FUGITIVE SOUNDS

A very cool video showing how one of my favorite microphones, the Royer R-121, is made. Makes me understand why they aren’t inexpensive. Enjoy.

Hello, all. Sorry for the lack of posts recently. I’m finalizing a move to Los Angeles and have been traveling on airplanes more than I’d like. New content soon.

My buddy Keller Glass recently posted an amusing reaction on his blog to a December NPR piece on the Loudness War. In his post, Keller offered a succinct differentiation of dynamic-range compression and digital compression—two often-confused audio concepts. (The part where he compares encoding MP3s to excoriating flesh is especially nice.)

I’d actually heard the NPR essay and had planned on writing something in response. What follows, then, might be considered a companion piece to Keller’s writing, and perhaps the beginning of a friendly dialog between blogs on this and other subjects.

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There is a penchant in popular discourse for using language of conflict to characterize our reaction to any pervasive cultural affliction. It’s a tendency shared by politicians, pundits,  and common individuals. We’ve embarked famously on a “war on drugs,” a “war on poverty,” a “war on terror,” and now (with appropriate anticlimax) a war on…“loudness”?

Such phrases are supposed to be inspiring, as they tacitly cast us in a heroic struggle against an insidious—if frustratingly abstract—foe. The problem with such rhetoric, however rousing, is that it isn’t particularly useful: How exactly do you wage a war on poverty—or loudness for that matter—anyway?

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Jon Pareles, one of the fine music critics at the Old Gray Lady, has a concise, astute retrospective in today’s Times on the the digital revolution underpinning the music of the “aughts.” Enjoy.

“A World of Megabeats and Megabytes“

In today’s music-making climate, to suggest that the recording studio should be considered an “instrument”—no less a compositional tool than the piano or guitar—is a bit like saying the world is round, digital files will supplant CDs, and the demise of the traditional record industry is imminent. It’s one of those blithe claims someone makes at a cocktail party—like “isn’t it cold of late”—to which everyone within earshot inanely nods.

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Here’s a great article I found on The Daily Swarm prognosticating various developments in the evolution of digital music in the coming year. The short text focuses primarily on how digital music content might get disseminated on-line in the near future, without tackling concomitant issues—like how physical storage media might mature, and in what format, or whether DSD will begin to supersede PCM as the preferred encoding paradigm (doubtful, considering consumers are clearly more interested in portability—see iPod—than high fidelity—see SACD).

Anyway…

It’s a quick and interesting read. It comes originally from PaidComment.org.

Also, here’s a thread of various articles from CNET over the past year on the subject of digital (streaming) media.

Enjoy.

This is the inaugural post in a series highlighting great recording studio web sites. Future studios will be selected not merely for the quality of their facilities but for how appealing, innovative, and informational their web presence. I suppose this means I’m launching a category of posts that is, at the core, pornographic. At least for studio geeks. Our first selection is Chicago’s Electrical Audio, home of legendary engineer and audio iconoclast Steve Albini. (I’d have called him a “producer,” as well, but as you may well know, he doesn’t like to be called that.) Electrical is one of America’s most distinctive recording facilities, from it’s old-school, analog-centric production ethos to its peculiar (and uniquely-named) acoustic spaces, to the maverick reputation of its founder.

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While searching cyberspace for great web sites and blogs devoted to the art and science of audio production, I’ve discovered another gem: Recording Hacks.

Billed as an “online magazine about recording techniques” Matt McGlynn’s site is actually the chronicle of one man’s obsession with microphones. The blog provides a “microphone and database search engine” and “directory of commercial mic modders”—and, here’s the best part—is home to the “TapeOp mic review archive.”