Comments on: Whatever happened to the audiophile?

By: Colin Hall

Colin Hall — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 12:39:35 +0000

Cheers David,

If anyone else is interested here’s a nice little show – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQVVLAO-9LU

All the best

Col :-)

By: David Bradley

David Bradley — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 08:59:48 +0000

Aha. *That* Ben Webster. ;-)

By: David Bradley

David Bradley — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 08:58:58 +0000

Nice one Colin. Just going to check out Ben Webster…albeit most likely as a Youtube clip or an iTunes download (no record shops within a short walk here, sadly).

By: Colin Hall

Colin Hall — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 08:53:11 +0000

I agree with the guys above, we (The Audiophiles) are alive and thriving. Spurred on by the mass of ‘clearout’ sales on ebay, from people wanting to ‘downsize’, we gather all manner of old school music reproduction equipment in an effort to best present our thousands of vinyl rarities. From my own point of view I collect 60′s speakers, equalisers and tube amps … anything to hear Ben Webster play in that lovely soft, breathy fashion.

Cheers and all the best

Col :-)

By: David Bradley

David Bradley — Fri, 04 Feb 2011 07:36:06 +0000

Rush are to remix their 2002 album Vapor Trails. Vapor Trails suffers from serious and nasty clipping in the really loud patches because of audio compression and the band was slated by audiophiles at the time for pushing the CD format too far. A remix should remedy the situation and bring out the best in some classic songs.

http://www.rushisaband.com/display.php?id=2460

By: Markk

Markk — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 04:59:46 +0000

I have always wondered why someone hasn’t come up with a “phono” filter for well recorded (a key pre-requisate) CD or other digitally encoded music. You could make it sound just like a vinyl record. You could add in the “warmth” and also the distortion in frequency response from the needle as it gets to the inner low radius area of an LP, and also put the same needle inertia distortion effects at high frequencies LP’s have. It’s interesting to read how the old producers used to mess around with sound when creating LP’s. Things just as nasty as the amplitude compression that goes on now.

By: David Bradley

David Bradley — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 08:43:51 +0000

Vinyl is highly collectable. See this item in the Calgary Herald, with a nice Rush/Geddy Lee reference. Hat tip to Clayton Walls for the alert.

By: Jerald

Jerald — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 16:29:56 +0000

On earphones, I have to note that it makes a huge difference for listening experiences of any kind. I bought some studio recording reference standard phones with totally flat frequency response (Beyerdynamic DT 48) a few years back. They’re big, metal-framed, full ear-enclosure, heavy magnet drivers–and they don’t fatigue my ears *at all*. You can listen for hours without strain, because of the strict frequency balance across the entire sound spectrum–most consumer headphones are quite bass-heavy and usually higher-treble heavy as well. I actually carried them on quite a few plane trips (also needed a 1/4″ to 1/8″ adapter plug), despite the ‘schlep’ factor, because the isolation and quality was so good. So even if you’re listening to heavy metal the whole way, the quality earphones will pay off in quality experience.

By: David Bradley

David Bradley — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 16:21:30 +0000

@Jerald I think we could easily collapse into a discussion of the relative merits of different musical genres if we aren’t careful. While much of pop and rock essentially doesn’t suffer, there are some artists whose work can be described as being just as dynamic and exquisite as any jazz, or even classical. However, that doesn’t tend to be the music listened to by mass audiences, it’s a long-tail effect and those of us who enjoy exquisite more than loudest suffer because the industry (hardware and music) follows the market rather than chasing the tails…

By: Jerald

Jerald — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 16:14:52 +0000

There’s a related issue, which is the actual content that comes from the studio after the mastering engineer has completed his work. In order to be more prominent in music videos and for radio airplay, there has been a steady progression in pop music towards greater and greater compression, closer and closer to the 0 dB signal ceiling that is possible. The basic theory is, “Loudest track wins”. You may occasionally notice the same phenomenon in television commercials, which are often far louder than the programs they interrupt.
The result is pop music tracks with a dynamic range of 10 dB or even less, with no audible detail of any kind. Music of this kind suffers little, if at all, from MP3 compression used in moderation, or from lower-quality earphones. So the source material itself of pop music is also evolving towards lower quality, purely for reasons of prominence during broadcast. For jazz and classical, of course, it’s a very different story.