Because they are losing money and the tech equivalent of Enron?

No, I mean that I bought the new Beauty Pill album as download-only, 192K 24 bit. Sounds truly awesome.

Vinyl certainly doesn't cap at 16k or anything close to it, because this crazy system worked: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Quad, off vinyl, done by cutting not one but two distinct carrier waves into the groove at 30K. These then somehow manipulated a FM wave varying from 18K to 45K (!) and that's what made your surround outputs. It worked, and was the most ungodly hack. I've never heard it, and I bet those surround channels sounded mighty strange, and after a thousand plays, good day, sir! you lose! ;)

But it worked. In 1971. Pretty conclusive proof vinyl put out coherent audio waaaay beyond 22K, if you could run a quadrophonic sound system off FM carrier waves at up to 45K using the vinyl mastering of the day.

Thanks. Being an old fart who willingly listens to Neil Young, I like hearing new stuff that's amazing. More relevantly, Noisia USES those frequency ranges actively, which is more than Neil really does (with him it's all just the natural behavior of cymbals, sibilance, violins or what have you).

It blows my mind that the same generation who's composing music that can do ANYTHING with sound, tend to be glued to this dogma and stuck to lossy encoding and aggressive bandlimiting. Seriously guys, it's just as much of a handicap as loudness war is, and I know you don't like that. Bits are cheap, live a little.

He totally does: plays guitar through a particular crusty old amp and mixes/records stuff through lovingly reconditioned crusty old tube gear (mind you, speakers might be a lot newer, certainly not worn unless it's his guitar speakers).

Have you HEARD crusty old tube gear, playing music? Or indeed playing old records or alternately the kind of overkill digital Neil likes?

You might consider trying that one day. I don't listen through crusty old tube gear, far from it, but once I did. Not a great choice for a working sound engineer as it'll fool you and make you do dumb things in mixing (better to have something that'll sound bad if you mix bad). However, you might be startled at how un-yucky classic vinyl (or overkill digital Neil-style) sounds through old tube gear and various kinds of speakers.

In fact some of the junkiest old speakers do have the advantage of being single driver, so they trade off frequency extension (which the old tube amps don't do great with anyway) for other worthy qualities of tone. But you have to hear it, and streaming audio is more or less the diametric opposite tone quality to that.

I don't remember electing you the arbiter of whether Neil's information is false FOR ME.

I have a Pono and Neil's right. But I've also worked in pro audio for many years, and when I say it's obviously better than ipods and such and comparable to a Lavry DA10, I am plugging this into it: http://en-us.sennheiser.com/im...

It's slightly disingenuous to argue for Pono's cheapness when ideally the headphones you use cost as much OR MORE than the Pono, to get those results. But I already had the headphones (in fact I've stripped them to bare speaker elements for critical listening during audio plugin design).

Neil does like going around blowing the minds of amateur listeners who've never heard good sound before. He might not be telling them that you need to spend a bunch on headphones too, but people like blowing stupid money on headphones: look at Beats.

He doesn't need a profit, and it's not false information. I'm afraid you're being kind of silly here.

Somehow, techies are all 'rar, free market, no regulate anything' but the instant it's 'audio frequencies', suddenly all pearls are clutched and it's EEEEE! Protect the poor general public from the evildoer exploiters! Baffling. You don't trust the market perhaps because claims like Neil's gain traction and are taken seriously? There might be a reason for that, for instance 'true information'. Whether it matters that much to you is another story.

Dave? Dare I say 'the' Dave Collins?

'Taustin'? Run.

You've just bet a steak dinner that dcollins117 can't tell the difference between Pandora 128K audio, and Pono 192K/24 bit uncompressed.

He'll be listening on this: http://www.hardbanger.net/wp-c...

Dave, if it's you, drop me a note on Terry's forum or something because I will buy you a steak dinner just for the sheer intensity of that burn. You mean, funny, awesome man :)

Oh, and thanks for mastering The Police's 'Synchronicity'. I love that record :)

Slashdot, ladies and gentlemen.

http://maagaudio.com/AIRBAND.h...

You manipulate bands like 30 or 40K when you want to bring a sense of energy or detail without apparent brightness—or if you need to interact with other EQ bands in a particular way. Only certain sounds even make sense to work with this way: cymbals are an obvious choice as they go right out to 50K and beyond, and of course lead vocals miked very closely with a large-diaphragm condenser mic. As soon as you're about ten feet from the mic those superhigh frequencies are already gone. To the listener they read as 'incredibly close to the ear' and that's valuable for many lead vocals.

Granted, if you count PA system graphic EQs and mixing board channels, the vast majority of EQs don't touch this range and may even filter it right out by default. But one doesn't choose lead vocal mics and EQs on the basis of averageness.

That's a SM57, a guitar cab mic. It is, shall we say, NOT typical of the performance of even $100 microphones these days. Hell, the trouble you have with cheap Chinese condensers is generally not the rolling off of high frequencies: the problem with garbage condenser mics is that they are TOO bright and blast you with sound up to 20K and beyond, combined with nasty capsule resonances.

If your argument rests on 'microphones act like SM57s, here's a chart', I can't help but question how honest the rest of your argument is. 57s are for putting up to a speaker grille or the actual paper cone, to get a really upfront heavy guitar tone that conditions the unbearably bright, harsh sound you get there.

Did anybody else spot that was a chart for a SM57? Or know what mic that is?

You don't GET to tell a crowd of uneducated techies that's a normal microphone and what they typically hear on recordings. They might believe you, and then where would we be?

I don't know, I think he has a good point

These days concerts (or even dance clubs) are the domain of really expensive, powerful PA systems such as Funktion One, where old 808s and 303s and JP-8000s combine to make pulsating electronic noises VERY LOUDLY.

At SPLs like that, you'd better believe you can hear lossy-encoding crud in the noise floor, with speakers like that you'd better believe you can hear sloppy blurred transients from mp3s. It's trendy to make PA systems ultra-powerful, ultra-punchy, capable of shatteringly pure sound quality. Lots of modern music (Noisia comes to mind for me) is geared to exploit this. It still sounds good as crappy MP3 because you can't tell what it's supposed to be, but over a real system (such as at a big club) it sounds amazing. Or over a really good home system.

DJs know this, that's why they scorn DJs that try to DJ using mp3s.

At 130 db on the dance floor that is where you might want to follow Neil Young's lead, and get something better than streaming quality. At 130 db you will probably be hearing the difference between 16 and 24 bit on the music's texture (your ears will be compressing the peaks insanely hard and they won't register with you like they would listening at home). And over massive high-powered horn tweeter arrays that can kill dog ears at fifty paces with >30K energy, you will probably hear the subtle differences between brick wall cutoff at 22K, and brights going out to 48K or so.

What you play on your iPod is your affair and a different other thing. ;)

They pretty much mean 'owner is willing to listen to music'. Compared to serious gear Bose is kind of silly but usually has some sort of merit. They're almost always working some kind of interesting concept, like the old single-driver omnidirectionals with most of the speakers facing backwards, or the noise-cancel headphones, or their line array speaker sticks. It's not that they're super well implemented by professional standards but at least they're trying and have a 'hook' to run with.

Owning Bose means you don't know all that much but you're willing to learn and eager to listen. Or possibly that you want to lord it over plebes, in which case the joke's on you :)

Real question here: back in the day media distribution was indeed controlled by a smallish group of powerbrokers, such as Ahmet Ertegun, Clive Davis (and how he'd hate being put second!), Walter Yetnikoff, David Geffen, Irving Azoff, even eventually guys like Neil Bogart. (if you don't recognize these names it's a fascinating story)

Now, media distribution is controlled by tech companies. We don't know any of the people behind it, it may or may not be an even smaller group, and where the original powerbrokers were motivated by personal artistic whims (Davis, Ertegun, to some extent early Geffen) or rapacious greed for power and importance (Geffen! Yetnikoff, Davis again, Bogart), today's media powerbrokers are devaluing media as a loss leader to get tactical control of the distribution channels, correctly thinking that if you can lock down a channel (like YouTube, or searching with Google) you have real power.

This is actually the Casablanca/Neil Bogart model, which ought to scare anybody who knows the history. Except artists aren't getting paid because they're up against the total history of recorded media, and rather than knocking off the outliers the whole system (that was already only serving megastars) is just scaled down and made faceless.

This is because media distribution is controlled by an even smaller group of tech industry middle managers who've been dumping content for decades to try and lock down control of the media pipes, in no small way by undercutting anything the former media industry could do.

Given that in neither case does it help working musicians and artists, and that in both cases it's control by a tiny bunch of dubious people, but now you will never know who they are and their interests are completely opposed to that of their content creators, how is this better?

You can say 'because artists are getting paid what they should, nothing' and I'll disagree, but please don't even make an argument that it's an equalizing force bringing down the megastars and growing the grassroots because internet at this point, that is clearly bullshit and always has been. It's a lie.

Network effects means the manufactured megastars dominate MORE over working musicians, not less, and the whole system has also been scaled down as you describe. I'd just like to know if you're imagining some kind of grass roots DIY 'because internet' lie. It's not, the controlling questionable individuals have just become Google mode (you can't ever reach them or speak to them, and they don't even care about you out of vanity or whim, instead they act like algorithms).

And with that, the thread was won :D

No, wrong, not.

The publishers are no prize, we know that (different artists have had very different experiences with 'em: ask John Fogerty)

Streaming is WAY worse. If you even knew any working musicians you'd have heard this. Even midlevel acts are getting checks like a couple bucks, or in the pennies. Neil has always been pretty decent at the business side and with CSN was aligned with Geffen back when you could get a pretty good deal if you were sharp, and he took advantage of that, and it's other people who got ripped off by the biz, not so much Neil.

He's not calling you a thief, he literally said quote "Copy my songs if you want to. That's free. Your choice" unquote.

I think it is possible you still have stuff to learn about the industry, about the current state of affairs, and about streaming. Fact is, musicians in general are way more hosed in the world of streaming, and they're being killed off slightly faster than the actual industry execs you hate, which are also being killed off (while they frantically try to cut streaming deals).

That's a good analogy. How much over 30fps is unnecessary for a twitch game? Presumably 60fps is too many?

How about 1920x1080? No video games should be allowed to run better than 30fps 1080p, including on home PCs?

That's not serious, by the way, I love me some 60fps youtube videos even (much less directly using a computer)

But it's analogous. Also, modern music is MORE likely to exploit the high sample rates Neil likes. Very few sounds he ever made besides cymbals really used that range, but something like noisia? Wow. If they're not working in 96 or 192K, they should, they've got a LOT of stuff going on waaaaay up there, and it's amazing.