Sound Engineering/Quality - Then and Now

[Miguel]

Motown chief engineer Mike McClain built a miniscule, tinny-sounding radio designed to approximate the sound of a car radio.

When I was researching the people rumored to possibly be working with Haley, there was an old-school one who would mix the sounds using a small speaker. If he could make it sound good on that it would sound fantastic on anything better.

Back in November I posted this video about Motown and its production process:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QeQvOu4gbaQ

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Some thoughts about sound quality today compared to the past (articles from 2010):

Why Music Sounds Lousy in 2010

Mr. Iovine lashed out at the “digital revolution” in music and how it has degraded audio quality. “It just drives me nuts,” he said later in an interview. “We need a real file that can capture music the way it was intended to be heard. Labels have been dumbing down the music for years.”

Part of the problem, Mr. Iovine says, is the quality of music found on file-sharing sites. “You download an MP3 file off of LimeWire and it sounds like it’s been through a blender,” he said. When it comes to the dominant seller of music online, Apple, Mr. Iovine still sees flaws in the “digital ecosystem,” as he called it. “You have music labels sending Red Book” — the CD audio standard — “files to Apple. Why? Why not send something better? You have to get the file right to get the ecosystem correct.” Mr. Iovine said that Universal Music Group is working with Apple to increase the quality of the recording it sends to iTunes. “An audio signal is only as good as its weakest link,” he said.

http://gadgetwise.blogs.nytimes.com/2010...y-in-2010/

In Mobile Age, Sound Quality Steps Back

...A onetime audio engineer who now works as a consultant for Stereo Exchange, an upscale audio store in Manhattan, Mr. Zimmer lights up when talking about high fidelity, bit rates and $10,000 loudspeakers.

But iPods and compressed computer files — the most popular vehicles for audio today — are “sucking the life out of music,” he says.

The last decade has brought an explosion in dazzling technological advances — including enhancements in surround sound, high definition television and 3-D — that have transformed the fan’s experience. There are improvements in the quality of media everywhere — except in music.

In many ways, the quality of what people hear — how well the playback reflects the original sound— has taken a step back. To many expert ears, compressed music files produce a crackly, tinnier and thinner sound than music on CDs and certainly on vinyl. And to compete with other songs, tracks are engineered to be much louder as well.

...The change in sound quality is as much cultural as technological. For decades, starting around the 1950s, high-end stereos were a status symbol. A high-quality system was something to show off, much like a new flat-screen TV today.

But Michael Fremer, a professed audiophile who runs musicangle.com, which reviews albums, said that today, “a stereo has become an object of scorn.”

...“People used to sit and listen to music,” Mr. Fremer said, but the increased portability has altered the way people experience recorded music. “It was an activity. It is no longer consumed as an event that you pay attention to.”

...With the rise of digital music, fans listen to fewer albums straight through. Instead, they move from one artist’s song to another’s. Pop artists and their labels, meanwhile, shudder at the prospect of having their song seem quieter than the previous song on a fan’s playlist.

So audio engineers, acting as foot soldiers in a so-called volume war, are often enlisted to increase the overall volume of a recording.

Randy Merrill, an engineer at Masterdisk, a New York City company that creates master recordings, said that to achieve an overall louder sound, engineers raise the softer volumes toward peak levels. On a quality stereo system, Mr. Merrill said, the reduced volume range can leave a track sounding distorted. “Modern recording has gone overboard on the volume,” he said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/10/busine...audio.html