FUGITIVE SOUNDS

“Let’s start with a proposition…High-quality recording is style-agnostic.”

— George Massenburg

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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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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