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> the Atmos mix of Abbey Road, which was produced for its 50th anniversary in 2019 is “a much better-functioning Atmos mix because it’s much closer to the stere

• Applejinx 5y ago
  Exactly this. Whether it's Giles Martin (who IS NOT George Martin, and who did not work with the Beatles) or Steven Wilson remixing every great progressive rock record known to man, all of these are the same. Replace the vibe, atmosphere and space of whatever the original thing was, with a version in which every little detail is a little bit too close and carefully cut out from its background to be presented, pristine, as if it could be listened to isolated from the music it's in. Generally if you have a sense of the vibe and space of the original work you'll find the remixing appalling, terrible. It's improved if the goal is to pick out all the details as if you were going to fill out a report or perhaps a postmortem. It's like being mad old Eno records don't have enough 18k content and blaming the original vinyl and fixing it. Sometimes the artists go along with this nonsense and sometimes they just put up with it, or have passed on and can't be consulted about it. It is only for the glorification of the remixers: Steven Wilson at least does his own music, though I haven't liked it all that much.
  • exmadscientist 5y ago
    > Generally if you have a sense of the vibe and space of the original work you'll find the remixing appalling, terrible. It's interesting that one can see this in other arts as well. One example from typography is how Trade Gothic, a mutt of a typeface if ever there was one, got "remastered" into Trade Gothic Next by Akira Kobayashi. The original is warm, scatterbrained, charming, completely imperfect, and generally has a soul. The remaster has... nothing. Completely "corporate neutral". The only thing it has going for it is that it fills out the weight and width axes more completely. (Kobayashi's remasters of other Linotype typefaces were similarly deflating, but Trade Gothic had the most soul to lose.) (Recently mentioned on HN was MD Primer https://mass-driver.com/typefaces/md-primer https://mass-driver.com/typefaces/md-primer , which appears to actually back off this trend and go back to things with imperfections, but alas, commercial fonts are a little tough to use in FOSS projects....) I think one of the main drivers behind these trends is the switch from analog to digital technologies as media for creation. Analog tech tends to be "one-shot": if you didn't capture something you like, do it again until you do. Often some level of editing is possible, depending on the particular medium, but it's usually a pretty blunt, coarse-grained instrument. Digital, on the other hand, allows unlimited tweaking of every last digit and detail until everyone is bored with it and can no longer go on. This power to revise forever is more dangerous than it looks, because now perfection actually appears attainable, peer artists are already chasing it, and so artists feel they have little choice but to do the same. Even if that's not the best thing for their work as a whole. You can see this in action with photography: in the recent photo threads here, or anywhere else for the last decade, how much time is spent whining about sharpness and gear foibles versus the composition of interesting photographs?
• sevensor 5y ago
  If you're listening late at night, you may think the band are not quite right.