Man V. Nature Open Thread...
From the original Analog Industries archive. Some links and images from that era no longer resolve.
I’m going camping tomorrow, so unlike my normal “out of the office” type things, where I’m still very much connected to the interwebs via a combination of iPhone and MacBook, I’m gonna be somewhere that doesn’t even have cell service. Some sort of Conrad-inspired horrors will ensue, no doubt. I will be back Saturday.
So, this is a 3-day open thread. The subject I leave to the first person with enough literary muscle to get everybody talking about the same thing. Don’t break anything while I’m gone.
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What are everyone's favorite qualities about digital audio? One might say, its clarity and predictability. Personally, I enjoy the graininess of digital sound. Digital distortion sounds so. . . digital. And I like it. When digital equipment tries to make "analog" overdrive, it sounds grainy (I would not say gritty).
What are some thoughts about the pleasing qualities of digital sound (and I suppose we can allow talk about glitching into the conversation)?
I rather talk about the death of subscriber radio on XM/Sirius. They removed the punk station to play 24/7 AC/DC for the next 90 days... a whole genre not represented anywhere else on XM/Sirius and they replaced it with four on the floor three chord rock from a band who's last album didn't do so hot.
So instead of getting my love of punk filled they actually expect me to PAY to listen to INFOMERCIALS from AC/DC and Metallica (who also has a 24/7 channel)...
So researching this I learned that they also sometime back killed the folk channel, the music lab alternative channel and a couple pop channels. Next is supposedly the Jazz channel.
Nice to see their promise to fill our niche music desires with Clear Channel-inspired programming...
WNYU.org HAD a good punk show, I just checked their schedule doesnt seem its on their anymore.
What do I like about digital/VST??
Keys, knobs, sliders dont break.
I can't spill coffee on the Waldorf Edition.
VST's usually dont end up in the closet dusty and broken until you get money to repair them..except for Steinbergs P-delay.
As for the audio quality...digital is a prissy bitch..you gotta love it alot for it to love you back. Audio quality is fine when Hardware is ran through the efx, not so much when I use VST instrument(Borat).
He, I just noticed that last night. I hit the punk preset and got AC/DC. The next thing Ithat got my attention was just how fucking awful digital radio actually sounds. Squashed and full of artifacts. For a moment I wasn't even sure it was AC/DC, could have just been NIN...
(haven't left yet.)
I didn't like the punk station in the first place, because (a) they played too much hardcore which, despite evidence to the contrary, is not punk, and (b) like all the limited listen channels its bandwidth was throttled to about the equivalent of a 32K MP3. And Pennywise is a channel-changer, no matter what the other circumstances.
That said, now that XM and Sirius don't have to compete with each other by having the largest selection of cool, weird channels, we'll begin to hear a fuck of a lot more commercials, and all the interesting stations will go away or get bandwidth-limited to unlistenability.
I got the subscription free when I bought the car, but frankly I'm not sure I'm gonna renew it when my year is up. I usually just listen to my iPod anyhow.
-CR
Early AC/DC was filed under Punk in a lot of UK shops back in the day (so I'm told...)
The bandwidth issue has kept me from loving my XM. FM radio sounded bad enough, this is another step down. I kept it around for the variety, but mostly ended up either plugging in my ipod (until it disappeared from the car, hope someone out there is listening to our old band) or adding to the ever-growing pile of burned mix CDs in the dash.. on the floor... in the pocket on the door...
This weekend I took an hour and half drive through the country to visit a friend - and didn't listen to <i>anything</i>. Just thought my thoughts, many of which were about music. Oh, Irony, where is thy string?
I guess the UK market equivalent to satellite radio is Digital Audio Broadcast radio:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Audio_Broadcasting
which I think is/has going/gone through a similar station rationalization - there hasn't been anything like the projected penetration of receivers. My own set is pretty much permanently tuned to 6Music because there is bugger all else worth listening to - and 6Music is hard work at times (although at others, like during Stuart Maconie's Freak Zone show, there's nothing else like it...)
Sirius uses AAC (it might be an extended codec, like AAC+) at something like 32 kbps. I am surprised more people aren't complaining about the sound quality, but I'm also surprised that anyone signs up for something like that rather than Rhapsody, Napster, or Zune (unless you drive for a living).
Regarding digital, I'm old enough to have climbed the tape ladder - from cassette 4-tracks to 1/4" 2-track to 1/2" 8-track all the way up to 2". The ONLY good thing tape/analog ever had going for it was sound quality, and you paid for it with maintenance and fragility.
And it took tape ~40 years to get that good.
The first time I comped vocals on digital I was sold. I am reasonably confident that ~40 years from 1980 digital will be sounding even better than it does today.
It's also worth noting that when electrical recording (tape!) first came out, proponents of the previous system (direct mechanical recording) decried it as sounding awful and unable to capture sound's magic the way yelling directly into a horn could.
Plus ca change...
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