Missing the Analog Point

For the last couple of days, I’ve been enjoying Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher: The Epic Life and Immortal Photographs of Edward Curtis, by Timothy Egan. It is a story about the most famous photographer of the American Indian in our history. But it is also a story about a man and his art, photography, at the beginning of that technology. When I was a kid, for a little while I was a photography geek in school. I had a few cameras, stuff that I’d found in pawn shops, from 120/620 Kodak film and a huge and beat-up Kodak Vollenda expandable camera to assorted low cost 35mm cameras. I wasn’t particularly good with the cameras (no change from today), but I was fascinated with the developing process and was fairly competent at that for a while. Music drug me away from photography pretty quickly and until digital cameras made taking pictures easy and cheap I pretty much gave up the habit.

Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher has a lot of detailed descriptions of the chemistry and experimental quality of the developing process that reminded me of the analog recording processes and equipment that I grew up working with and wrestled with for more than 40 years. The book made me wonder if modern analog camera fans are as clueless about the technology they use as are modern analog recording freaks? Edward Curtis was a wizard in the darkroom, creating his own developing emulsions, processes, and creating effects with chemicals, development time and temperatures, and other techniques. His gallery in McCloud, California is a national treasure as was his art. Most modern analog photographers bypass the darkroom, for good reason. The chemicals are often toxic, at best, and the processes are tedious, hazardous, and unpredictable. Sending your roll of film into a company that owns and maintains the automated processing equipment is the surest, easiest, safest way to get pictures developed. It also eliminates at least half of the art of being a photographer.

The analog recording process, at its best, is a similar mess of technologies, lots of subjective judgement, experience, tedious technologies that require constant (expensive) maintenance, and ridiculous quantities of patience. Like analog photography, the results of all of those qualities can be emulated relatively simply and predictably with digital technologies with little-to-no downside. I am not saying that those emulations are perfect and I am absolutely not arguing that an analog master can not do things in that format that might be impossible to duplicate in the digital world. I am saying that if you aren’t a master of the technology, you’re probably bullshitting yourself if you think plowing money into obsolete equipment and media is going to magically buy you something you couldn’t do better with digital equipment.

When Technology Becomes “Fool Friendly”

Thirty years ago (early 1992), I had just started work at my first medical devices position. One of my coworkers was the company’s brand new  IT guy, Richard, and he and I got curious about the new “World Wide Web” at about the same time. I’d been on-line with email and user groups for some time, but HTML and the web was new to both of us. The company, Telectronics Pacing Systems, was just beginning to face some of the problems that would eventually get the company regulated into history for a collection of disastrous product and engineering decisions. At the time, we were still flyin’ high and looking toward a bright future. (Hard to remember there was a time like that in the USA, isn’t it?)

As we got further into HTML, UNIX, and SQL coding, we could see that the days of these skills could be numbered in the single digits. When we first started out, to send an email message via UNIX, you first had to write an email editor with which to write the message. I had just learned how to do that bit of coding when HP-Mail, DEC’s All-in-One, and other email “clients” plus browsers like Mosaic (Netscape) came along and made many of my brand new skills obsolete.

About then, Richard said, “When the internet becomes easy for everyone to get into, it will be ruined.” What he meant was that for the time being the internet, before the WorldWideWeb, was pretty much a techie’s playground. Once browsers, email clients, and the rest of the crap that would come along to make the Internet accessible to “the common man/woman” the whole thing would turn into a clusterfuck of garbage, morons easily expressing their opinions, and lots of commerce. And he was right. That sequence of events has been true for many technical things: cars, motorcycles, synthesizers, personal computers, photography, audio and video recording and editing, and even engineering.

Jamkazam has been making fairly large strides toward creating an on-line place for musicians from all over the world to get together. The service just became fee-based, although you can experiment for a few hours each month for free. Recently, a new user went to the Facebook Jamkazam Jammers page to complain that she was unable to get “Jamkazam to work.” It turned out that she couldn’t get her Mac to work with her Presonus audio interface and, since her only reason for having an interface was to clutter up the Jamkazam fiber channels, her inability with her equipment was Jamkazam’s problem to solve. That is typical of my experience with the side-effects of dumbed-down technology. When the technology gets simple enough so that it “becomes easy for everyone to get into,” the quality, skills, commitment, and contributions of the people involved quickly drops to that common denominator. Now that on-line music is relatively simple (and getting more simple by the day), the people involved are less sophisticated, less talented, and way less capable of actually playing in a group.

There are at least a dozen groups on Facebook with clueless, talentless members claiming to be “music producers” and/or “recording engineers.” In today’s vernacular, I have no idea what a “producer” is or does. None of these people could swing a record deal if their lives and parents’ fortunes depended on it. They don’t know any actual musicians, so managing a recording date is hilariously out of their bailiwick. The first level border guard of recorded music used to be the entry fee: $100,000 14-track, 2” machines, half-million dollar consoles, multi-thousand dollar microphones, and million dollar acoustic spaces. Today, you can actually spend less than $500 and “make a record.” Most likely, that recording will suck on multiple levels, but YouTube won’t discriminate. Either will CD Baby, Tunecore, iMusician, Distrokid, or any of the other social media and on-line music distribution resources. You can be the absolute worst talent on the planet and still make a record and put it out there where people will have to step around it to avoid hearing it.

This is condition is sometimes described as the "tragedy of the commons." Wikipedia neatly defines this situation, "The tragedy of the commons describes a situation in economic science when individual users, who have open access to a resource unhampered by shared social structures or formal rules that govern access and use, act independently according to their own self-interest and, contrary to the common good of all users, cause depletion of the resource through their uncoordinated action."  The long, but detailed, way of saying, “When the internet (or anything) becomes easy for everyone to get into, it will be ruined.”

In manufacturing, quality and manufacturing engineers have a saying, “The only way to foolproof a system is to get the fools out of the system.” When it comes to systems like the internet, music, and art the fools rush in so fast and get so deep into the structure that there is no turning back.

The “I’m Gonna Quit” Story

There is a long, semi-funny story behind that song and the first recording and THIRD recording. We were living in Fremont, Nebraska at the time. I’d been laid off of my 1^st engineering job and had taken a position as tech services manager for an Omaha office equipment company, servicing Burroughs Corporation word processors and IBM Selectric typewriters among other electric and electronic equipment. It was a miserable job with a terrible company, but there weren’t many tech jobs in 1976 Nebraska. A few days before the song’s birth the owner of the company told me I had to lay off 2-3 of my newest, most capable technicians because they were “overqualified” and he wanted the money for raises for a couple of his bimbo saleswomen. The tech service department was not only making the company money, for the first time in the company’s history, but our service was attracting IBM customers and the sales commissions on those machines was better than anything a car salesman could make. Today, I would assume he was screwing the sales bimbos, then I was a pretty innocent/gullible 28-year-old.

Another insane Republican had driven the US economy into the dirt and times were somewhere between terrible and disastrous. We “sold” our house at a $5,000 loss (on a $20,000 original purchase), although on paper it looked like we broke even; I paid the “buyers” $5,000 under the table to make their down payment. I had arranged an Omaha apartment for us to move to, but at the last minute (before any money changed hands) Elvy wasn’t going to go. She’d asked a friend in Scribner, Nebraska for help and he’d offered her (and us) a house he owned that needed a lot of work but was livable and he would pay for the work and materials. $80 a month rent, which was workable on Nebraska’s unemployment. One morning, I called the office company owner and said, “I was sick when I took this job, I’m better now and I quit.” No notice, no two weeks, nothing. I hadn’t worked there long enough to damage my Unemployment from my engineering job so I had nothing to lose.

Before we packed up our belongings and gave away everything that wasn’t going to fit in our new far-smaller home, two friends (Dan Tonjes and Mark Von Seggern) and I hit the basement “studio” for one last blast of our past and we recorded the twanging electric guitar part, vocal, bass (Dan), and drums (Mark) to my new song, “I’m Gonna Quit” on two of my Teac 3340’s four tracks (drums ALWAYS get tracked in stereo). After we were sort of settled in to the house in Scribner, I wanted to add a distorted guitar part and an extended percussion into and outro. Dan and/or Mark knew the Scribner school music instructor and “borrowed” a wheelbarrow full of school percussion instruments. We used the other two 3340 tracks on I don’t remember how many percussion players gathered from our friends in Scribner and my guitar part and I had a song and a recording. I still love that original recording, as rough as it is.

A decade later, a Nebraska friend and one of the guys (a drummer) who we used in the studio occasionally was in a band being fronted by Barry Fey’s company. I’d given him a cassette of my songs back in the 70s and he’d played it for the band and they wanted two of my songs: “Down on the Beach” and I’m Gonna Quit.” By “wanted” I mean they wanted me to give them the publishing rights and authorship in exchange for . . . nothing. I declined, but they recorded the two songs anyway and the band dissolved and nothing happened to the recordings after a lot of money was spent and the usual 80’s rock and roll silliness ensued.

When I moved to Denver in 1991, I looked up the lead singer of that band and she gave me a cassette copy of their take on my song. It was . . .entertaining, but I could see how the band didn’t take with audiences or promoters. Too much Pat Benatar, too late.

Through my following studio years, I always wanted to redo “I’m Gonna Quit” with a little more fidelity, but recreating the attitude, energy, random-ness and creativity of the performance and percussion section overwhelmed me. Sometime around 2002, Michael McKern and I gave it a shot with the original recording as our “click track,” we recorded his drums, the clean electric guitar parts, some background vocal ideas, and a decent acoustic guitar part to his 24-track MCI JH24 deck and bounced that to Pro Tools. And . . . nothing. I was still stuck without a way to pull off the percussion section and that was a gumption trap.

Jump to August 2020 and I’ve been playing music, on-line, through JamKazam, with four friends: Harold Goodman, Stu Anderson, and Scott Jarrett since March. We’re messing with original music and covers and they’ve irrationally designated me “vocalist” because no one else wants to sing, including Scott who is an infinitely better vocalist than me and about 1,000 times the musician. Michael has been dubbing drum parts to my original songs via Dropbox and, when I tell him I can’t get into finishing off “I’m Gonna Quit” because my attempts at doing a percussion part either with real instruments or Logic X’s loops or MIDI just sucked, Michael knocks out six tracks of the percussion instruments you will hear on the recording. Hesitantly, I offer up “I’m Gonna Quit” to Harold and we fool with it for a bit on line and he, as usual, asks “Should we record it?”

This was the first time I had sung the song since 1978, other than noodling around with ideas with Michael almost 20 years ago. The vocal you hear on this recording, for better or worse, is my first take at the song in August of this year. I’ve sung it with the group on JamKazam a dozen or more times, since, and tried to overdub it with a “better” microphone in my office/studio and I still like this take the best. I musta been really pissed off at something (probably Trump) that day. Harold’s bass line was the perfect foil for the busy percussion and guitars and Stuart’s steel guitar and Scott’s organ and the rest was my problem. My wife, Robbye, suggested industrial, work sounds to go with the percussion intro and outro and that pretty much filled in everything I thought was missing. I did keep a lot of my last vocal stuff from the times we recorded the song on JamKazam for the outro. All of that “I don’t need this” and “I’m gonna quit” and the rest after the last chorus was cut-and-pasted from every other take of the song.

This is the final, newest, bestest version of my song, “I’m Gonna Quit,” featuring my friends Michael McKern, Harold Goodman, and Scott Jarrett. I can not express the obligation I feel toward all of them for making this happen. Not out of arrogance but out of personal history, I do love this song and I am really happy with this version. It is, finally, done.

Technology Is Gonna Do What?

The telephone has been around almost 150 years, since 1870. By 1879, telephone service subscribers began to be identified by their phone numbers, not by their names and by 1918 a million telephones were in service just in the USA. In 1962, Telestar, the first communications satellite was launched. In 1973, the beginning of the end of telephone communications arrived when Martin Cooper developed the first handheld mobile telephone. The first analog cell phone system went into service in Japan in 1979. In the 1990’s, cell phones began the switch to digital and there are hundreds of millions of people now frustrated by the awful sound of low-fidelity (at best an 8bit/8kHz sample rate, 200-3.2kHz bandwidth, 64kbs data compression) digital cell phone conversations and miscommunication created by lousy digital connections.

In fact, according to an Atlantic Magazine article "Don't Hate the Phone Call, Hate the Phone" a whole generation, Millennials, have been diagnosed with a “kind of telephoniphobia” regarding voice telephone communications. Now that half of Americans under 35 use cell phones exclusively, “the intrinsic unreliability of the cellular network has become internalized as a property of telephony.” It isn’t. It’s a property of fuckin’ cell phones and I absolutely hate the damn things. I hate getting calls from people on their cell phones. I hate calling people who I know will answer my call on their cell phone. Between the distortion, the Auto-Tune-like Mr. Roboto voices, and the forced long pauses while we try to determine if there is still a usable connection (on their side) I just assume that at least 3/4 of the things that were said were misunderstood or not heard at all.

I have stopped listening to audio fidelity complaints from people who tolerate cell phones. This is not an anti-digital rant. I love digital data storage and have been perfectly happy with digital audio for music since the early 1980’s. However, the fact that cell phone users don’t even insist on full duplex communications capability from their crap-stick phone providers is evidence enough to me that they are not serious audiophiles of any sort. If you don’t know the difference between half and full duplex, I particularly like this comment and response for an answer: “GSM operates in duplex (separate frequencies for transmit and receive), the mobile station does not transmit and receive at the same time. That's called half-duplex. It's done to save bandwidth and battery power, and to make cell phone conversations more difficult.” While I’m sure the real reason cell phone providers don’t deliver full duplex is because it would be technically slightly more demanding and marginally more expensive, I’m entertained by the assumption that “it's done to . . . make cell phone conversations more difficult.” No matter why it’s done, it sure as hell makes conversations more difficult, less convenient, less entertaining, less personal, and less pleasant.

This afternoon, I tried to have a conversation with my brother who lives in Phoenix and this statement from that Atlantic Magazine article on why people hate phone calls rang true, “On the infrastructural level, mobile phones operate on cellular networks, which route calls between between transceivers distributed across a service area. These networks are wireless, obviously, which means that signal strength, traffic, and interference can make calls difficult or impossible. Together, these factors have made phone calls synonymous with unreliability. Failures to connect, weak signals that staccato sentences into bursts of signal and silence, and the frequency of dropped calls all help us find excuses not to initiate or accept a phone call.”

It’s not just “weak signals” that are the problem. Grossly misnamed “communications companies” have jammed so much data into so little bandwidth that signal strength is just one of many factors that creates an incoherent telephone call. My brother, for example, said he had “five bars” of signal strength, but our conversation was mostly a collection of Mr. Roboto vocoder noises, weird electronic bird song tweeting and screeches, and long pauses where neither of us were able to get anything across the satellite signal path. After a bit, we gave up and went back to email to carry on our “conversation.”  A few moments later, my daughter called. We both have “land line” phone systems; hers is provided by her telephone company and mine is through the internet and an Ooma Telo system. We had a pleasant 1/2 hour conversation; with each of us laughing at the other’s jokes and stories made even more personal by being able to hear the laughter while we continued the stories. No weird noises, no Auto-Tuned Kayne West sound effects, no forced pauses waiting for the phone system to reboot itself and reconnect us; just a normal telephone conversation. The kind we used to have every time we picked up a telephone that was wired to the fuckin’ wall; 75 years ago.

The fact that the quality of telephone data transmission is lousy allows cell phone manufacturers to dumb-down the whole signal path. The microphones, the “speaker,” and the analog electronics connecting those transducers to the crappy data transmission system are all degraded. Why connected a decent micro-condenser microphone to an 8bit/8kHz sample rate, 200-3.2kHz bandwidth, 64kbs data compression system? It doesn’t make sense to waste a decent transducer on a crappy ADC system. Likewise, at the receiving end why connect a half-decent speaker to a low-fidelity DAC? So, they don’t. You clearly don’t notice or care. Some of you low-life weirdoes even listen to music on your phone, out of that godawful speaker!

Cell phones have rendered over-the-wire conversations pointless and painful. They are helping us all grow apart. “Can you hear me now?” is not a question of coverage and hasn’t been for at least a decade. Now, it’s a question of did you understand that simple question through the hash of garbled transmission, Star Bores sound effects, and cut-out segments of the phrase? I’ve said this before, “I can, in a few moments, tell if a caller is on a cellphone because the quality is miserable. Always. My guess is if you can tolerate that level of distortion in a voice conversation you aren’t that discerning in any aspect of audio. So, while I’m not surprised that music is being listened to on actual speakers by an audience of 12%-and-shrinking I’m also not impressed by your musical tastes. Your opinion of audio quality is just going to make me laugh, so don’t waste either of our time.” It’s still true, but now I also don’t think you care much about communicating with your fellow human beings.

Overrating Repairability

Back in the mid-80’s I thought I had a small vision of the future. I imagined that there would be a much larger market for small, high fidelity, high reliability power amplifiers for the home studio market. First, I talked Pat Quilter into designing a one-rack-space Series One amplifier for that market; the QSC 1080/1100. From my own studio experience, I added a pair of headphone jacks for control room monitoring, with independent and easily replaceable limiting resistors so that two different monitor headphones could be plugged into that amp with the expectation that the acoustic output would be the same on both phones regardless of sensitivity or impedance. My contribution to the company’s documentation was the schematics that were found at the back of every owners’ manual for more than a decade. I also spec’d all of our circuit boards at 2 mil thickness to make servicing easier without causing damage to our boards during repair and to add to the durability of our products. I even argued that slotted screws were more repair-friendly than Philips screws, due to my experience working on Japanese motorcycles. (I was wrong in that argument.) 40 years ago, I was a big believer in designing field-repairable products. Today, not so much.

I have a long career in music instrument (MI) and audio equipment repair. That means, I have worked on equipment from the end of the tube design period through the 30-some years of analog equipment and discrete-to-integrated-circuit designs to today’s surface mount technology (SMT) components and our current age of equipment that is so complicated it is very nearly unrepairable for anyone but factory technicians. I have worked for several manufacturers, either as a captured employee repairing company products or as an independent tech working as an authorized service center or repairing equipment long past warranty. I’ve worked on a lot of equipment after someone else has attempted to make repairs. I’ve seen butchered single-sided printed circuit boards (PCBs), slaughtered double-sided PCBs with nonsensical jumpers scattered all over the board to bypass the wreaked traces, and point-to-point terminal strips so buried in cold solder that I needed a bottle of flux to get the solder to flow well enough to remove past repair attempts. And those messes were often created by factory authorized service center technicians and even the factory technicians! There are at least two well-known, high end Eurotrash console makers (who may or may not remain nameless) that were infamous for shipping new consoles with so many butchered and jumpered boards and wiring harnesses that we just assumed their crap would need reworking out of the crate. All of that equipment was repairable, but it needed repairing on a constant basis; rarely less than every 100 hours of use.

In fact, most of the products from our past that are “repairable” were made that way because their expected lifetime was incredibly short without occasional repairs. The old VW air-cooled motors lasted about 35,000 to 50,000 miles between major overhaul (35 for the van, 50 for the Beatle). In the good old days, an analog tape deck required recalibration with every new reel of tape and serious and expensive maintenance every two thousand hours (about 250 8-hour-days) of operation. In modern vehicles, safety features like crumple zones, air bags, ABS brakes, and other electronic-controlled features and functions limit repairability to module replacement because of their complexity and design. It’s not just the SMT components, but the incredible increase in complexity of the circuit designs that limits field repairs.

However, we’re at a point in auto manufacturing history where any vehicle that doesn’t last 200,000 miles between major service intervals is considered a lemon. Other products offer similar longevity expectations. I’m still using a 2008 Dell laptop, although it is on its 3rd keyboard (which was designed to be easily replaceable). While Millennials seem to think a cell phone is obsolete after a year or less, my flip phone has been working just fine for the last decade and it is still on the original battery. Televisions usually get replaced becauses they are “too small” or don’t have current features, not because the CRT or other tubes and components have failed. Appliances are often handed down to a home’s next owners because, on average, Americans stay in their houses fewer years than an appliance survives.

Much of what we buy today can be repaired, it just costs so little to replace it that we do that instead. Click and Clack, the guys on the old Car Talk NPR radio show once estimated that it cost an average of $600/year to maintain an old car, far less than car payments. People still buy new cars, even when their current vehicle is probably good for another decade or two. My father, on the other hand, habitually traded in his “old” Chevy at 50,000 miles because he was used to his cars falling apart about then; and losing trade-in “value.” My first decent vehicle, a 1973 Toyota Hilux pickup, lasted for 350,000 miles with a valve job at 250,000 and a rear transmission seal at 275,000 being the only significant necessary repairs. I sold it for almost exactly what I paid for it, thirty years later. Now that is both longevity and repairability, but no crumple zones, no ABS, decent fuel economy but lousy emissions, lots of vehicle noise, and not much interior comfort. My current 2008 Nissan pickup has most of the creature comforts and safety features of the best car; at least as of 2008. It is pretty servicable, too. My brother’s new Toyota coupe looks like a nightmare to service, but it has a 100,000 mile power train warranty.

Finally, while there is lots of talk about fighting the disposable product economy, there isn’t much energy going into actually doing it. Consumers are quite happy being ignorant about how practically everything they own works. I would bet that the percentage of consumers (including musicians and studio owners) who are capable of repairing even the most simple electro-mechanical problem is less than 1% and many of those would rather they didn’t need to. At some point in manufacturing history, someone asked “How many customers read our detailed owner’s manual with maintenance and service information?” When the answer came back, it was obvious that was a waste of time and effort. Soon after, someone asked, “How many customers care if a service manual is available?” That discouraging answer eliminated service manuals. As long as those kinds of questions keep getting money-saving answers, you can assume servicability will continue to vanish.

If you really like working on old junk, there is more than enough of that crap availble out there for you to play with. Since all of the post-Boomer generations appear to be mostly bdisinterested in “vintage” crap, prices are falling and demand is vanishing. At that rate, you should be able to buy Grandpa’s muscle car for less than your father paid for it. Hurry, though. Old stuff is showing up in the dump on an accelorated schedule. Turns out, most people would rather recycle old equipment rather than wrestle with fixing it.

The other end of the decision process is function, value, and price. For the cost of a 24-track record head you can buy 24-or-more high definition preamps with a high-resolution A/D interface that will likely last for a decade or more with no maintenance required. For the repair cost of a vintage Eurotrash tube condenser microphone, you can buy a modern condenser microphone that will emulate a whole collection of vintage microphones. If that kind of analysis doesn’t convince you to reconsider tossing good money after bad, you are clearly convinced that there is something special from obsolete technology and I can’t (and wouldn’t want to) change that.

Bullshit Arguments

A TapeOp Magazine opinion piece recently presented the dumbest anti-ABX argument I’ve heard to date; and I’ve heard a lot of really stupid arguments against ABX comparisons. Allen Farmelo's article title pretty much says it all, “The Problem with A-B'ing and Why Neil Young is Right about Sound Quality.” Because I’m a nice guy and it’s early in the morning, I’m not going to spend any time whacking away at the fact that there are so many old, deaf, mediocre rockers who imagine they possess golden ears. Neil Young, probably the single most prolific creator of awful sounding records in human history, is close to the last guy on the planet who should be promoting high resolution audio. Nuts, I went there anyway. So much for being a nice quy. 

However, the bullshit argument here is, “. . . we hear people talk about how one can't make out the difference between a hi-res MP3 and a 24bit WAV file (assumedly a difference similar to the one Neil Young feels is worth fighting for).  Admittedly a hi-res MP3 and a 24bit WAV are relatively close enough in resolution that many people will not be able to pick them out in an A-B test.

“But, we don't live with music like that.  If your'e [sic] anything like me, you listen to a lot of music in a lot of styles and - over the course of, say, a month - perhaps you've absorbed well over a hundred listening hours across many different albums on a few different playback systems.”

It gets better.

To “prove” his point, he uses what he imagines to be an analogy, “For example, when I started living with my partner I introduced her to what I call ‘good coffee.’  At first she kind of shrugged it off as my snobbery at work, and she couldn't really taste the difference.  But then, after months of drinking the good stuff, she found herself to be a bit of a coffee snob, too.  She could taste the difference because she had, simply, spent time with the good stuff.  The coffee revealed itself to her, slowly and subtly.  Her palate developed.  And the thing about good coffee is that it holds more detail, nuance and, therefore, interest.

“But it takes a while to become aware of that depth and complexity.  Had she done a flip-flip-flip A-B and made her choice to only drink the cheaper stuff because, ‘you know, they're basically the same,’ she'd have missed an opportunity to develop her palate.”

Farmelo is avoiding the simple test that would at least prove his coffee snob argument; now that she has developed “her palate” can she tell the difference when she does a “flip-flip-flip A-B?” If she can’t, you’re still full of shit. Likewise, way back in 2004 the Boston Audio Society performed a simple, repeatable ABX test of ancient 44.1kHz/16-bit technology and a 96kHz/24-bit source and, so far, no high-res audio equipment or recording professional or company has found a way to prove this test was incomplete or inaccurate. Humans love their delusions. One of the most inane arguments I’ve heard from an “audio professional” was the statement “I know what I know and I hear what I hear.” Totally incomplete. Doofus should have said, “I know what I think and I know what I think I hear.” It’s a useless statement, but accurate. 

There are a lot of reasons why I don’t take the fruitcakes and goofballs who call themselves “audio engineers” seriously, but this terror of reality and the limitations of their own hearing is high on the list. No, I don’t take sanitation engineers seriously either; they are just old fashioned, hard-working garbage men (or women).

Product Review: DiGiCo SD9 Digital Console

When I decided to write up my experience with and opinion of the DiGiCo SD9 console, I suspected my less-than-positive opinion might be in the minority on this piece of expensive equipment. Often, people who spend a fortune on gear convince themselves it’s the best thing since sliced fingers. Most of my experience with live and studio consoles has been on analog equipment, but I was not only an early user of the Yamaha PM1D and did a fair amount of upgrade and warranty service for Yamaha between 2001 and 2007 on their PM1D and PM5D consoles. I have had an opportunity to mix on the AVID Venue and Midas M32 consoles a few times, also. I’m not digital-hostile, but I am not particularly fond of engineers who thing the world needs to revise how it spins because those engineers want it to. For starters, there are a variety of opinions from equally talented and experienced mixers regarding the DiGiCo design and ergonomic concepts. For my money (which, happily, isn’t involved here) it’s a no-brainer: the DiGiCo costs about $30,000 without I/O and the Avid Venue is about half that cost with many times the customer base. Even the new Midas digital consoles are considerably cheaper than the DiGiCo consoles and they have a 10 year warranty, vs DiGiCo’s 1 year coverage. The Midas M32 costs less than $6k and would more than do the job this small facility needs done. 96 input channels for a 450 seat facility is gross overkill.

I did some searching on the Web for other opinions of DiGiCo and found a few technical sites where the subject was discussed. For example, when asked for “general opinions about DiGiCo,” an obviously knowledgeable user said, “You probably don't hear much about them because they are rather pricey and usually only the top level companies/venues can afford them, but they are worth it. I think they are more prevalent in Europe along with Midas digitals than here in the states.” Another opinion from a tech clearly familiar with a variety of digital consoles was, “I'm sure that the UI could be learned with a fair amount of time and effort but it's not particularly user friendly especially when coming from experience with the more widely encountered Yamaha's and Avid's.” A tech who has “been touring with Digico consoles since 2007” said, “Users who complain that they are ‘hard to walk up to’ just need to take a moment to give it a chance, as we had to give all the digital consoles a chance that we have learned.  With an on-screen layout that mimics an analog channel strip, operating a Digico console is quite easy.  I have trained many users ranging from digital console newbies (a couple months ago I gave a training session to a company who bought an SD9 after only owning simple analog consoles) to seasoned touring pros on how to operate Digico consoles and I find that once a few workflow items are explained, people catch on quickly.” “Catching on” isn’t the problem. DiGiCo’s complete ignorance of or disdain for modern design and ergonomic concepts means catching on is about 1/10th of the battle. The problem is that the design lends itself to inefficient and simplistic work flow. I hope this review details some of the reasons why I found the SD9 to be one of the most user-hostile electronic devices I’ve used in years.

NOTE: When it comes to how seriously you take the points made in this review, please take into account that I have 50 years of analog console experience, failing eyesight, and almost zero interest in listening to live guys babble about “sound quality”; a concept so rarely heard in live music performances that I doubt few “professionals” in live music would recognize their own name if it were shouted at them by their mother in close quarters. There is a lot of audiophile fascination with fidelity from the clinically deaf crowd, in my opinion. However, I’m going to assume the sound quality is a given, because it is, and worry about the ergonomics and function of the console.

For starters, DiGiCo’s conceit is that there is something intuitive about a small screen in the middle of the console that describes the functions of 12 of 96 potential channels with no direct physical relationship to channel faders. The only controls lined up with the faders are mute and solo buttons, ID scribble pads, and LED VUs. That does not work for me. The large, asymmetrical physical and visual leap from the constantly in-use faders to the awkward miniature virtual channels on the screen in the upper middle of the console, and the continuous rotation controls at the right of that screen, the function selection buttons on the left of the screen, and another set of continuous rotation faders at the bottom of the screen (plus an alternative function selection button) pushes the limits of my eyesight and long-established habits. My motivation to adapt my lifetime of habits to the DiGiCo world is tempered by the knowledge that I won’t be working on this equipment often and would not choose to ever do so.

There is no labeling on the two channel buttons: solo and mute. The 100mm faders are pretty much the same as everyone else’s. At the channel input screen, the tiny and upper-most positioned channel VU meters are labeled and scaled in 15dB steps, so determining input signal precisely is difficult. If you select the input screen, the VU meters do not come with it. There are larger LED meters just above the channel ID LCD scratch pads. Those meters are more typically scaled, but since there is no correlation between the LCD screen channels and the physical channel location, using those more precise VUs is very counter-intuitive and, honestly, I was never convinced the two meters gave the same information because the scales are so different. Not having taken test equipment to the console, I’m not sure what headroom is available over the VU meter’s clip indication. The preamp has the typical 60dB of gain and the output is capable of +22dBu max output. Distortion is a fairly typical THD >0.05% at 1kHz, which is barely information in today’s far more useful multi-tone IMD measurement world.

DiGiCo’s SD9 touch screen is pressure sensitive, functionally, that an odd feature in today’s world of capacitive touch screens. As if that isn’t odd and off-putting enough, the screen is not particularly consistent in the amount of pressure required or where each button and control’s pressure points are located on the screen. I resorted to using the back end of a BIC pen for screen entry to minimize misses and false control selection. That helped, but didn’t consistently solve that problem. Not being able to use my fingers to make function selections and open and close screens meant making adjustments to practically any function was cumbersome.  

A lot of the features I take for granted in a digital console are not available in the SD9: color-coded groups, individual channel automation, (Avid’s “Auto-Off”, for example), grouped faders and mutes, I/O naming, and probably a whole collection of other useful features I have yet to discover aren’t there. DiGiCo’s Snapshot feature allows you to automate the setup for scenes/songs and is useful for a lot of things, however automating several channels for a variety of things can get messy and, once again, the tiny buttons on the “global scope” touch screen make every change . . . challenging. The facility where I used the SD9 has a keyboard stored on a sliding shelf under the console, but every time I slid it back under the desk, the bump at the end of the shelf jogged something that caused a loud “snap” in the mains; probably a fiber optic connection issue, but it could be almost anything related to the console and its complicated connections. In the end, I mostly did my text entry on the cobbly virtual QWERTY keyboard on the screen. The automation capabilities of the SD9 are very 1990’s capability-wise. You can automate pretty much any of the SD9’s functions, but it’s all or nothing. Unlike Avid, Yamaha, or even Presonus channels that can be individually selected to track or record automation or not, when you select the input channel faders, mutes, pans, sends, or any other function to be automated with Snapshot changes, it’s all or nothing. “Mostly useful” is the nicest thing I can say about the Snapshot feature. If you use the console’s left side Snapshot “next” button to pre-arm the next Snapshot and try to trigger that move with the console’s right side Snapshot “next” button (instead of the left side’s “Fire” button), the selected Snapshot will be one past the one you pre-armed. I can’t guess what the British logic behind that would be.  

The built-in plug-ins are fine and there are a few typical Waves plug-ins that can be inserted almost anywhere there is an insert in the signal chain. The problem is that DiGiCo works a lot harder than most console manufacturers to make it hard to figure out where the input and output connections actually are. Relabeling their obtuse equipment identification terminology isn’t an option. Like it or leave it, DiGiCo knows better than you how your I/O should be identified.

From reputation only, I understand the SD9 is a pretty durable console. It seems pretty tough, just based on the chassis construction. I haven’t seen the inside of the console and I wouldn’t pass judgment, one way or the other, on it’s durability until I have seen how the boards are mounted, what kind of connectors are used and how they are secured, and how the wiring harnesses are secured. In the past, Euro-designs have rarely impressed me in this regard, so I have my doubts. Based on the Sheldon Theater’s experience, there is no chance that I would consider using DiGiCo’s fiber-optic system on a road tour. In fact, I’d want to see a CAT5 connection to all equipment, looped and returned redundantly. In my experience, British equipment isn’t particularly durable or well-constructed and that would be one more reason I’d never consider a DiGiCo console for a touring rig. Your mileage may vary.

The SD9’s price tag puts it well into the most-expensive-in-class category; more like SSL than Midas or Avid. That makes choosing a DiGiCo console risky business. Like it or not, digital electronics should be expected to have a 3-5 year lifetime before regular maintenance becomes necessary. The DiGiCo’s 1 year warranty is a statement in the company’s product reliability expectation, in itself. I suspect that a majority of SD9 owners are unfamiliar with Return on Investment (ROI) calculations. Before you spend this kind of money on digital audio equipment, you should correct that deficiency. When this kind of gear is discontinued or the company bellies-up, or the gear just stays in use beyond that 3-5 year expectation, you will be regretting that big purchase decision unless you also received big earnings from the investment. The more complicated and sophisticated gear becomes, the harder it is to repair and the more likely it becomes that repair will be necessary. The SD9’s modular assembly makes doing big section repairs fairly easy, but when the warranty expires that design tactic will make repairs expensive. When the company stops supporting the product, it won’t be long before you can get great deals on used SD9’s. In fact, you can already buy a used “refurbished” (whatever that means) SD9 for about $0.30 on the original purchase dollar. No digital equipment holds value well, though, which should always be considered when you are counting up the dollars you plan to spend on equipment.

I’ve heard mention of fader glitches from other DiGiCo users, particularly on unused third and fourth layer faders. I experienced a master group fader suddenly dropping to “–inf” just before a show started, after 45 minutes of signal passing through the mains before the show. I have to admit that unexplained fader moves on group levels that are not part of any area I ever use is a deal-breaker for me. That sort of occurrence is completely outside of anything I have experienced with any other digital console, other than a first generation Soundcrap I was forced to use on a television remote truck for about a year. Some consoles have a function select that allows you to prevent any fader from moving unless there is a human finger on that fader, but that isn’t a DiGiCo option. It should be.

The console’s power supply noise probably isn’t a problem for most pop music acts, but it is a pain in the ass for the small theater production I was involved with. For example, when the theater was empty the FOH work position noise level was 69dBC and 46dBA while the majority of the audience seats were 56dBC and 44dBA, indicating that there is a lot of low frequency noise produced by the console and a fair amount of low-to-mid frequency energy; 10dB or more, in fact. Honestly, in this day of high efficiency, low noise computer power supplies, I think this much noise from audio equipment is intolerable. Since I was working for an average sound system level of 6-8dB over ambient, all that console noise made my job a lot harder than it needed to be.

I’ve written before about my bitch with DiGiCo’s bullshit WAVE drivers, but it’s worth mentioning here. DiGiCo is arrogant enough to believe that they are “special” enough to make obtaining their drivers for recording apps harder to buy than actual programs. You have to be a registered DiGiCo owner to obtain their damn drivers. When you do get them, good luck. Way back when Avid’s Venue came out, in 2005, my Location Recording class went to Duluth to record that city’s High School Battle of the Bands. We had our location Digidesign HD rack, a MacBook Pro, and absolutely no experience with the Venue console. We were able to get a session up and going in a few minutes. After a brief discussion with the FOH engineer about who would control what in the sessions, we were up and ready to record our first band within an hour of arriving. Three years after my local theater bought their SD9, the console has yet to be successfully used as a recording interface. The four events I’ve been asked to record were handled by using the DiGiCo D-Rack splitter and my own mic pres and recording interface. The local rep, other sound techs who were supposedly familiar with the SD9, along with the characters who sold this rig to the theater have been unable to make any sort of useful connection between all that “sophisticated British gear” and any recording program. In the meantime, I’ve managed to do location recordings on Behringer, Midas, and Yamaha digital consoles with damn near no serious issues. I’m sure DiGiCo sells their Waves-mismanaged drivers as some sort of “feature,” but I am generally disgusted.

Simply put, I’m not impressed. Between the poor ergonomic design, the high price, and the mediocre post-sale support, I think choosing the DiGiCo SD9 is more about status and conspicuous consumption than any functional or aural values.

Getting Off of the Bandwagon

Mix Magazine has always been a marketing tool for the equipment industry. Rarely, the magazine actually prints an article that is of some use to a recording tech. Constantly, the pages are filled with pseudo-reviews that are barely more (or not more at all) than reprints of the product’s advertising literature. I’m not just picking on Mix, because that has been the industry standard since Recording Engineer/Producer died.

The Mix Studio Blog: article, “To Subscribe, Or Not To Subscribe” is a typical bullshit Mix faux-informational article promoting, while trying to pretend it isn’t, Pro Tools’ subscription policies. The author pads his pr work with broad statements like:

• "Subscriptions also make it possible for developers to give customers access to a broader range of products for the money than is feasible through the purchase model."
• "it takes a mental adjustment to stop thinking of your software as something you own, like your microphones or audio interface, and to consider it a service that you pay for. Some advocates of subscriptions respond to that concern by saying that you never really owned your software, anyway, you just licensed it."
• "Imagine if the company that makes your DAW goes belly up and your software ceases to function."
• "Actually, there's already one DAW developer that has a de facto subscription-only policy. Although it allows you to choose between a perpetual license or a subscription, those who choose the former also have to pony up for an ‘upgrade plan’ to get any updates (even maintenance ones)."
• "Outside of the music space, some pretty major software titles, such as Microsoft Word and the Adobe Creative Suite are available on a subscription-only basis (I'm writing this column on a subscription version of Word, because I don't have a choice), and it could be that it's just a matter of time before that's the case with a lot of music production software, as well."

In 2004, I wrote “Who Would That Inconvenience?” In that article I wrote, "Software manufacturers estimate that they've 'lost' somewhere between two hundred million to a billion-zillion dollars due to software bootlegging. According to their estimates, everyone on the planet would have purchased their products if they hadn't had access to illegal versions. Some of us would, surely, have bought those products several times if legal channels were the only way we could obtain software. Software companies have moved from vaporware to vapor markets. Their hallucinations of wealth and power have infected the magazines with whom they advertise, too." Like Mix Magazine. I also said, “That's a great business, if you can find it.  Build a crappy, unreliable product and follow that up by charging your customers extra for ‘supporting’ your mistakes.  That is the next step beyond planned obsolescence, assuming that your customers don't revolt.” You’d think, that revolution would have happened when Avid started charging $300/year for their “subscription model” or $2,500 for the HD software-only purchase plan that does not provide you support or even a good price on the next version Avid releases, just to piss off non-subscription software owner.

In “Gotta Have It” I wrote, “People did perfectly professional work on Sound Tools, the first 4-track version of Pro Tools, and the first serious multi-track version of Pro Tools (2.0) that produced the first Grammy winner for Digi. Marketing squirrels can yak about why we ‘need’ whatever crap they're pedaling, but the fact is we don't. We've had all the tools we need to record good audio, digitally, for at least a decade.” We need Avid, Apple, Steinberg, etc less today than in 2012 when I wrote that essay. Software updates may be the single best argument for disbelieving the whole supply and demand delusion. Software that is doing every job necessary perfectly well suddenly becomes unusable because a new, unproven, probably buggy version of that same piece of code is available? Nonsense.

Today, I’m doing fine with my 2007 MacBook Pro and 2006 Mac Pro tower machines, both running OS X 10.7.5. My Win7 machine is a 2007 Dell Latitude. All three machines run Pro Tools 10, the Dell a little more reliably than the MacBook Pro. Both Macs also run Logic 9, Mainstage, Soundtrack Pro, and Waveburner flawlessly. I have done dozens of video projects on the Mac Pro running Final Cut Studio. I’ve seen the newest versions of Pro Tools, Logic, and Final Cut and I can’t find a reason to “need” them. Logic X, in particular, is really cool looking and I can imagine using many of the new features, once I struggled through the learning curve on another weird, counter-intuitive Apple interface. But, as usual, Apple would require me to buy new machines, use the latest OS, along with the learning curves for those formidable obstacles. For what? Honestly, just thinking about the hassle of all that makes me want to quit messing with software at all.

As for that wimpy, irritating “I'm writing this column on a subscription version of Word, because I don't have a choice” whine, grow the fuck up and grow a pair while you are at it. “Don’t have a choice” my ass. You can do what ever you want as long as you are smart enough not to fall for the “I need to be state-of-the-art” fallacy. For example, I know quite a few highly functional people who are still doing fine running Office 2003, 2007, or 2010. In fact, I run 2003 on my Windows machines and 2011 on my MacBook Pro. If I “upgrade” to anything, it will be Office 2010 for the Win7 machines. Microsoft says Win7 and Office 2010 will be maintained at least until 2020. So, I don’t have any motivation to go newer until at least 2020.

There is no chance that I will ever become a software subscriber. Worst case, I’ll be using Open Source software for everything after my current equipment and OS becomes really obsolete. By then, Open Source software may very well be superior to the expensive brands. The newest version of Audacity is currently very competitive with the version of Pro Tools I am running and it is cross-platform friendly with many versions of OS X, Windows, and Linux and it uses practically every format of plug-in on all platforms. As for a subscription for Office, forgetaboutit. Never gonna happen. I already use Open Office almost as much as Office and it is also cross-platform compatible.

Series Review: Soundbreaking, Stories from the Cutting Edge of Recorded Music

Quite a while ago, a friend recommended that I watch the 2016 PBS series “Soundbreaking, Stories from the Cutting Edge of Recorded Music.” At that time, I gave it a show by watching the segments on the PBS website and gave it up as a bad experience, mostly because the PBS webpage was a pain in the ass and I’ve never subscribed to cable television. The reminder came around again this past week and I finally hunted the series down on DVD from my local library. It was worth it.

I should have known it would be worth the effort, since one of my heroes, George Martin, was the show’s producer. It was Sir Martin’s last projects and one worthy for a career cap of one of the most competent, creative, and original people ever involved in music and recording. While I’ve never been much of a Beatles fan, I have always been a George Martin fan. When Lennon was throwing his poncy hissy fit about Martin being the “5th Beatle,” Lennon said, “When people ask me questions about 'What did George Martin really do for you?,' I have only one answer, 'What does he do now?' I noticed you had no answer for that! It's not a putdown, it's the truth," I, immediately thought, “What about ‘Blow by Blow’?” Lennon would never sit in a recording studio that accomplished that much from his first day to his last. But, I was never a Beatles fan, so what do I know? I am, however, a lifetime Jeff Beck fan and, lucky for me, there are a few Jeff Beck interviews in the series.

Some of the show’s highlighted producers, like Phil Spector, would naturally put me off because the records the show is celebrating from Phil and his ilk are records I have never liked much. Spector’s “Wall of Crap” sound always made me wish my stereo was quieter and of lower quality. Every single record he ever recorded made me wish someone had been able to tell Spector “that’s enough crap, stop while you are ahead.” Never happened, until the police finally delivered that message after he murdered an actress in 2003. Lennon brought Spector in to trash-up “Let It Be” and I never had much use for that record until “Let It Be, Naked” came out in 2003. That record stripped off the Spector crap and demonstrated the power of George Martin’s arrangements and engineering at the peak of that band’s capabilities. As Martin said when he was asked about the credits for “Let It Be,” “How about ‘produced by George Martin, over-produced by Phil Spector?”

The segments on Dr. Dre, Sly Stone, Les Paul, Jeff Beck, Al Schmidt, Tom Scholtz, Don Was, Brian Wilson, Marvin Gaye, etc. paid the viewer-bill, for me. The series is a terrific primer on the history of recording technology and, more importantly, the people who pushed the technology to its limits. It was especially fun to see Giles Martin, George’s son, playing with the old EMI console. Watching him reproduce segments of “Revolver;” “Tomorrow Never Knows” makes it pretty clear how much George Martin, Geoff Emerick, and the EMI engineers contributed to the sound we describe as “The Beatles.” Of course, John Lennon never approached that level of greatness again, but George Martin did.

The series episode titles tell you a lot about what you will see and hear:

• Episode One: The Art of Recording.
• Episode Two: Painting with Sound.
• Episode Three: The Human Instrument.
• Episode Four: Going Electric.
• Episode Five: Four on the Floor.
• Episode Six: The World is Yours.
• Episode Seven: Sound and Vision.
• Episode Eight: I Am My Music.

In this day of hyper-expensive microphones and zillions of digital plug-ins and analog or digital effects, it’s hard to imagine that many of the records today’s artists hope to equal were done using incredibly limited equipment and downright cheap dynamic microphones (many of them omnidirectional). Practically every home studio in the country has better and more powerful technology, more available tracks, easier access to instruments and sounds, and no excuse for not making equal or better music; except for the talent problem. The “Painting with Sound” segment does a wonderful job of describing how many of the great pop records were made: warts and all.

One of the series’ silly aspects, technology, was often highlighted by having Ben Harper explain a variety of technologies. Ben is a fine performer, but what he knows about electronics, acoustics, or technology in any form could be well-documented on a single fingernail with a relative coarse Sharpie. His “thoughts” were good for a laugh, though. There are a few other moments like that, but there are plenty of technically-sound moments to spell the laughter: Tom Scholtz, for example, Les Paul, Al Schmidt, Don Was, and more than a few other recording greats.

I almost held my breath through “I Am My Music,” waiting for the usual MP3 snobbery and I was really surprised and pleased with the absence of all that silliness. Mostly, my experience with ABX testing and audio repair work makes me really suspicious of “pros” who make claims to golden ear-ed-ness. But we didn’t have to listen to any of that here because the focus of the episode was about how the MP3, digital downloads, and the industry’s shortsightedness caused the music business to go into freefall; for good reasons.

Do NOT forget to watch the “extras” on the 3rd DVD.

ARTICLE: Rounding Out the Sound

All Rights Reserved © 1999 Thomas W. Day

(Originally published in Recording Magazine, May 1999 Volume 12, Number 8, p112, in the "Fade Out" guest editorial column under the title "Rounding Out the Sound.")

In the early 80's, a lot of engineers and musicians fell in love with our brand new digital masters. In the compromised world of vinyl, you would have to pick "the lesser evil" out of a group of master disks sent back from the mastering lab. The records that were made from those masters were, yet another, big step away from our master tape. With digital masters and CDs we got to hear what we originally recorded. The panning, bass, and volume are all where we put them. We seem to be taking that huge step for granted, lately.

The 90's seemed to introduce a new era of doubt for recording engineers. The ABX-shy golden ears crowd and other audiophile terrorists ranted about the loss of all those "pure" varieties of vinyl distortion (frequency, phase, and harmonic). For some reason, we listened to them and started trying to find ways to "round out" the clear, noiseless recordings we could make with our snazzy new digital toys.

There are lots of ways to take the edge (read "top end") off of what you put on disk. The current trendy method seems to be to stick a tube preamp between the mike and the digital gear and go on with life as you normally live it. I have some problems with that theory.

First, where are you going with all those "warm" tube amp even-harmonics? The basic idea behind the hoodoo is that solid state amplifiers add "bad" odd-harmonics to whatever they amplify. Tube amps add "warm" even-harmonics. If you believe there's something inherently evil about the extremely low harmonic distortion generated in modern semiconductor circuits, complicating (distorting) the signal you sent them makes no sense at all. You've created something extremely complicated that has to be "rounded out" in the solid state signal chain. A more conservative and informed "rounding" approach to smooth recording involves a collection of tactics.

Digital recordings got their "harsh" reputation when recording engineers tried to apply their dubious overdriven "tape saturation" tactics to the new digital equipment, resulting in lots of square waves showing up on all kinds of instruments. The same thing happened in the transition years from analog tube equipment to transistorized gear. The first thing you can do to round-out your sound is to keep your levels a safe distance from your headroom. Clip indicators flashing all over the board is a bad thing and your tube preamp isn't going to fix any part of that. After each technology evolution, design engineers learned to build in enormous amounts of headroom to compensate for deaf people in the sound room. Just having all that space for error doesn't require using it.

If you aren't trashing the input amplifiers with overdriven signal, you may be providing them with a harsh signal due to your microphone selection. Microphones and monitors are signal sources that even the lowest caret golden ears can identify in an ABX test. Microphones do not sound alike. Sometimes, two mikes of the same make and model will be considerably different. One of the basic distinctions between good engineers and everybody else is that the good ones have spent a lot of time experimenting with microphones, microphone placement, and stereo microphone configuration (XY, M-S, 3:1, etc.).

Some famous old tube condenser mikes will round off the edges of anything you care to record. Some of the newer FET condensers can do the exact same job for a lot less money. Of course, stuffing a delicate, large capsule condenser mike into a bass drum will give you a harsh, overloaded signal that no tube circuitry can round out. Part of the time you need to spend experimenting with microphones should be spent learning which mikes work on certain instruments and where those mikes are absolutely useless.

Finally, and critically important, you have to do your recording in a decent room. The tracks that need the most rounding-out are the ones that had a microphone stuffed into the guts of every instrument in the mix. If you want a smooth, clean sound that has depth and warmth, you ought to do at least a little bit of the recording in a room that has those characteristics. A grand piano sounds terrific in a decent room, heard from a decent listening position, but it will sound like a poor sample if you cram your head against the sound board. When was the last time you listened to an acoustic guitar with your head stuffed into the sound hole? Pickups are useful in live applications, but on record they make great acoustic guitars sound like mediocre ones. There is supposed to be an advantage to being in the studio. That advantage doesn't get used nearly enough.

Your ears should be the best audio reproduction equipment you own. The best way to achieve a smooth, well rounded recording is listen carefully and critically to what you are putting on tape (or disk). Don't blindly follow someone else's rules. If you have carefully studied your craft, you will have learned that Goldman's Rule applies to art in general, "Nobody knows anything." Our audience will put up with almost any godawful recording technique to hear great songs and performances. I think our goal should be to get between them and their music as little as possible. There have been great records taped directly to 2-track tube decks and on 128-track digital rigs. Patching a tube preamp between a poorly selected microphone and your mixing and recording medium will not correct for abuse of technology or mediocre music.

REVIEW: MP3 Comparison Tests

[This article was published on TapeOp’s website. Whatever it took to publicly humiliate the competition in print, Larry Crane didn’t have, but he still had the nuts to say it somewhere.]

All Rights Reserved © 2006 Thomas W. Day

A while back, I read an editorial in Mix Magazine that claimed to “prove once and for all” that MP3 audio compression was low-fi.  The author was a Mac user, so maybe he can’t be faulted for the many flaws in his test procedure, but be that as it may be, I read between his lines and found a few statements that I couldn’t believe.  His procedure was incredibly flawed and rigged to make MP3 files test poorly, even if the file format and compression were perfect.  His built-in bias was so strong that it was obvious how the test would turn out, even before the second sentence.  This author claimed to hear a “robust difference signal,” proving that the MP3 format was defective and high distortion.  I listen to MP3s, mostly in my car and I was suspicious of that “robust difference signal.” 

First, probably because of the limitations of his computer equipment and/or software, the author took an audio sample, inverted the phase of that sample, played the two (in-phase and out-of-phase together), and found that the resulting signal was the expected nothing.  The result was a near-perfect cancellation, proving that the two samples were equal, with practically non-existent distortion.  Here is where the example died a non-scientific death.  The author converted the phase-inverted signal to an MP3 format and, because his software could only play AIFF wave files, converted the MP3 back to AIFF and ran the above test again. 

Back in my audio manufacturing employment history, I built an ABX test rig for my employer and did a ton of ABX testing on anyone I could con into submitting to the ABX protocol.  Mostly, we learned what the audiologist discovered at the 1985 AES Convention in LA; that most people involved in professional audio are “functionally deaf” or, at least, “hearing impaired.”  Instead of spending our time trying to figure out what subtle differences in equipment were audible, we discovered that drastic defects in the signal path went undetected by most of our listeners.  I went so far as to install defective active components (ICs producing as much as 10% THD) into the signal path of otherwise identical pieces of equipment and found that an alarming number of audio professionals were unable to hear the difference in a reasonably good listening environment.  On the other hand, one of my own employees was able to hear signal differences that my test equipment (which was Audio Precision’s finest of the time) barely identified as measurable (except for substantial very-low-frequency phase differences that I’m still hard-pressed to believe explained the listening test results).   With that history behind me, I decided to replicate the magazine test myself, using a Windows-based software (Adobe Audition) which doesn’t have the limitation of only being able to play one file format simultaneously.  This eliminates the multiple conversion errors from the author’s test and makes the test more of an apple-to-apple test.

I picked three MP3 formats, 128Kbps, 192Kbps, and 320Kbps, constant bitrate, with CRC checksums and a pair of 44kHz, 16-bit CD recordings (“Afternoon” from Pat Metheny Group, Speaking of Now, and L’Adoration de la Terre from Telarc’s Cleveland Orchestra recording of the Stravinsky The Rite of Spring) for the test.  I, first, copied a section of the music and made an inverse-phase mono copy of that section.  In Audition’s Multitrack View, I inserted the two sections into a pair of tracks and compared the resulting signal; or lack of signal.  The two WAV copies exactly cancelled, both according to my ears and Audition’s metering system.  Figure 1 (from the Afternoon recording) displays a section of the original signal from the recording that I will use to display the results of the signal-canceling comparison tests.

Figure 1: The original signal, with peaks approaching 0dB.

I tried both Windows’ Media Player v9.0 and dBpowerAMP Music Converter™ for the creation of my MP3 files (all made from the reversed-phase WAV file with an already established signal accuracy).  I believe I saw a very slight reduction in distortion using the 320Kbps Music Converter™ version of the Media Player output, so I created the rest of my MP3 samples using that program.  I inserted the 3 MP3 inverse-phase signals into a 5 channel Multitrack file and listened to the resulting output, comparing each MP3 to the original in-phase WAV file. 

The first problem you will discover in performing this test is that the MP3 converters both added a short leader (approximately 50mS) to the files.  Ignoring this anomaly produces the “robust” distortion difference signal that started this investigation for me.  Time-aligning my files took some time, but produced a much more believable result from the comparisons. 

 

Figure 2: 12 8Kbps distortion result waveform

The 128Kbps compression produced a tinny output, with a little low end and a sound quality that was obviously distortion components. The resulting distortion component waveform is pictured in Figure 2.  At this point in the original recording, the peaks are touching 0dB, so the peak distortion output was approximately 25dB below the peak recording signal level.

Figures 3 and 4 picture the results of repeating this test with the 192Kbps and 320Kbps MP3 samples.  The distortion components of the 320Kbps compression sample are 33-36dB below the original signal.  Those residual signal values roughly translate to 5% THD for 128Kbps, 3% THD, for 192Kbps, and less than 1% THD for 320Kbps MP3 samples.  I’ll agree that these are substantial distortion values, but “robust” is not how I’d describe the resultant signal and I question the ability of most professionals to clearly hear the difference signal in an ABX environment.  After all, I’ve simulated much worse distortion components that appeared to have been inaudible.

Figure 3: 192Kbps distortion result waveform

Regardless of my test results, I recommend that you try a similar test with material of your own choosing and in a controlled listening environment.  Personally, I discount the results of any listening test that doesn’t live up to the rigor of the ABX protocol.  You can believe any fantasy you like, though.  Part of what makes working in audio so entertaining is the delusions under which we labor and the resulting, sometimes silly, products produced to cater to those illusions. 

 

Figure 4: 320Kbps distortion result waveform

I do, however, intensely suspect the opinions of someone who claims that consumer cassettes were musical and that MP3 reproduction systems are deficient in comparison.  Compared to FM radio, a high resolution MP3 is practically pristine.  Pop recordings are often so distorted that the minimal harmonic addition low-fi 64Kbps compression introduces can do no more harm to what’s left of the musical content.  If we’re not going to complain about these traditional high distortion delivery systems, where is our credibility regarding new technology?

Most analog consoles don’t produce 40dB cancellation artifacts when one channel is beat against another in producing the side component in a Mid-Side microphone signal.  Analog recording systems are far from capable of producing this level of signal uniformity. 

Dis’ing our customers’ sonic standards, because they are listening to a technology that has an economic impact on our industry, is dishonest, unbelievable and ineffective.  They know the MP3 files they listen to are higher fidelity than past and current commercially delivered formats and once they suspect the industry is lying about quality, what else do we have to offer? 

Technorati Tags: audio recording,distortion,mp3,analysis

ARTICLE: Who Would That Inconvenience?

[Clearly, in 2004 I was in a prolific self-publishing mode. I didn’t even try to find a home for some of these articles, as strongly as I felt then or now about their relevance.]

You can't read an entertainment or computer magazine without running into an article or ad about how much "damage" is being done to the nation's creativity by "intellectual rights theft."  The game manufacturers are, apparently, going broke because so many people are "stealing" game software.  The music industry execs are all living in cardboard boxes in New York and LA's back alleys because nobody is buying music, we're all stealing it through MP3s online.  And those poor, poor software designers are working nights at SuperAmerica to support their creativity because everyone is bootlegging software.  Billy Gates has sold his mansions and lives in a Seattle commune with 35 other desperate, but dedicated-to-their-art, Microsoft employees.  Congress and the international community needs to "do something" to protect these poor, starving, and productive folks before these vital industries are starved into non-existence.

Or not. 

I think not.  For instance, the music industry thinks nothing of "giving away" it's product on the radio.  Radio stations "give" us more of the music industry's product than most of us want to hear.  Sure, they're selling ads and using the music as a loss-leader to attract listeners, but they have worked overtime to own the broadcast business so that they have easy access to free distribution of their god-awful products.  How that is different than the distribution of these same products through websites is too indistinct for my sensitivities.  I'll admit that I'm not particularly sensitive to the needs of overstuffed executives and their desperate desire to own everything from natural resources to original thought.  But I do believe that if you give away your product in one venue, you've given up the right to be able to protect it in another.  The Supreme Court thought the same way when they prevented record companies from limiting the use of cassette recorders, 30 years ago. 

But my real reason for writing this article is to address the pitiful condition of software companies.  In our industry, bootlegged software is as common as guitar picks.  At the tech school where I sometimes teach, I hear about the use of "illegal" versions of every program from ProTools to Sonar to Logic to $50 plug-ins and $10 sampled loop CDs.  Everything you might ever want to own is available, for free, in a bootleg version.  Acquaintances who aren't even involved in the music business have copies of programs that I couldn't justify buying if I didn't need to eat regularly. 

Software manufacturers estimate that they've "lost" somewhere between two hundred million to a billion-zillion dollars due to software bootlegging.  According to their estimates, everyone on the planet would have purchased their products if they hadn't had access to illegal versions.  Some of us would, surely, have bought those products several times if legal channels were the only way we could obtain software.  Software companies have moved from vaporware to vapor markets.  Their hallucinations of wealth and power have infected the magazines with whom they advertise, too.

I beg to disagree.  In fact, I'd bet that the opposite of their argument is true.  I'd argue that if bootleg "test" software wasn't available, most of us wouldn't bother with computers at all.  The computer industry has made that a fact by its inability to build reliable, quality products.  The business tells us that bootleg software is unreliable and to obtain reliability we should pay for the software and pay again for the minimal "customer support" provided by the manufacturers.  Experiences tells us that the words "unreliable" and "software" are inseparable.  It doesn't matter if you pay for software or if you steal it, it's going to be unstable, undependable, buggy, and a constant irritant.  And you're going to have to pay, over and over again, for future versions that "fix" a few problems and create a lot more. 

That's a great business, if you can find it.  Build a crappy, unreliable product and follow that up by charging your customers extra for "supporting" your mistakes.  That is the next step beyond planned obsolescence, assuming that your customers don't revolt.

Basing a home studio around bootleg software is a risky business, because putting any faith in software is an act of unfounded faith.  The products are, simply, buggy as a Tijuana hotel bed.  Software crashes, we reboot, software crashes again, this time rebooting for us, and we pay more money in the foolish hope that, this time, the code will be more reliable.  The more features we get, the less reliable the software becomes.  It's an endless, unproductive closed-loop.  Many users are honestly "test driving" software by using hacked versions.  On the rare occasion that a piece of software is actually useful, many users turn from test drivers to legitimate owners.  I see it happen with students all the time. 

Occasionally, a company screws up and releases a version of software that crashes less often than its competition.  When that happens, many users end their search for improvement and get back to doing productive work.  A few months ago, I read a business computer article about a large number of businesses who are still using Microsoft's Windows for Workgroups, version 3.11, and the associated version of Office, because it did the job that needed doing.  Those of us who migrated to Windows 95, 98, 2000, ME, and XP often think that the few functioning features we've gained haven't repaid the investment in retraining, debugging, and the reliability problems we've suffered in transition. 

What would happen if every computer user decided to quit chasing the holy grail of the newest, coolest version of software and found something that worked reasonable well and stuck with it?  There are a fair number of analog studios out there who have gone back (or stayed) to 20 year old technology and spend their time tweaking reliable and functional technology and making music.  Computer recordists could do the same thing.  Quality work was done on almost every version of almost every program.  We could have all quit looking for something new at any time in the last decade or two. 

Of course, that would break the software company income chain.  If every software company in the industry went broke and vanished tomorrow, who would that inconvenience?  If we all were forced to use the products we're using today for the next fifty years, would we stop recording music?  If today's software glitches and crashes became a constant, known, and never-ending irritant, would that make a lick of difference to people currently using that software?  You know it wouldn't.

If the state of the art never moved an inch from its current status, we'd still be doing what we're doing today.  We'd be recording music, burning CDs, cutting vinyl, posting MP3s to websites, and looking for the next cool music.  The profits or losses of software companies means nothing to the flow of music.  We have the tools we need and a hell of a lot of tools that nobody needs.  Software companies have their problems and we have ours and the two have nothing to do with each other.