[Gllug] MP3 player recomendations

[Christopher Hunter]

On Sun, 2007-09-02 at 22:28 +0000, Chris Bell wrote:

>    I have listened to music under as near to ideal conditions as possible,
> where the expense of equipment is virtually no problem, and have been able
> to immediately compare what I have heard with the original live music. The
> quality possible is extremely high, but really does depend on the listening
> conditions.

So have I, and in the latter days of analogue recording, we were getting
pretty close to the original sound.  Digital recording wrecked all that
we had striven for - the artifacts inherent in digital recording are
obvious and unpleasant to many people.

>    Studio monitoring is done in a very well soundproofed room, with walls
> lined with thick sound absorbent covering to avoid colouration, and there is
> often a choice of speakers for comparison.

That's pretty much my monitoring arrangement (I get to play with
recording studios a lot - I used to be in the business).


>  Each microphone can be selected
> and placed according to the particular task, to match a particular musical
> instrument. The microphone feeds are usually split and mixed independantly
> for television sound because an attempt is made to match the sound to the
> picture, but the quality is identical; the brain just expects to hear what
> is shown in close-up, so there can be a little cheating.

I never did TV sound, but would have liked to

>    Many microphones are designed to work a little away from the sound
> source, but many performers think that they need to almost swallow a
> microphone. This can result in continually variable sound quality as they
> move, and a number of sensitive microphones were damaged before more robust
> microphones were obtained.

This might be an issue in live performance, but in the recording studio
environment, there was seldom any problem.

>    Unfortunately, all of this can be wasted if the final result is severely
> bandwidth limited or level compressed.

This is my usual complaint!  CD has a maximum bandwidth of slightly
under 18 kHz - you can safely forget the Nyquist frequency at about 22
Khz because there's no filter on the planet that can give any response
above 18 kHz and prevent obvious aliasing artifacts at 22 kHz!

Dynamic compression is mostly misapplied, so usually unpleasant to hear.
Also, there's no kind of gain reduction mechanism that can act
instantly.  There are two approaches that can overcome this - delay-line
(or "feedforward") compression which does the level sensing at the
beginning of a delay line and the gain reduction at the end, or
clipping, which is the cheaper, simpler option and introduces so much
distortion that it's awful to hear!

There are also studio "effects" - "Aphex" was a particularly nasty
addition to the recording engineer's arsenal: it separated out a
(tunable) section of the audio bandwidth, and fed it to a distortion
circuit, and this abused mess was then added into the main signal again.
It could make vocals "stand out" from the mix (useful for inept mixdown
engineers) and could (according to the advertising blurb) add "clarity".
It made its debut in the mid-80s, and is used today to make DJs appear
to be "louder".  It's an abomination!

>  This is not likely to happen with a
> "quality" music channel, but may be the result of a deliberate decision if
> the intended audience is likely to be listening in a noisy environment such
> as a vehicle or workplace.


That may have been so in the past, but even Radio 3 is now audibly
compressed!

Chris


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