Sound Engineering/Quality - Then and Now

[Tusk]

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NOTE FROM MIGUEL:

Tusk made this post in the Listen Up! thread. After I responded, I decided to split it off and create a new topic out of it.

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Tusk's post:

At IDF, a poster commented she thought Casey delivered on the promise of an 'organic' album as opposed to the more processed sounds on Haley's "Listen Up!".

Another poster countered that "Listen Up!" was indeed 'organic' for a Motown inspired album, which caused me to look something up and I posted an interesting article that I found that seems to be the template that they went with when making "Listen Up!" They followed the Motown map to a "T"

Haley's album is organic in the sense that it's pretty pure for a mo-town sound and such. You don't strip down those types of songs.

I agreed with this post and posted

http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,...75,00.html

So what was the Motown Sound? Great melodies, lots of tambourines and hand clapping, blaring horns, interplay between the lead singer and his or her backup vocalists, driving bass lines and foot-slapping drum parts. In his still essential Motown history Where Did Our Love Go? Nelson George writes, "Motown chief engineer Mike McClain built a miniscule, tinny-sounding radio designed to approximate the sound of a car radio. The high-end bias of Motown's recordings can be partially traced to the company's reliance on this piece of equipment." They knew people would be listening on their car stereos and on their transistor sets and they were going to do what it took to make their songs sound good and memorable. Even if you couldn't put your finger on it, when a Motown song came on, you knew it.

Throughout the Sixties, Motown produced a catalog of songs that cannot be rivaled. "You've Really Got a Hold On Me," "Heat Wave," "Dancing in the Street," "Tracks of My Tears," "Where Did Our Love Go," "My Guy," "My Girl," "Baby Love," "Reach Out, I'll Be There," "I Can't Help Myself," "Get Ready," "Stop! In the Name of Love," "The Way You Do the Things You Do," and so on. They were simple love songs that told simple stories, often in joyously happy or heartbreakingly sad ways. And all the while Motown was the pride of Detroit and the pride of black America (though Gordy tried, with his usual bluster, to make it the "Sound of Young America," a label he began to stamp on all of the company's vinyl)

sounds like Mission accomplished on "Listen Up!"

[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