Michael L Torrie wrote:
Agreed. Modern recordings *suck* for technical reasons. Sound
engineers have decided that it is cool to have a much louder-sounding
recording[1]. Put on a record from the 70's (as in LP) and watch your
little db meter. It will peak at 70% of the scale (not sure what that
is maybe 0 db?). Put in a modern CD (say coldplay) and you'll find that
90% of the time the db meter is maxed out.
So basically we have a medium (CD audio) that's actually quite capable
of storing a very high-fidelity and wide amplitude range of sounds and
sound engineers compress all our music to fit just into the highest 20%
of the amplitude range. This means that instead of using 20 bits to
represent the amplitude, we're getting maybe 6 bits of real variance.
This really lowers modern CD audio quality dramatically. . . The classical
recordings are recorded with a much greater range of amplitudes and typically
don't have as much compression[2].
When we were recording the BYU Men's Chorus CD, "Praise My Soul" last
year, Sister Hall mentioned the fact that the recording engineer would
run the whole thing through a filter to limit the dynamic range of the
music. All the loud stuff would be squeezed down while the quietest
whispers would be raised up (She didn't want us shouting since it would
be attenuated anyway, let alone what it does to vocal quality). The
underlying reason of course being that modern society listens to music
on the go in a loud noisy world. They don't have time to adjust the
volume or quiet their noisy lives for a softer piece of music.
My larger worry is getting blasted by drastically different volume
levels. That can be pretty painful and dangerous for your hearing. It
would be nicer to have a high quality recordings and let your player
adjust the dynamics for your listening environment.
If I see the sound engineer one of these days, I should ask him what
sort of dynamic range is left in the music. He writes music himself and
records other BYU groups, so he should know how to record classical
music. Granted it's not as big of a deal for MC since we lack the
variety of timbre's and frequencies found in a large orchestra, but we
are good enough that we were invited to the American Choral Directors
Association conference a couple of weeks ago.
Scott K.
--------------------
BYU Unix Users Group
http://uug.byu.edu/
The opinions expressed in this message are the responsibility of their
author. They are not endorsed by BYU, the BYU CS Department or BYU-UUG.
___________________________________________________________________
List Info: http://uug.byu.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/uug-list
