On 2014-02-28, Richard Dobson wrote:
Apart from obvious true/false things such as digital clipping, it seems to me that very little in musical audio can, in any scientific deterministice way, be called either "correct" or "incorrect".
I'd argue even for clipping in some cases. Judiciously used it's just another waveshaper, with nice, crunchy qualities.
Yet even the modern fad for "death by compression", in the "loudness wars" is ostensibly a "correct" commercial decision.
Not to mention, it's impossible to "correct" something like that. The trouble is, nowadays compression is not just a mostly-transparent afterthought used to fit the dynamics into a limited channel and applied in an open loop manner. It's part of the aesthetics of the music, which feeds back so that the music itself is made to be compressed. The effect is the same as with Gregorian chant: if you somehow managed to deconvolve out the whole massive reverb, you wouldn't be left with a more correct version, but something which was never intended to be played except as the excitation to the instrument that is the space.
As recording purists we may not like it, but can't really argue about correctness or otherwise. Clearly you have every right to season or otherwise transform your music library in whatever way you choose, for your own listening pleasure. People have done that with hifi tone controls (and even those silly EQ controls) since amplifiers were invented.
You're going to be adding a lot of unknowns and distortion sources to the mix, however, if you start with blind processing of whatever comes out of a modern studio. I can just barely agree with the idea of automatic mastering to some kind of a tonal template, but going the other way around I think mostly just leads to unpleasant surprises and a lot of crud which is difficult to avoid without going back at least to the final pre-mastering mix, or perhaps as far as the original composition.
I also believe the examples Theo's given earlier lend some perceptual support to my point. Despite lots of clever processing, the end result at least to me just seems hazier than the original.
-- Sampo Syreeni, aka decoy - de...@iki.fi, http://decoy.iki.fi/front +358-40-3255353, 025E D175 ABE5 027C 9494 EEB0 E090 8BA9 0509 85C2 -- dupswapdrop -- the music-dsp mailing list and website: subscription info, FAQ, source code archive, list archive, book reviews, dsp links http://music.columbia.edu/cmc/music-dsp http://music.columbia.edu/mailman/listinfo/music-dsp
