Lou Reed is an asshole—but a very talented, sharp-minded asshole.
Below, hear the rock legend drone on about the inferior sound quality of MP3s during the just-completed South By Southwest in Austin, Texas. I love much of Lou Reed's music (especially that of the Velvet Underground, whose canon is essential), but I sure wouldn't want to live with him. In honor of his notorious prickliness, check out a video of his band doing “Vicious” live in 1974. (I do like Lou as a speed-freak blond—onstage anyway.)
Richard Devine is one of the most innovative electronic-music producers currently working. He's also one of those go-to guys whom gear manufacturers tap to demo their new products. So here is Devine at the latest NAMM in Anaheim, putting a few Livewire machines (the company's based in Pomona) through their wonky paces. Technology: it's inspirational. (Hey, I recognize those noises—it's how my brain sounds during deadline crunches...)
Robert Levine's Dec. 26 piece in Rolling Stone has been making (sine) waves in audiophile circles and the blogosphere (I will never get sick of typing that word) for its damning indictment of modern recording techniques used by many major-label artists. It's worth the substantial time investment required to read it, if you care anything at all about sound quality in the music you let into your head space.
In a nutshell, Levine observes, many records now (and, really, since the mid-'90s) are being mastered excessively loud to make more of an impact on radio and in the lousy, tiny computer speakers and earbuds through which more and more people listen to music. The dominant MP3 format is compressed and, consequently, details—mainly extreme low and high frequencies—are lost in the process of sound being transferred into digital bytes. Ergo, you get a monotonous sound that lacks spaciousness and dynamics. You get songs that slam you hard for their entire duration, resulting in listeners suffering hearing fatigue. Subtlety vanishes and is viewed as wimpy, to people who champion what's become known as the Loudness War.
The video below illustrates this concept.
Young people who have never experienced music in the analog format probably won't even realize that they're getting sonically short-changed. It's downright tragic.
