danalog02
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Posts posted by danalog02
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Just found this drone footage of the damage.
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I wonder how many unnecessary arguments could be avoided if the forum simply refreshed faster.
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1 minute ago, jimjimbo said:
Do you mean other than the fact that you are showing that very quality yourself…
Really? You want to keep this particular line of conversation going just when Chris and I are patching things up?
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5 minutes ago, Chris A said:
Perhaps extending an olive branch a bit (and apologies to the OP):
In my own prior profession (the one before the one I've got now helping folks here with audio stuff), I found that there were issues that fundamentally conflicted with my profession doing a truly spectacular and critical job--issues that were justified in the name of "business"--including huge amounts of dark tetrad stuff.
No one dared mention that the profession was doomed because of these factors (especially in customers' organizations), but the truth is that is exactly what occurred, such that the capabilities of practicing engineers were deliberately dumbed down over time by those calling the shots (albeit without traceability to who was doing it). It's a shame, because the losers are really the public.
It's the same in the recording industry apparently. I really do extend my condolences for real--because I've experienced that sort of thing, too. Perhaps some old war stories can be told at the SWAG...
Chris
I'm happy to chat about it and olive branch accepted. I've chased the audio rabbit way far down the hole and had some great experiences. I got to meet Mark Knopfler and hang out with him and Chuck Ainlay while he was mixing "Sailing to Philadelphia", one of my favorite records. I got to listen to a 1/2" safety backup tape of Led Zeppelin IV with Chris Huston (one of the engineers) through an SSL G-series QUAD mixing console while picking his brain about drum sounds.
I've also recorded and mixed some of the shittiest songs, custom records, and demos so we could keep the lights on waiting for the good project to come in. I have found that the amount of talent an artist has is inversely proportional to the amount of money be can raise to make a record.
I'd you'd like to hear an example of a record I co-engineered (with the producer) you can stream "American Vistas" by Marc Kunkel. We worked hard on that one.
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I have a wonderful set of 1982 Heresys purchased a while back from Marion. My first pair and I love them. Marion was then super generous and gave me a pair of Speakerlab K-horns (his first) that he built with his dad. They need work and I'm in the planning stages to refurb them now. I've heard Cornwalls and La Scala's and they're both great, but I can certainly see where someone got the idea for the Cornscala. I supplement my Heresys with a 12" Dayton Audio sub crossed over around 60hz or so. Thanks for asking.
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1 minute ago, Chris A said:
Touchy, too.
The point that I made was that, if you're getting your music education from listening to popular music on the top 40s radio (through the 1990s), streamed, etc., that isn't very "broadening" from a musicians perspective. I've in fact been pretty underwhelmed by what I see and hear out of these guys that come and go here.
I would expect nothing less than this from someone in your shoes, I suppose. My condolences.
Chris
What I'M saying is that it's fun to armchair quarterback an entire group of people with subjective arguments as to what's good and bad in your opinion. Seeing as you know little about me and even less about my musical tastes, you are somewhat less than qualified to psychologically evaluate me.
I'm not an expert, I just have more experience with the entire process of making records and the music business in general than the average audiophile. YMMV, take everything I say with a grain of salt. Nothing in recording is absolute, but certain things tend to hold true over time. One of them is that almost every album is a compromise (excepting maybe Two Against Nature, The Dark Side of the Moon and Random Access Memories). Somewhere along the line, a corner gets cut. Could be budgetary, could be a release deadline, could be any number of things. Records are hardly ever "finished", they just reach a quitting point. It was very disillusioning for me to figure out.
Expect what you want from me or, better yet, expect nothing. You'll never be disappointed. I'll enjoy my classical/jazz/blues/rock/EDM/bluegrass or whatever moves me that day on my wonderful Klipsch speakers and also enjoy NOT being part of the soul-crushing ringer that is the music business
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2 minutes ago, Chris A said:
I don't hate anyone here. I do hate the practices being used and attempts to justify their use.
Chris
Then become an engineer and show us how it's done there, Sparky. (while continuing to pay the rent)
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...and just for the record - Bachelor of Science - Recording Industry: Production and Technology - Middle Tennessee State University. Chair of MTSU Audio Engineering Society for 2 years. Spent 7 years as a studio manager and engineer before managing a pro audio rental and repair shop. I've figured a few things out here and there.
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30 minutes ago, MechEngVic said:
A lot of great music is coming out of home-made studios now-a-days. It sounds better to me because it is probably processed a lot less than music coming out of corporate studios. I think it's for the exact reasons danalog02 mentions. There are no "corporate" mixing/mastering decisions being made, no customer that has to be made happy, no mastering being done that squashes all the life out of good mixes. I don't mind a creaking chair, or a musician coughing, or instruments that come in at higher or lower volumes. What I can't stand is the compression done at music peaks where multiple instruments/voices are playing, making soaring music sound like shrill noise. With all the home-made recording done now, it's getting easier to tell the difference. I'm listening to a song right now that sounds so squashed I feel embarrassed for the band.
Compression can be an engineer's best friend used properly. Used improperly, it can be horrible and tragic. I will say that digital is far less forgiving than analog. Tape saturation in analog can sound nice before it distorts. Digital clipping (square waves) are nails-on-a-chalkboard awful. The loudness wars really reached nuclear status with the introduction of the Waves L1 Ultramaximizer, making ultra-hot compressed recordings the norm. For many mastering guys it was ALWAYS the final piece of the chain, being used whether it was needed or not because they could make the label happy with a louder recording (for radio) while being transparent and avoiding clipping.
Yes, I enjoy many indie records and the internet has been nothing but amazing for artists who want to control every step of the process and put out great sounding singles, EPs or full albums, minus filler tracks. I buy lots of stuff off Bandcamp.
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19 minutes ago, Chris A said:
I've read this so many times that candidly I feel nauseated when writing this--once again.
If I were in your shoes, I would personally hide your contributions to that business when contributing to this website--or at least completely disown all practices used today for popular music "creation". That isn't justification enough in my book for what's being done to popular music recordings (vs. classical and perhaps mainstream jazz).
When I take apart a music track from an album produced since 1991 (the year that multiband compressors statistically came into widespread use), I see and hear increasing amounts vs. time of damage that has been impressed into the recordings. Nowadays, what's typically left over for the consumer is like corned beef hash.
Again, I really do think you picked the wrong web site to start this argument (yet again). Perhaps it might be better received at a mastering forum for those trying to break into the business (...poor souls...). They may value this type of advice. You're certainly welcome to voice your views here, but note that there are more than a few folks here that are also going to voice theirs.
Really? Even live performance? I think you're trying to justify something that I certainly wouldn't.
"Assembling recordings" (multitrack recording) is actually the problem--the point where good musicians actually lose control of their product. And you can hear it on higher quality models of Klipsch loudspeakers--in spades.
Sounds like you're searching for catharsis here.
I think you're losing your focus here, however. If the standard in the business were transparent recordings (as it is for classical and jazz), then the above statement wouldn't be very much of a factor to talk about.
I think you're in danger of being called "a bit self absorbed" here. All music is created like this. If it weren't, it would be called programming.
Chris
Hey Chris, fortunately, I don't care what you think. I was adding my perceptions to questions or topics posed by others. Have a good one.
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1 minute ago, glens said:
That was nicely put and I fully understand all that. My unstated point was not "hey, that drum set doesn't sound to me like my drum set while I'm playing it," rather that much "popular" music seems to have been mixed to sound good on speakers with bloated bass, dull highs, and little-to-no dynamic capability.
I've picked up several "remastered" versions of '80s CD releases (largely of pre-CD original works) (and mostly for the additional tracks) and without fail the sonic results may be cleaner from some technical aspects but the dynamics and more "natural" tonal balance are all but obliterated.
Back in the '70's I favored the "cut corner" import LPs over the "American" issues not only because they were nominally half the price, but they flat out "sounded" better. Especially the Zeppelin stuff from the UK.
I guess what I'm saying is that I don't rightly know just what it is the engineers are largely doing these days, but it isn't making the end results sound good. If they were doing whatever it is they're doing behind the board(s) at a big live show I'm confident they'd be escorted outside the venue in a hot minute. If not by their bosses, at least by the "customers."
What's so difficult about using decent playback equipment and making it sound halfway decent? This isn't just about this week's paycheck, it's something that will likely be set in stone for all posterity.
Just for the record, every engineer I've ever met is a huge music fan, if not musician, and can readily rattle off his/her/its favorite records and how those albums got them into recording in the first place. Studios are generally very well thought out and engineers take pride in their equipment choices and will agonize over how things sound.
A big reason your "cheap" albums sound good is that the plant pressing the records had to turn the volume way down in order for the record to play without the needle jumping out every other second. The records were made thinner, with less raw material, so they couldn't make them as hot (and distortion prone) as the heavier records. Since a record is literally destroying itself, bit by bit, every time it is played (the needle quickly melting the vinyl before the vinyl is rapidly cooled, trapping dust and dirt forever), the cheap records wouldn't last as long.
Remasters are a whole 'nother matter. I hate most of them as they're never a straight transfer. Remastering engineers always feel the need to leave their "sonic signature" on something, generally meaning a smiley-face EQ and squashing the life out of it. It just makes more money for the record label as they can re-release catalog material they own to squeeze a few more drops of blood from a rock. I went back and bought a ton of first generation CD transfers of some of my favorite albums, making sure to get the early editions as they were more or less straight from the master tapes without the new (at the time) Sonic Solutions No Noise noise reduction, which is hot garbage. Had to eBay a lot of them to make sure I was getting the right catalog numbers. Then I ripped them into full-range FLAC files using AccurateRip for verification. They sound amazing. Anything past 16bit, 44.1k for analog transfers is a waste of hard drive space. Analog only has so much dynamic range and frequency response to begin with. Redbook CD standard is just ducky.
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2 minutes ago, glens said:
I've never understood that rationale.
Why not make it sound the best it can, as in "right"? Let the end user salt and pepper to taste if necessary. Salt and pepper can't fix what isn't there anymore.
Because "right" is an extremely subjective argument. Of course as a listener and an engineer I always want to get the best sound possible, but at the end of the day, it isn't my vote that counts. The artist or producer has final say over a mix and they often don't have the best ears, but as a working stiff, I wanted to get paid and perhaps repeat business. It's a contributing factor as to why I don't do it anymore professionally.
If I knew it was headed for mastering, especially to a mastering engineer I trusted and respected, I'd often leave a couple of rough edges that I knew they could smooth out and make it tighter and more cohesive overall.
And addressing the topic of "right" and "accuracy" in listening, folks, it's a fool's errand. With the exception of high end classical recordings where the engineer is simply documenting a performance and attempting to capture the dynamics of an orchestra and the space of a beautiful music hall, recordings are "assembled" in parts. There may be a rough track as laid down by a band or a team of studio musicians, but there will be LOTS of overdubs, comps, edits, tweaks, leveling, dynamic range limiting or compression, equalization, AD and DA conversions, time alignment, etc, etc. The track will be full spindle mutilated and that's IF it doesn't get sent to someone else for remixing or secondary work. Every microphone, preamp, converter and plugin add their own flavor to the mix.
What I'm trying to say here is that your favorite records were created through a series of happenstance situations and compromises. There is no "right" way to listen. If it sounds good, it IS good.
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Thanks for getting back to me.
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Yeah, studio stuff always looks and sounds impressive until you realize that it's a working environment. People get attached to their monitors because of predictability. When an unfamiliar set of tracks come across YOUR monitors that you've spent hundreds, if not thousands, of hours listening to, you know what to do. EQ and dynamics application and changes are apparent not because the speakers are perfect, but because YOU know how they should respond to certain things.
Unpictured in that image I posted above is that the room I'm in comes right off a kitchen. Sitting in front of the monitors, you never had a great idea where your bass and kick drum sat in the mix, so I'd get up and go lean in the doorway to the kitchen and listen to my mix. It gave the bass frequencies room to finish their wavelength and told me if I needed change the low end any. Worked every time.
Hmm. Price is no object choice of monitors? Probably the monitors my mastering engineer friend Eric uses. They're custom built with dual 15" TAD drivers and large horns handling mids and highs. He drives them with a tube amp (Manley, I think) and a custom DAC he built. You can hear a gnat fart on those bad boys. It's beautiful. This is a pic in his old room. They've since built a new studio.
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Is there any chance part or all of this is still available?
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I live in Murfreesboro, about 30 minutes southeast of Nashville. I used to work for 911 in Nashville, and my friends who still work there tell me it's slammed and they're stretched thin. The last time it was like this was the flood. Large tornado tore a path right through the downtown and east Nashville areas. Lots of damaged businesses, some of them just rubble. TEMA has declared a level 3 disaster which should help prompt a federal response for cleanup and recovery efforts. They may not be done discovering bodies yet, either.
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I always found it funny that people would ask me about great sounding "studio monitors". Most of the studio monitors I listened to were nothing special in the excitement department. They were meant to present the broadest possible spectrum of tonal variation. My theory behind the popularity of certain monitors like the Yahama NS-10 was not that they were so much a great speaker as they were easily repaired. Most studios had an extra pair or two in a second room or a closet along with spare woofers and tweeters, although you'll find many used NS-10s with fused tweeters as they were constantly blowing. Unlike home audio gear, studio gear is put to work regularly. Studios aren't gonna sit on a piece of gear that isn't making them money as it means they have funds tied up in a mic or a preamp they could be using elsewhere. You don't want a client sitting around twiddling their thumbs while your monitors are blown. They're paying for that time (or maybe they aren't and you're working for free). Reliability is paramount. I'll take some Fostex T-40 or Sony MDR-7506 headphones over something much more expensive because (1) the studio musicians don't care, (2) they are going to be abused, hence they need to be easily repaired with obtainable parts, and (3) perfect is the enemy of good enough. Super high quality monitors were to be found, sure. Some places kept the high-end stuff, but the problem with that is that you've blown your budget on a great pair of speakers with no backup. A studio might build a big set of far-field speakers, but they were generally only used to "make it sound important" when a record exec or non-musical "producer" came through. No one mixed on them.
...and Auratones. I didn't care for them. They were ok for checking your mix "clock radio style" but not really for anything else. It was easier to just burn off a CD and run to the car to check it.
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What are you trying to gain by biamping? Generally you would do that in an active crossover system where you want to manually adjust the crossover points to complement whatever (sometimes custom) tweeters and drivers you're using, but Klipsch has done a good job with crossovers for the most part. I'm guessing any benefit you're attempting to gain by biamping these speakers will be lost in the complexity of trying to make your amp do something it's not designed to do.
I wouldn't go to complicated. Just go with some good quality oxygen-free monoprice like Tom suggested, or you can use the famous HD14G cables like I have used before (Home Depot 14 gauge extension cables) and enjoy the speakers.
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As a former recording engineer here in the Nashville area, I have used many near, mid and far field monitors for recording and mixing. I never really used or enjoyed them for any sort of recreational listening because I found most of them fairly clinical and surgical/dry. When mixing, you're trying to make the mix sound balanced across a wide array of potential listening situations: car, headphones, earbuds, cheap speakers, party speakers, etc. We were usually trying to make it sound as good as we could across the range. Many, many studios used the ubiquitous Yamaha NS-10s, a speaker I hated then and now. It was taxing to listen to and I was always tired after using them. I used Genelec 1030-somethings for a long time. They were powered, accurate and very surgical. You could hear every EQ and dynamics change easily, but they were very sterile and not musical at all. I always did like Tannoy Gold's and tannoys in general were quality. If I had to pick a Klipsch speaker to mix on today, I'd go with the RP-600M for sure. It's the right size and you could easily use them as nearfields. Pair them with a quality Bryston or similar amp and you're golden. I never used subs mixing, because it was too hard to get a good balance and everything ended up too bass heavy or light depending on your setup and room.
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Studio Monitors for Near Field Listening?
in 2-Channel Home Audio
Posted
I'll take it.