass roots DIY 'because internet' lie. It's not, the controlling questionable individuals have just become Google mode (you can't ever reach them or speak to them, and they don't even care about you out of vanity or whim, instead they act like algorithms).
The publishers are no prize, we know that (different artists have had very different experiences with 'em: ask John Fogerty)
Streaming is WAY worse. If you even knew any working musicians you'd have heard this. Even midlevel acts are getting checks like a couple bucks, or in the pennies. Neil has always been pretty decent at the business side and with CSN was aligned with Geffen back when you could get a pretty good deal if you were sharp, and he took advantage of that, and it's other people who got ripped off by the biz, not so much Neil.
He's not calling you a thief, he literally said quote "Copy my songs if you want to. That's free. Your choice" unquote.
I think it is possible you still have stuff to learn about the industry, about the current state of affairs, and about streaming. Fact is, musicians in general are way more hosed in the world of streaming, and they're being killed off slightly faster than the actual industry execs you hate, which are also being killed off (while they frantically try to cut streaming deals).
That's a good analogy. How much over 30fps is unnecessary for a twitch game? Presumably 60fps is too many?
How about 1920x1080? No video games should be allowed to run better than 30fps 1080p, including on home PCs?
That's not serious, by the way, I love me some 60fps youtube videos even (much less directly using a computer)
But it's analogous. Also, modern music is MORE likely to exploit the high sample rates Neil likes. Very few sounds he ever made besides cymbals really used that range, but something like noisia? Wow. If they're not working in 96 or 192K, they should, they've got a LOT of stuff going on waaaaay up there, and it's amazing.
Yeah, but I like stuff like Tangerine Dream, or obscure psytrance bands from Sweden, where there IS no 'lyrics' and the sound is literally the only thing. It's OK if Neil is being insulting to you, you don't have to care. He's brought out some playback gear that's really, really good at playing the music _I_ like, a lot cheaper than that stuff usually runs.
I prefer fancypants 192K (or 96K: same to me, frankly) 24 bit, to vinyl. Unhesitatingly (though there are times when the vinyl mastering helped the sound of the record, and just taking the master tape wouldn't give you as good of a mix).
But I prefer both to CD quality, except when the vinyl's real noisy. Assuming I can pay attention, because if I'm doing something else none of it matters. But if I'm doing something else I'm NOT listening to music at all.
And I prefer CD quality to any form of lossy compression: and have told them apart in ABX testing, up to and including a 320K mp3 example. It was a castanet sound, and if it had been some other instrument (such as a flute, or an 808 kick sample) I would never have been able to tell. The attack of the castanet sound had less personality as 320K mp3, and I ABXed it successfully that time (it's a challenging test!)
I am not obliged to listen to crap just because, if the crap was playing a 300 hz sine, I wouldn't be able to tell the difference. I can use something that's equal to any listening/content situation I can throw at it. Or, I can get something that's happily overkill and know there's no way I'll ever have issues with it. To me, 96K is already overkill, probably 64K would suffice, but 44.1K is a little chintzy.
I have a car that'll drive way faster than 90 mph, too, even though I stick to around 65 most of the time. Is that immoral? Am I obliged to only drive something that struggles to get to 70, that being faster than I'll generally use?
He literally just said "Copy my songs if you want to. That's free. Your choice."
Considering how much Slashdot likes all forms of DRM and restrictions of information, I would think that was worth something. Of course the reason he's saying it is, he's telling you "your mp3s are worthless! Call that music? shyeah right! Knock yourself out, you're making yourself the sucker!"
Which is more or less true: people toss around multiple gigabytes of data via torrents all the time, and nothing much is stopping you from also copying and exchanging 192K uncompressed files of all Neil's stuff. But no, people are gonna copy around 128K mp3s that sound like a cellphone with delusions of grandeur and think they're sticking it to the Man.
As for FM, traditionally that's more like a remastering with a weird twist on it where you're pre/de-emphasising it heavily in transmission, which also gives it a characteristic sound. AM radio has different characteristics and rather than require really tight stop-bands with no overshoot, it's strongly asymmetrical because you only have to limit one polarity of the signal. So it's loaded with second harmonics like a single-ended triode, a 'warm' sound. Both of them started out analog (do they even do AM radio anymore?)
He may be selling them, but getting them made the way they once were, that's another story. Not long ago I had a choice of buying a new release in fancy vinyl, or in 192K/24. I went for the hi-res digital without hesitation (and NOT from Neil, either). I'll listen to vinyl from back when they made it properly, anything new I'd rather seek out a digital format. New vinyl is NOT automatically good or good-sounding just for being vinyl, that's crazy talk.
I think you'll find most people making arguments against the thing have not heard it. I'm thinking of a variety of sound engineer and musician friends not associated with Young. One guy was a mastering engineer, one's a modern-day musician who does interesting stuff with sampling and sound layering, including sounds like a dog bowl whirring on concrete.
It'd be pretty dumb to say 'the Pono doesn't sound great' when it blatantly does (it's battery life that sucks!:) ). What some people are saying is that everything, all the streaming and earbuds and detritus of the 2015 audio life, also sounds great, wonderful, perfect.
Ah, another vintage slashdotter! We're coming out of the woodwork here.
The crappiness of your Macbook isn't Neil's fault, and he didn't make you buy it. Nice burn on the FLAC file, we both know that's lossless and there will be no difference (unlike anything where data's truncated or lossy-compressed). And you can still get tons of music which isn't all 'loudness war', across the entire range of recorded history in fact. If people aren't making good recordings anymore, listen to something else, over headphones that block some of the distracting noise.
If you don't want Neil or his music, he's done you no injury. If you are mad at him continually suggesting that the digital formats we're using are inadequate, or that your playback stuff is plebian and lame, you should tell him to go make his own. Oh, wait, he did! And put it up for sale at a price that strikingly undercuts most of the 'audiophile' world. And nobody is making you buy that, though it's markedly cheaper than your MacBook. I'm given to understand there are computers running Windows and Linux that will also play your Miley Cyrus.
Wire coat hanger ain't a bad DIY fancy speaker cable. It's good heavy wire, and an air dielectric, and depending on how the coathangers are twisted it might be very little inductance. It's fine to tease overly-wealthy people waving magic rocks at their stereos, but there are a lot of things you can do WITHOUT spending silly audiophool money that will help your monitoring system perform. The stuff worth having tends to work on basic concepts like capacitance, inductance, adequacy of power supply, isolation from digital circuitry and so on. Just like the design inside the Pono. There's little revolutionary in there, it's just done right at a price point.
You might be able to tell the difference between wimpy 28 gauge speaker cable and nice solid air-dielectric coat hangers if you're feeding the playback system off a Pono with good digital files to play through it.:)
Nonsense. I have one. It sounds awesome, comparable to a Lavry DA10 at several times the price that can't play all the digital audio the Pono can.
Everybody I know who has one or has heard one, who actually know what they're doing audio-wise, think it sounds great.
If you get used to tone like that then it becomes more understandable why Neil would respond with a 'nuuuuu! go 'way!' to compressed streaming audio. Is it up to him to decide whether the experience of sonic presence and tone color is all that matters? When there are things like notes, lyrics, stuff not related to how good the sound is? I don't know. Not like you can't get everything he's done by mp3 anyway.
The real reason to bail on streaming services is, it's a con and ripping off the artists even worse than the original music business did. Everybody in the business knows rates are a sick joke, meaningless. You don't have to care about that but any musician has a right to 'nope' out of there, at least unless or until the tech industry sets up mandatory licensing so musicians can't even opt out of streaming if they wanted.
It's pretty classless to curse out Neil Young for doing this. He doesn't have a right to go and make his own tech if he doesn't like what the computer industry's done with his medium? As if CDs weren't bad enough. You can say "fine, shut up and go make your own music tech!" and I'd have thought that would be a real mic drop line right there.
And he DID. I own a Pono, thing sounds extremely awesome, ridiculously good for $400 (I have numerous digital converters worth more than that, it's my day job). He DID go make his own, and you're still bitchin'?
Nope. They will preferentially hire drivers using Jeeps and Humvees that can drive across post-apocalyptic terrain (or that six-wheeled Mercedes thing?).
Then, everybody else finds using private vehicles is even more difficult and expensive, making hiring an Uber Humvee more advantageous.
That's the obvious market answer. Why would they want to fix roads if that helps people not use their service?
Imagine a guy who gets off on driving for Uber Black in a Ferrari F40. They get crazy tips but what they're really doing it for is the awe of the passengers and to be treated like a freaky crazy rich dude for the people. What's that (or more luxurious angles: a Rolls-Royce guy) do to the job market?
Slashdot Mirror
Because they are losing money and the tech equivalent of Enron?
No, I mean that I bought the new Beauty Pill album as download-only, 192K 24 bit. Sounds truly awesome.
Vinyl certainly doesn't cap at 16k or anything close to it, because this crazy system worked: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Quad, off vinyl, done by cutting not one but two distinct carrier waves into the groove at 30K. These then somehow manipulated a FM wave varying from 18K to 45K (!) and that's what made your surround outputs. It worked, and was the most ungodly hack. I've never heard it, and I bet those surround channels sounded mighty strange, and after a thousand plays, good day, sir! you lose! ;)
But it worked. In 1971. Pretty conclusive proof vinyl put out coherent audio waaaay beyond 22K, if you could run a quadrophonic sound system off FM carrier waves at up to 45K using the vinyl mastering of the day.
Thanks. Being an old fart who willingly listens to Neil Young, I like hearing new stuff that's amazing. More relevantly, Noisia USES those frequency ranges actively, which is more than Neil really does (with him it's all just the natural behavior of cymbals, sibilance, violins or what have you).
It blows my mind that the same generation who's composing music that can do ANYTHING with sound, tend to be glued to this dogma and stuck to lossy encoding and aggressive bandlimiting. Seriously guys, it's just as much of a handicap as loudness war is, and I know you don't like that. Bits are cheap, live a little.
He totally does: plays guitar through a particular crusty old amp and mixes/records stuff through lovingly reconditioned crusty old tube gear (mind you, speakers might be a lot newer, certainly not worn unless it's his guitar speakers).
Have you HEARD crusty old tube gear, playing music? Or indeed playing old records or alternately the kind of overkill digital Neil likes?
You might consider trying that one day. I don't listen through crusty old tube gear, far from it, but once I did. Not a great choice for a working sound engineer as it'll fool you and make you do dumb things in mixing (better to have something that'll sound bad if you mix bad). However, you might be startled at how un-yucky classic vinyl (or overkill digital Neil-style) sounds through old tube gear and various kinds of speakers.
In fact some of the junkiest old speakers do have the advantage of being single driver, so they trade off frequency extension (which the old tube amps don't do great with anyway) for other worthy qualities of tone. But you have to hear it, and streaming audio is more or less the diametric opposite tone quality to that.
I don't remember electing you the arbiter of whether Neil's information is false FOR ME.
I have a Pono and Neil's right. But I've also worked in pro audio for many years, and when I say it's obviously better than ipods and such and comparable to a Lavry DA10, I am plugging this into it: http://en-us.sennheiser.com/im...
It's slightly disingenuous to argue for Pono's cheapness when ideally the headphones you use cost as much OR MORE than the Pono, to get those results. But I already had the headphones (in fact I've stripped them to bare speaker elements for critical listening during audio plugin design).
Neil does like going around blowing the minds of amateur listeners who've never heard good sound before. He might not be telling them that you need to spend a bunch on headphones too, but people like blowing stupid money on headphones: look at Beats.
He doesn't need a profit, and it's not false information. I'm afraid you're being kind of silly here.
Somehow, techies are all 'rar, free market, no regulate anything' but the instant it's 'audio frequencies', suddenly all pearls are clutched and it's EEEEE! Protect the poor general public from the evildoer exploiters! Baffling. You don't trust the market perhaps because claims like Neil's gain traction and are taken seriously? There might be a reason for that, for instance 'true information'. Whether it matters that much to you is another story.
Dave? Dare I say 'the' Dave Collins?
'Taustin'? Run.
You've just bet a steak dinner that dcollins117 can't tell the difference between Pandora 128K audio, and Pono 192K/24 bit uncompressed.
He'll be listening on this: http://www.hardbanger.net/wp-c...
Dave, if it's you, drop me a note on Terry's forum or something because I will buy you a steak dinner just for the sheer intensity of that burn. You mean, funny, awesome man :)
Oh, and thanks for mastering The Police's 'Synchronicity'. I love that record :)
Slashdot, ladies and gentlemen.
http://maagaudio.com/AIRBAND.h...
You manipulate bands like 30 or 40K when you want to bring a sense of energy or detail without apparent brightness—or if you need to interact with other EQ bands in a particular way. Only certain sounds even make sense to work with this way: cymbals are an obvious choice as they go right out to 50K and beyond, and of course lead vocals miked very closely with a large-diaphragm condenser mic. As soon as you're about ten feet from the mic those superhigh frequencies are already gone. To the listener they read as 'incredibly close to the ear' and that's valuable for many lead vocals.
Granted, if you count PA system graphic EQs and mixing board channels, the vast majority of EQs don't touch this range and may even filter it right out by default. But one doesn't choose lead vocal mics and EQs on the basis of averageness.
That's a SM57, a guitar cab mic. It is, shall we say, NOT typical of the performance of even $100 microphones these days. Hell, the trouble you have with cheap Chinese condensers is generally not the rolling off of high frequencies: the problem with garbage condenser mics is that they are TOO bright and blast you with sound up to 20K and beyond, combined with nasty capsule resonances.
If your argument rests on 'microphones act like SM57s, here's a chart', I can't help but question how honest the rest of your argument is. 57s are for putting up to a speaker grille or the actual paper cone, to get a really upfront heavy guitar tone that conditions the unbearably bright, harsh sound you get there.
Did anybody else spot that was a chart for a SM57? Or know what mic that is?
You don't GET to tell a crowd of uneducated techies that's a normal microphone and what they typically hear on recordings. They might believe you, and then where would we be?
I don't know, I think he has a good point
These days concerts (or even dance clubs) are the domain of really expensive, powerful PA systems such as Funktion One, where old 808s and 303s and JP-8000s combine to make pulsating electronic noises VERY LOUDLY.
At SPLs like that, you'd better believe you can hear lossy-encoding crud in the noise floor, with speakers like that you'd better believe you can hear sloppy blurred transients from mp3s. It's trendy to make PA systems ultra-powerful, ultra-punchy, capable of shatteringly pure sound quality. Lots of modern music (Noisia comes to mind for me) is geared to exploit this. It still sounds good as crappy MP3 because you can't tell what it's supposed to be, but over a real system (such as at a big club) it sounds amazing. Or over a really good home system.
DJs know this, that's why they scorn DJs that try to DJ using mp3s.
At 130 db on the dance floor that is where you might want to follow Neil Young's lead, and get something better than streaming quality. At 130 db you will probably be hearing the difference between 16 and 24 bit on the music's texture (your ears will be compressing the peaks insanely hard and they won't register with you like they would listening at home). And over massive high-powered horn tweeter arrays that can kill dog ears at fifty paces with >30K energy, you will probably hear the subtle differences between brick wall cutoff at 22K, and brights going out to 48K or so.
What you play on your iPod is your affair and a different other thing. ;)
They pretty much mean 'owner is willing to listen to music'. Compared to serious gear Bose is kind of silly but usually has some sort of merit. They're almost always working some kind of interesting concept, like the old single-driver omnidirectionals with most of the speakers facing backwards, or the noise-cancel headphones, or their line array speaker sticks. It's not that they're super well implemented by professional standards but at least they're trying and have a 'hook' to run with.
Owning Bose means you don't know all that much but you're willing to learn and eager to listen. Or possibly that you want to lord it over plebes, in which case the joke's on you :)
Real question here: back in the day media distribution was indeed controlled by a smallish group of powerbrokers, such as Ahmet Ertegun, Clive Davis (and how he'd hate being put second!), Walter Yetnikoff, David Geffen, Irving Azoff, even eventually guys like Neil Bogart. (if you don't recognize these names it's a fascinating story)
Now, media distribution is controlled by tech companies. We don't know any of the people behind it, it may or may not be an even smaller group, and where the original powerbrokers were motivated by personal artistic whims (Davis, Ertegun, to some extent early Geffen) or rapacious greed for power and importance (Geffen! Yetnikoff, Davis again, Bogart), today's media powerbrokers are devaluing media as a loss leader to get tactical control of the distribution channels, correctly thinking that if you can lock down a channel (like YouTube, or searching with Google) you have real power.
This is actually the Casablanca/Neil Bogart model, which ought to scare anybody who knows the history. Except artists aren't getting paid because they're up against the total history of recorded media, and rather than knocking off the outliers the whole system (that was already only serving megastars) is just scaled down and made faceless.
This is because media distribution is controlled by an even smaller group of tech industry middle managers who've been dumping content for decades to try and lock down control of the media pipes, in no small way by undercutting anything the former media industry could do.
Given that in neither case does it help working musicians and artists, and that in both cases it's control by a tiny bunch of dubious people, but now you will never know who they are and their interests are completely opposed to that of their content creators, how is this better?
You can say 'because artists are getting paid what they should, nothing' and I'll disagree, but please don't even make an argument that it's an equalizing force bringing down the megastars and growing the grassroots because internet at this point, that is clearly bullshit and always has been. It's a lie.
Network effects means the manufactured megastars dominate MORE over working musicians, not less, and the whole system has also been scaled down as you describe. I'd just like to know if you're imagining some kind of grass roots DIY 'because internet' lie. It's not, the controlling questionable individuals have just become Google mode (you can't ever reach them or speak to them, and they don't even care about you out of vanity or whim, instead they act like algorithms).
And with that, the thread was won :D
No, wrong, not.
The publishers are no prize, we know that (different artists have had very different experiences with 'em: ask John Fogerty)
Streaming is WAY worse. If you even knew any working musicians you'd have heard this. Even midlevel acts are getting checks like a couple bucks, or in the pennies. Neil has always been pretty decent at the business side and with CSN was aligned with Geffen back when you could get a pretty good deal if you were sharp, and he took advantage of that, and it's other people who got ripped off by the biz, not so much Neil.
He's not calling you a thief, he literally said quote "Copy my songs if you want to. That's free. Your choice" unquote.
I think it is possible you still have stuff to learn about the industry, about the current state of affairs, and about streaming. Fact is, musicians in general are way more hosed in the world of streaming, and they're being killed off slightly faster than the actual industry execs you hate, which are also being killed off (while they frantically try to cut streaming deals).
That's a good analogy. How much over 30fps is unnecessary for a twitch game? Presumably 60fps is too many?
How about 1920x1080? No video games should be allowed to run better than 30fps 1080p, including on home PCs?
That's not serious, by the way, I love me some 60fps youtube videos even (much less directly using a computer)
But it's analogous. Also, modern music is MORE likely to exploit the high sample rates Neil likes. Very few sounds he ever made besides cymbals really used that range, but something like noisia? Wow. If they're not working in 96 or 192K, they should, they've got a LOT of stuff going on waaaaay up there, and it's amazing.
Yeah, but I like stuff like Tangerine Dream, or obscure psytrance bands from Sweden, where there IS no 'lyrics' and the sound is literally the only thing. It's OK if Neil is being insulting to you, you don't have to care. He's brought out some playback gear that's really, really good at playing the music _I_ like, a lot cheaper than that stuff usually runs.
I prefer fancypants 192K (or 96K: same to me, frankly) 24 bit, to vinyl. Unhesitatingly (though there are times when the vinyl mastering helped the sound of the record, and just taking the master tape wouldn't give you as good of a mix).
But I prefer both to CD quality, except when the vinyl's real noisy. Assuming I can pay attention, because if I'm doing something else none of it matters. But if I'm doing something else I'm NOT listening to music at all.
And I prefer CD quality to any form of lossy compression: and have told them apart in ABX testing, up to and including a 320K mp3 example. It was a castanet sound, and if it had been some other instrument (such as a flute, or an 808 kick sample) I would never have been able to tell. The attack of the castanet sound had less personality as 320K mp3, and I ABXed it successfully that time (it's a challenging test!)
I am not obliged to listen to crap just because, if the crap was playing a 300 hz sine, I wouldn't be able to tell the difference. I can use something that's equal to any listening/content situation I can throw at it. Or, I can get something that's happily overkill and know there's no way I'll ever have issues with it. To me, 96K is already overkill, probably 64K would suffice, but 44.1K is a little chintzy.
I have a car that'll drive way faster than 90 mph, too, even though I stick to around 65 most of the time. Is that immoral? Am I obliged to only drive something that struggles to get to 70, that being faster than I'll generally use?
He literally just said "Copy my songs if you want to. That's free. Your choice."
Considering how much Slashdot likes all forms of DRM and restrictions of information, I would think that was worth something. Of course the reason he's saying it is, he's telling you "your mp3s are worthless! Call that music? shyeah right! Knock yourself out, you're making yourself the sucker!"
Which is more or less true: people toss around multiple gigabytes of data via torrents all the time, and nothing much is stopping you from also copying and exchanging 192K uncompressed files of all Neil's stuff. But no, people are gonna copy around 128K mp3s that sound like a cellphone with delusions of grandeur and think they're sticking it to the Man.
As for FM, traditionally that's more like a remastering with a weird twist on it where you're pre/de-emphasising it heavily in transmission, which also gives it a characteristic sound. AM radio has different characteristics and rather than require really tight stop-bands with no overshoot, it's strongly asymmetrical because you only have to limit one polarity of the signal. So it's loaded with second harmonics like a single-ended triode, a 'warm' sound. Both of them started out analog (do they even do AM radio anymore?)
He may be selling them, but getting them made the way they once were, that's another story. Not long ago I had a choice of buying a new release in fancy vinyl, or in 192K/24. I went for the hi-res digital without hesitation (and NOT from Neil, either). I'll listen to vinyl from back when they made it properly, anything new I'd rather seek out a digital format. New vinyl is NOT automatically good or good-sounding just for being vinyl, that's crazy talk.
I think you'll find most people making arguments against the thing have not heard it. I'm thinking of a variety of sound engineer and musician friends not associated with Young. One guy was a mastering engineer, one's a modern-day musician who does interesting stuff with sampling and sound layering, including sounds like a dog bowl whirring on concrete.
It'd be pretty dumb to say 'the Pono doesn't sound great' when it blatantly does (it's battery life that sucks! :) ). What some people are saying is that everything, all the streaming and earbuds and detritus of the 2015 audio life, also sounds great, wonderful, perfect.
errrrrr no.
Ah, another vintage slashdotter! We're coming out of the woodwork here.
The crappiness of your Macbook isn't Neil's fault, and he didn't make you buy it. Nice burn on the FLAC file, we both know that's lossless and there will be no difference (unlike anything where data's truncated or lossy-compressed). And you can still get tons of music which isn't all 'loudness war', across the entire range of recorded history in fact. If people aren't making good recordings anymore, listen to something else, over headphones that block some of the distracting noise.
If you don't want Neil or his music, he's done you no injury. If you are mad at him continually suggesting that the digital formats we're using are inadequate, or that your playback stuff is plebian and lame, you should tell him to go make his own. Oh, wait, he did! And put it up for sale at a price that strikingly undercuts most of the 'audiophile' world. And nobody is making you buy that, though it's markedly cheaper than your MacBook. I'm given to understand there are computers running Windows and Linux that will also play your Miley Cyrus.
Wire coat hanger ain't a bad DIY fancy speaker cable. It's good heavy wire, and an air dielectric, and depending on how the coathangers are twisted it might be very little inductance. It's fine to tease overly-wealthy people waving magic rocks at their stereos, but there are a lot of things you can do WITHOUT spending silly audiophool money that will help your monitoring system perform. The stuff worth having tends to work on basic concepts like capacitance, inductance, adequacy of power supply, isolation from digital circuitry and so on. Just like the design inside the Pono. There's little revolutionary in there, it's just done right at a price point.
You might be able to tell the difference between wimpy 28 gauge speaker cable and nice solid air-dielectric coat hangers if you're feeding the playback system off a Pono with good digital files to play through it. :)
Nonsense. I have one. It sounds awesome, comparable to a Lavry DA10 at several times the price that can't play all the digital audio the Pono can.
Everybody I know who has one or has heard one, who actually know what they're doing audio-wise, think it sounds great.
If you get used to tone like that then it becomes more understandable why Neil would respond with a 'nuuuuu! go 'way!' to compressed streaming audio. Is it up to him to decide whether the experience of sonic presence and tone color is all that matters? When there are things like notes, lyrics, stuff not related to how good the sound is? I don't know. Not like you can't get everything he's done by mp3 anyway.
The real reason to bail on streaming services is, it's a con and ripping off the artists even worse than the original music business did. Everybody in the business knows rates are a sick joke, meaningless. You don't have to care about that but any musician has a right to 'nope' out of there, at least unless or until the tech industry sets up mandatory licensing so musicians can't even opt out of streaming if they wanted.
It's pretty classless to curse out Neil Young for doing this. He doesn't have a right to go and make his own tech if he doesn't like what the computer industry's done with his medium? As if CDs weren't bad enough. You can say "fine, shut up and go make your own music tech!" and I'd have thought that would be a real mic drop line right there.
And he DID. I own a Pono, thing sounds extremely awesome, ridiculously good for $400 (I have numerous digital converters worth more than that, it's my day job). He DID go make his own, and you're still bitchin'?
Indeed. "This legislation will ensure that Americans do not have accurate, consistent information about their food".
Nope. They will preferentially hire drivers using Jeeps and Humvees that can drive across post-apocalyptic terrain (or that six-wheeled Mercedes thing?).
Then, everybody else finds using private vehicles is even more difficult and expensive, making hiring an Uber Humvee more advantageous.
That's the obvious market answer. Why would they want to fix roads if that helps people not use their service?
Imagine a guy who gets off on driving for Uber Black in a Ferrari F40. They get crazy tips but what they're really doing it for is the awe of the passengers and to be treated like a freaky crazy rich dude for the people. What's that (or more luxurious angles: a Rolls-Royce guy) do to the job market?