The Story of the Band That Clipped Itself to Death

[stuarth]

that's the title of chapter 7 of a book I enjoyed a lot:

 

Perfecting Sound Forever: An Aural History of Recorded Music

by Greg Milner (Faber & Faber, 2010) - http://us.macmillan.com/perfectingsoundforever

 

This book touches on some of the themes raised in the Bill Schnee interview elsewhere on CA.

In fact Doug Sax, who Bill S. credits as a mentor is portrayed as defiantly flying the analog flag in an increasingly digital age.

 

Back to that chapter title, this focusses on the 'loudness wars' of the 1990's, where compression was used to excess and dynamic range (an original selling point of the CD format) was squashed right down.

 

Images of wave-forms of some offending tracks clearly show things have been pushed past the limit.

The band? Red Hot Chili Peppers. The album? You guessed, Californication.

 

As the author points out, audiophiles may have objected to the sound, but the album shifted lots of units (to use industry parlance). This raises the question of whether mainstream recorded pop/rock music is about 'fidelity' any more. The kids are just going to compress it to put on their iPods anyway - why bother to make it sound good?

 

Anyway that's just part of the book. It starts with Edison's first cylinder phonograph and goes on from there.

 

[The Computer Audiophile]

Hi Stuart - Thanks for mentioning this one. I would pay $50 for a remastered copy of RHCP's Californication. I love the music on that album, but the poor sound quality causes headaches.

 

[uvrmd]

I love Soundgarden to death, but I just picked up their new anthology, "Telephantism", and it's far too compressed to listen to with any satisfaction on my home system. I guess I'll just have to listen to it in the car...

 

[wgb113]

Sad to say but it's one of the reasons I downgraded my main rig to entry-level mid-fi...the majority of my CD's sound better than they did on a more revealing system.

 

I'd rather have a lower resolution system that I can enjoy my favorite songs on than a higher resolution system that makes them unlistenable.

 

Rather than record companies embracing our market (and HiFi manufacturers for that matter) they're driving the nail into the coffin. Without good sounding software the next generation is going to hit a wall in terms of fidelity that is much lower than it used to be.

 

Young people are much more willing to "settle" on lower-priced equipment that makes their music sound okay than change their taste in music and embrace "audiophile" demo recordings.

 

While most popular music genres were never at the forefront of the fidelity spectrum the scales seem to have tilted significantly in the past twenty years towards LowFi.

 

Bill

 

[DMark1]

Hardware manufacturers need to put more pressure on record companies too. Afterall, their hi-rez gear will sound better with hi-rez music, and may encourage the next generation to appreciate sound quality and buy better gear.