Adeste Fideles

Oh, yeah, come all ye faith­ful repro­duc­ers of sonic phe­nom­ena. Just glanced through this arti­cle, The Death of High Fidelity while I was research­ing the foibles of mix­ing specif­i­cally for the mp3 format.

I had just bounced down a few recent changes in my cur­rent ros­ter of songs, and was giv­ing them a lis­ten on the open-air Bose speak­ers (note1) and was sur­prised by what got buried v. what got empha­sized. Part of this, of course, is my own lack of skills at mix­ing. But part of it isn’t …

Any­way, inter­est­ing to hear of the cur­rent pres­sures on pro­duc­ers and engi­neers to mix for the overcompressed-mp3-plus-crappy-laptop-speakers, since this is now the stan­dard state of lis­ten­ing affairs for a good chunk of the crowd out there. I don’t yet know what I think about that, since it’s the old artistic-ideal-vs.-commercial-reality conun­drum, and i have heard sim­i­lar argu­ments about the com­pres­sion for nor­mal radio air­play, but for this lat­ter there was always a radio.edit dif­fer­ent from the stu­dio album ver­sion, so that the sonic qual­ity was opti­mized for each dif­fer­ent scenario.

The truth is, I tend to like the mod­ern– well, 90’s and 2000’s era– pro­duc­tions. I think that we have a vast amount of tech­nol­ogy and knowl­edge that tweaks our aural per­cep­tion, and i find many albums today a resplen­dent sound­scape. Granted, I lis­ten to a lot of Nine Inch Nails and Radio­head, two bands who have invested a lot of stu­dio time in cre­at­ing sounds and atmos­pheres; but I do get a bit of the younger bands unnamed but implied in the arti­cle, both from my own pas­sions and research, and from catch­ing echoes of the ado­les­cent frenzy of my daugh­ter, 16 years old and every­thing that tends to mean. And truth is, as John Oswald says, the world is a noisy ball. You have to shout some­times to be heard. But then you have bands like Low, like Sigur Ros, like Kings of Con­ve­nience, and like the Black Atlantic (my recent late-night addic­tion): bands who swim only in the soft, the med­i­ta­tive, the glacial, and/or bands whose whole ethic is dynam­ics, mean­ing the soft­est softs and com­par­a­tive ‘louds’ that are an orgasm’s release of ten­sion. So I don’t know. On this, I am agnostic.

Mean­while, the prac­ti­cal side is that I have to make sure that these songs, being built in an incre­men­tal record­ing process that is all I can afford right now, sound good on an mp3 as well as full-fledged CD audio aiffs. I will over­com­press where I have to. I am not afraid.