off topic, acoustical question

Supply House Rick

i am not yet a dead man, but i am over 60, and i notice the radio is getting harder to listen to. some of this problem is no doubt due to "old ears", but not all, i suspect. there is new technology to compress the audio as it goes out to the satelite and then back down to the local npr station. i wonder if this new audio compression has lost some of the components needed for "old ears" to work properly. when combined with background music, the reformulated talking part is hard to understand. so my question to the real perry : is it my ears, or is the new audio compression leaving something out?

we all know how damaging too much "compression" is in steam systems-maybe the same is true in audio!--nbc

ttekushan_3

compression and compression, not real technical.

There's data compression and there's dynamic range compression, both of which should be transparent in their application. For some reason, they rarely are transparent in practice. Where technical problems leave off and technician problems begin is a grey area, and differs from medium to medium.

In an era of never ending boom and sizzle, the value of midrange clarity has disappeared in the amateur and a large segment of the professional sound worlds. Amazingly, most modern rock and pop music is compressed in dynamic range to such an extent that the any intrinsic character of individual instruments and vocals get mashed into an amorphous blur of grunge. Live amplified music in clubs and bars suffers the same thing. We're left with wooly, bloated mid bass, shrill highs, and illegible lyrics.

Pull out older CD's of spoken word or pop music of the 50's thru early 80's played on decent headphones and you'll find its probably not your hearing that's changed. For heaven's sake, I recently heard a clean 78 rpm record of a Gospel singer (whose name escapes me) on a Brunswick wind up 78 rpm console. I sat there disgusted with how clear and natural his baritone voice sounded. Why, WHY does sound quality today have to stink so? As far as I can tell its because we've been doing sound amplification and recording for so long that our engineers have developed such confidence in our superior technologies of today that they have eliminated that little step of actually listening to the outcome. The goal has become to compress it, smash it, spindle it, clip it and then reconstitute the the wave forms with the belief that nothing is lost, or, at least nothing anyone will notice. Over a generation, younger people have been trained to accept this.

This harkens back to another recent thread about snuggies ads. The discussion morphed into a critique on modern heating design and modern construction techniques with the conclusion that most people go for the eye candy without any regard for whats holding it up.

Cultural differences exist on what reproduced music should sound like. A true sense of the live performance is very difficult to attain, so cultural norms develop around specific playback characteristics. Europeans and British always went for a neutral presentation, valuing mid range performance first, the extended bass and treble responses second.

The American golden era of hifi was an northeast and east coast phenomenon where classical music reproduction had to sound as natural as possible. Many of those rigs still sound good today. Then came rock and roll and a shift to the West coast with the California boom sizzle sound. We started to see speakers with 1" dome tweeters and 15" woofers and no midranges. Predictably, there was no midrange! I'd say we have become desensitized to the insipid distortions and artifacts introduced by what may simply be the misapplication of changing audio technologies.

In a past life I was (and in the off-steam months I still am) an audio component designer. Pretty esoteric expensive high performance stuff. Its quite a luxury to design for perfectionists of means, so we don't have to meet a price point of $79 or something. On the other hand, its a demanding and rigorous process if the expected outcome is to be had. If one of those earlier-referred-to younger people comes by and hears the playback system, the look of total cognitive dissonance that lingers on their faces for a few minutes is quite precious. It proves how far we've strayed from audio clarity and purity.

Its not your ears.

Jim_64

tT

do you know what happened to sound in 'the dark knight'? i didn't see it in a theater, i did pay-per-diew and on-demand, and the sound was TERRIBLE on both. and i'm wondering if the dvd has the same terrible sound. if it's well recorded, i'd buy it to see what i missed. and/or i'd go see it at a replay theater to see what i missed, and experience the big screen effect that i'm sure would be worth it

Jamie Hall

not sure

just who, exactly, terryT is -- but he's right on. Except for one minor (very minor) quibble: a fellow named Hafler was able to show that you didn't have to pay a fortune to get really glorious, neutral even reproduction (I still treasure my all Dynaco (early) system!). To hear truly even, clear recorded sound, try one of the Mercury Living Presence recordings, reissued on CD, or some of the London 'FFSS' recordings. They are a treat.

To the specific point: I have found that the encoding done for satellite or what is known as MP3 data file compression (a very different thing from dynamic range compression which is easy enough to undo if it was done right in the first place -- a big if) almost always -- if not always -- creates very significant losses, both in frequency response and in the phase relationships; without getting esoteric, this is part of what makes a clarinet sound like a clarinet and not a flute or oboe!

I agree -- it's not your ears!

Supply House Rick

thanks for the reassurance!

i have heard about software, which can compress the empty spaces between sounds as well, so the commercial stations can have more advertising time.

add to that the telemarketers from foreign countries, and the list of incomprehensable messages grows an growa.

surely there must come a point of no return!!!!!!!!-nbc