Okay, my next album will be all pipe organ ;)
I spent much of the 90's hanging around a local public radio station (WPKN
89.5). I remember one afternoon the engineer had a scope on the output of
the station, and it looked like a fuzzy square with two rounded corners. I
asked why it looked like that instead of a more fluid waveform and he
sighed, "That's the compression." I mean, wow! The signal was clamped down
very badly! I guess it's a testament to the quality of those gargantuan,
expensive compressors that stations use that the music sounds as good as it
∗does∗, really, considering how they smash it down "into that little
square"... if ∗I∗ were to hard-limit music using a <$1000 compressor to that
extent, it would sound like complete crap.
Sad that we have so much technology in this day & age and still we spend our
time listening to MP3s, compressed radio, VHS tape and MPEG video, and,
well, music that doesn't have synthesizers in it. It's criminal.
-----Original Message-----
From: Paul Schreiber [mailto:
synth1@...]
Sent: Wednesday, 15 August, 2001 9:47 AM
To:
motm@yahoogroups.com; Tkacs, Ken
Subject: Re: [motm] Robert's site OK now
Much of the 'fault' lies in use of compression. Most commercial CDs are
compressed to hell and back. Especially
pop records, so that when kids hear them on their radios, the CD 'sounds the
same'. GACK!!! All FM stations
make a decision to trade off quality versus coverage area (the mathematical
theory about this [Bessel functions] is
quite interesting).
Electronic music tends to have wide dynamic range (lack of compression)
coupled with wide frequency spectra OR
narrow spectra (lots of 4-pole filtering going on). MP3 is a compromise
encoder that makes 'most music sound good'.
(the list of 'test' musical pasages that were evalutated is a can of worms
all to itself. Talk about bickering! One of
the committee members was a pipe organ nutcase. Lot's of pipe organ tests
were used).
Hope everone likes the sample snippets.
Paul S.