Re: Recordings mixed for AM (Was Re: Radio Disney in Boston)

[Garrett Wollman <wollman>]

<<On Sun, 12 Mar 2000 12:21:19 -0500 (EST), Sven Weil <sven@lily.org> said:

> The old songs that were mixed  with AM radio in mind actually do sound
> brighter. 

That was also in part due to the recording technology.  When the
Compact Disc first came out, many critics complained that the sound
was too brassy.  Of course, this had nothing to do with the CD
technology itself (which is as close to perfect as was economical in
the early '80s).  Rather, what the critics were really complaining
about was the practice of boosting the treble range during mastering
to make up for the ugly response curves of consumer record players.

We're starting to see a similar mistake being made today by people who
complain about the poor quality of Internet-delivered audio -- most of
which is caused by either limited bandwidth between the sender and
receiver, or poor choice of codec.  There's nothing preventing you
from transmitting music at 44.1 kHz using a 16-bit PCM codec (i.e., CD
format) over a network.  (This problem is exacerbated by the use of
inappropriate ``streaming'' technology, which makes abysmal use of
network resources, instead of network-efficient multicast.)  A similar
problem exists with the popular MPEG 2 Layer III (``.MP3'' in
Microsoftese) -- people complaining about the sound of MPEG are really
complainingh about the sound of 96-kbit/s or 128-kbit/s MPEG codecs.
256 kbit/s sounds almost as good as the original, which is why it's
used in DVD and digital TV.  (Of course, there will always be some
foamer claiming to be able to recognize any perceptual codec, but
even if correct such people are statistical outliers.)

-GAWollman

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Garrett A. Wollman   | O Siem / We are all family / O Siem / We're all the same
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