My brother and I used to walk up to our local drug store and buy LP records from a rack next to the candy bars. One day he bought Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon and I bought the live Rush album Exit Stage Left. When we opened them, I became jealous of the stickers and posters in Dark Side, so we arranged a trade, which seemed fair because the Rush record had two LPs in it. He became a Rush fan, I became a Floyd fan, and the rest of our lives followed from that fateful decision. (Not so much, but it makes a better story that way.)
This album is totally worth $30 on vinyl. But it'd be nice to get it for $15.
It's good to know that today's kids might have the same experience: Fred Meyer, a chain of drug stores in the Pacific Northwest, and Best Buy are both beginning to stock vinyl records again. John Paczkowski can scoff all he wants, but I still collect records and am therefore excited about this news for purely selfish reasons. Big box stores stocking vinyl means economies of scale for vinyl manufacturers, which hopefully means I'll never pay $30 again for a vinyl reissue of The Beastie Boys' Paul's Boutique. (It was totally worth it.)
Similarly, John can joke about an iPod Phono, but I've suggested several times that Microsoft build an analog recorder into the Zune software to replace that function in the no-longer-offered Digital Media Plus Pack. What better way to cater to music fans than give them yet another way to get music onto their computers?
How come modern rock recordings seem to be so relentlessly loud? Essentially, the answer comes down to the misuse of compression, a technique by which the peaks and valleys of volume in a recording are electronically leveled out.
There's a popular YouTube video circulating that gives a pretty simple explanation. After a recording is finished but before it's mastered to CD, engineers use electronic tools to increase the volume of the entire recording, then squash out any peaks over a certain level. The result is a really loud CD that is supposed to stand out to radio programmers and other types who judge music based on the first 10 seconds of each song, but that has very little dynamic range, which makes it hard for actual music listeners to enjoy it for more than a few minutes.
Many fans of Canadian rock band Rush criticized their 2002 album Vapor Trails for this problem. Bob Dylan has noticed it. I really noticed it on Beck's 2002 album Sea Change: here's an album of gorgeous acoustic tracks about heartbreak, best meant for late nights alone, and it's one of the most relentlessly loud CDs I've ever heard.
But just because compression has been misapplied, that's no reason to throw the baby out with the bathwater. In live settings, compression has helped many a weak singer shine through--everybody wants to hear the lyrics, so you have to crank the vocal track, and compression prevents the occasional peak from distorting. It's also useful for bass, where one big thumb-hit on the low E string can overload the sound system. And it's almost always used in recording. Sometimes an engineer will apply a compressor during recording to make sure a particular instrument--kick drum, bass--doesn't spike too high, creating distortion or digital clipping. More often, it's applied during mixing and mastering to change the character of a particular instrument, or of the whole recording.
Which brings me to Joe Meek, a producer of instrumental records, mostly surf, from the early and mid-1960s. (He committed suicide in 1967.) Meek essentially invented electronic compression, and a line of compressors still bears his name. Many of his recordings sound like music from an interstellar circus, transmitted across millions of light years. It's a musical fetish, but a pleasurable one if you're bored with the same-old-same-old.
Hardware geeks are gleefully prying their new iPhones apart to see what's inside them. Given the topic of this blog, I'm naturally most interested in the audio components--how does thing sound?
According to this breakdown by Semiconductor Insight, reported by EE Times, the iPhone uses the same hardware audio codec from Wolfson as the last generation of iPods, meaning it should sound similar. However, Wired's review suggests that the audio doesn't go as loud as most iPods, particularly the Shuffle, which could be a real problem if you listened to a lot of Rushover headphones in high school. I'm not sure why that should be the case, perhaps a different audio amplifier?
And many reviewers have noted that the iPhone uses a slightly different headphone jack than the iPod, so it can accomodate a microphone in the headphones (which lets users take a phone call while listening to music without switching out headphones). This means that the audiophile headphones purchased for an iPod probably won't work with the iPhone, although adapters are available.
But it seems like it's reasonable, and people aren't buying iPhone for the audio quality, which can't touch vinyl anyway.
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