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I feel your pain. I produce and mix records - at an amateur level, but enough to get quite good at it. It makes me want to toss all this "objective", "measurabl

by beat 8y ago

I feel your pain. I produce and mix records - at an amateur level, but enough to get quite good at it. It makes me want to toss all this "objective", "measurable" bullshit from the skeptics right out the window - the subjective experience is all that matters. But it also makes me want to toss the audiophile voodoo out the same window. "Accurate" reproduction? I just want to show them how records are mixed. My pet example is that I put high-pass filters (12db slope) at 250-300hz on almost everything that isn't a drum or a bass instrument. I'm slaughtering the bottom two octaves of guitars! And if you solo a guitar track, you can hear it. But in the context of a mix, all those bottom two octaves do is make mud and confusion, distracting from the clarity that the kick and bass (guitar || synth) needs. And I need that clarity, because I'm not mixing for $500,000 audiophile systems. I'm mixing for car stereos, boom boxes, Alexas, cheap earbuds, and worse. So all that matters for me with audiophile systems - and I love audiophile systems - is that they sound good. That doesn't mean they sound accurate.

rectang 8y ago
I agree that your high-pass filters are an application of masking principles. It would be challenging, especially for an untrained person but even for someone who is trained, to perceive enabling/disabling of those filters in the context of the full mix. Instead we solo to isolate the track being adjusted so the change is easily audible -- i.e. no longer masked by the other tracks -- and adjust the filtering anticipating the counter-intuitive but artistically desirable effect when the filtered track is blended back into the mix. Despite that, your hostility to the skeptics illustrates that you and I still aren't really on the same page (though I don't doubt you produce compelling art, don't question your techniques, and agree 100% about ensuring that aesthetic gestures survive the transition to imperfect end-user environments). To me, "objective accuracy" is a worthy and desirable intermediate goal for sound artists, a tool which can be leveraged for creative ends the same as a baker understanding food chemistry or an animator understanding Newtonian physics or a modern origami folder understanding programming. However, chasing "objective accuracy" means understanding the wildly non-linear, even bizarre human perceptual mechanism -- which is more of a pattern recognition machine and definitely not a measurement device -- in addition to all the strangeness of acoustics. The problem with audiophiles is that their approach to "accuracy" is unscientific and doomed from the start. The skeptics on the other hand, have the right idea -- but those who have not done deep study often fail to appreciate just how difficult the problem is and how far off their intuitions are. I've had some wonderful conversations with individuals whose perspectives are similar to mine, but it still seems impossible to find a hospitable public forum.
- beat 8y ago
  When I say "objective", it definitely needs air quotes, because the well-meaning skeptics love to toss it around for some decidedly non-objective opinions. My pet example is quoting "THD" as if it were a useful figure. It's not. The advantage of THD isn't that it is meaningful, but rather that it's easy to measure. Run a 1khz sine wave into the front of the amp, tap a resistive load on the back of the amp, measure the difference. Manufacturers like it because it makes for a competitive-sounding spec. But it has approximately zero to do with how an amplifier behaves in the face of complex musical signals, driving complex speaker loads. When it comes to recording, my "objective" reality is the sound I hear in the room before it ever hits a microphone. But what comes out of the other end of the microphone is already deeply subjective. The objective ability of hi-fi systems to reproduce that subjective, colored microphone signal (plus whatever processing is involved downstream) is about as objective as they get. But the recording itself? Outside the world of purely electronic music, it's a subjective experience. I play acoustic guitar every day, listen to unamplified singers/musicians (other than me) at least weekly, play electric guitar at least weekly, gig regularly. These direct, objective experiences of the natural sounds of instruments color my interpretation of both magical-thinking audiophiles and pseudo-scientific skeptics. I know intimately what the natural sound is, I know intimately what the recorded/reproduced sound is, and I know how the entire recording process works, from miking to mixing to mastering. Laws and sausages. The audiophiles and skeptics are both missing that perspective. So, as a recording/mixing engineer, as a producer, I'm looking not to deliver audiophile accuracy, but rather to deliver the intended intellectual and emotional experience of the music. What feeling is the artist trying to convey? How do I manipulate the sonics to emphasize the musician's intent, as expressed through the lyrics, the composition/arrangement, and the natural tones of their instruments? That's the fun part, for me. (As an aside, I'm currently working on a particular song of my own, destined for my long-delayed solo album. I wrote the song based on a nightmare I had in great distress. A few years back, I suffered an illness that left me nearly unable to speak, much less sing, and my voice is permanently damaged (I have surgery a few times a year on my vocal cords to keep speaking and not die of suffocation). I recorded the song right after writing it, just a couple of weeks before my first surgery, with a near-useless voice. "My broken voice won't fill the air / I know that you don't really care / You may not need my song but I need to sing it anyway". Fitting with the broken voice is the melody repeated on a piano that hasn't been tuned in over 50 years and has been flooded multiple times, so it's, um, colorful. To both the audiophile and objective mindset, neither the voice nor the piano were worth recording at all. But as an artist trying to communicate an emotional experience, they're vital.)

by beat 8y ago

rectang 8y ago

I agree that your high-pass filters are an application of masking principles. It would be challenging, especially for an untrained person but even for someone who is trained, to perceive enabling/disabling of those filters in the context of the full mix. Instead we solo to isolate the track being adjusted so the change is easily audible -- i.e. no longer masked by the other tracks -- and adjust the filtering anticipating the counter-intuitive but artistically desirable effect when the filtered track is blended back into the mix. Despite that, your hostility to the skeptics illustrates that you and I still aren't really on the same page (though I don't doubt you produce compelling art, don't question your techniques, and agree 100% about ensuring that aesthetic gestures survive the transition to imperfect end-user environments). To me, "objective accuracy" is a worthy and desirable intermediate goal for sound artists, a tool which can be leveraged for creative ends the same as a baker understanding food chemistry or an animator understanding Newtonian physics or a modern origami folder understanding programming. However, chasing "objective accuracy" means understanding the wildly non-linear, even bizarre human perceptual mechanism -- which is more of a pattern recognition machine and definitely not a measurement device -- in addition to all the strangeness of acoustics. The problem with audiophiles is that their approach to "accuracy" is unscientific and doomed from the start. The skeptics on the other hand, have the right idea -- but those who have not done deep study often fail to appreciate just how difficult the problem is and how far off their intuitions are. I've had some wonderful conversations with individuals whose perspectives are similar to mine, but it still seems impossible to find a hospitable public forum.

beat 8y ago
When I say "objective", it definitely needs air quotes, because the well-meaning skeptics love to toss it around for some decidedly non-objective opinions. My pet example is quoting "THD" as if it were a useful figure. It's not. The advantage of THD isn't that it is meaningful, but rather that it's easy to measure. Run a 1khz sine wave into the front of the amp, tap a resistive load on the back of the amp, measure the difference. Manufacturers like it because it makes for a competitive-sounding spec. But it has approximately zero to do with how an amplifier behaves in the face of complex musical signals, driving complex speaker loads. When it comes to recording, my "objective" reality is the sound I hear in the room before it ever hits a microphone. But what comes out of the other end of the microphone is already deeply subjective. The objective ability of hi-fi systems to reproduce that subjective, colored microphone signal (plus whatever processing is involved downstream) is about as objective as they get. But the recording itself? Outside the world of purely electronic music, it's a subjective experience. I play acoustic guitar every day, listen to unamplified singers/musicians (other than me) at least weekly, play electric guitar at least weekly, gig regularly. These direct, objective experiences of the natural sounds of instruments color my interpretation of both magical-thinking audiophiles and pseudo-scientific skeptics. I know intimately what the natural sound is, I know intimately what the recorded/reproduced sound is, and I know how the entire recording process works, from miking to mixing to mastering. Laws and sausages. The audiophiles and skeptics are both missing that perspective. So, as a recording/mixing engineer, as a producer, I'm looking not to deliver audiophile accuracy, but rather to deliver the intended intellectual and emotional experience of the music. What feeling is the artist trying to convey? How do I manipulate the sonics to emphasize the musician's intent, as expressed through the lyrics, the composition/arrangement, and the natural tones of their instruments? That's the fun part, for me. (As an aside, I'm currently working on a particular song of my own, destined for my long-delayed solo album. I wrote the song based on a nightmare I had in great distress. A few years back, I suffered an illness that left me nearly unable to speak, much less sing, and my voice is permanently damaged (I have surgery a few times a year on my vocal cords to keep speaking and not die of suffocation). I recorded the song right after writing it, just a couple of weeks before my first surgery, with a near-useless voice. "My broken voice won't fill the air / I know that you don't really care / You may not need my song but I need to sing it anyway". Fitting with the broken voice is the melody repeated on a piano that hasn't been tuned in over 50 years and has been flooded multiple times, so it's, um, colorful. To both the audiophile and objective mindset, neither the voice nor the piano were worth recording at all. But as an artist trying to communicate an emotional experience, they're vital.)