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More and more people are listening to music through equipment that is significantly inferior. I cannot imagine that this is true. Even listening to Spotify on
by dagw 8y ago
More and more people are listening to music through equipment that is significantly inferior.
I cannot imagine that this is true. Even listening to Spotify on a cheap phone using the headphones that came with the phone offers far better sound quality than listening to the nth generation tape copies on the cheap tape players or the bad reception of the tinny radios that we used to have.
- NeedMoreTea 8y agoYeah but most people had some stack system or separates at home as well as the walkman or tinny radio. Often horrible by hifi standards, almost always better than the tiny bluetooth speaker, or included headphones. When you went out you knew the walkman or car was second best, but enough background noise that it was still OK.
- benj111 8y agoParents had separates, they wouldn't take kindly to me blasting out whatever in the living room though.
- puranjay 8y agoYou're forgetting that the vast majority of consumers use cheap Android phones and the earphones packaged with them. This gear usually has very poor mid-range response. Hence, producers crowd tracks in the bottom-end (bass) and treble ranges. Try listening to a track with a cheap $15 earphones and then with a set of studio headphones like ATH-M50x and you'll hear what I mean.
- doctorpangloss 8y agoHa! If even the packaged earphones. Forget Spotify. People are listening to music on throttled YouTube. Compression wasn't the antagonist of music. Not even the consumer's general cheapness is the antagonist. The website that pirated it all, and then got bought by a parent company larger than the market value of the entire music industry combined, is the antagonist of music.
- puranjay 8y agoIt makes my life miserable. I love writing music but mixing is just a boring, unsexy grind. And it's a skill that takes way too much time to develop - you can't "hack it". I've produced tracks that sound incredible to me on my 6" Yamaha monitors. Then I send them over to friends who listen to them on their tinny laptop speakers and wonder what the big deal is.
- TheOtherHobbes 8y agoYour 6" Yamahas are not a neutral reference. Studios deliberately use bad speakers (NS10s, Auratones) to check for this. In the business it's called "translation" - a good mix sounds good on everything from earbuds to a car stereo to $$$$$$ hifi. It's almost impossible to make a mix that translates without spending a lot of money on neutral monitors and acoustic treatment. But there are tricks you can use to make a mix translate better. E.g. You can cut the lowest octave or two in the bass, because no one (outside of a club) can hear it anyway, and use bass sounds with plenty of mids, so you can hear the line even when the low bass isn't there.
- puranjay 8y agoYeah, I'm learning this along the way. Mixing is just a completely different skill set than production or composition. I've realized that it's better to let professionals handle it than learning it - it requires too much investment in equipment and far too much time in training to do it by yourself.
- meko 8y agoAuratones are not bad speakers though. They're single driver and non-ported. That has implications, namely better low end response, and uniformity in the waveform: ie. no notching from cutoffs; sound comes from one place instead of two (better spatial representation), and also a lot of consumer audio is on single driver setups (earbuds, laptop speaker, p much anything that doesn't have a dedicated tweeter or subwoofer).
- justtopost 8y ago
- jacobush 8y agoOh you are all so naive. They listen through the built in speakers on their cheap Android phone. In mono. On the bus. And everywhere else.
- detaro 8y agoNo, that's not what the vast majority of users does.
- justtopost 8y agoMaybe, but its a big enough use case to be optimized for imho.