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.

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 hilarious—although I’d thought all A&R guys had been canned in the destabilizing of the recording industry.

WARNING: There’s ample profanity in this video, so put the kiddies to bed before watching.

Enjoy.

I’ll probably get slammed for this, but I couldn’t resist. Watch the attached video and try to figure out if Spoon (I love Spoon. I really do. Let me rhapsodize about them for a moment…) got their most recent record (the wonderful Transference) mastered by renowned Masterdisk engineer Howie Weinberg (who has done projects for, um, U2, Nirvana, The Clash, and The Chili Peppers, to name a few)—or by Joe Pesci.

In all seriousness, it’s priceless. My favorite part is when Weinberg asks “How do you leak a record? Do you have to put it on a web site to do that?” Or perhaps when he explains how his photo ended up on the back of a Public Enemy record.

Good fun. Enjoy.

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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