BrianaW wrote: It may even interest you to know that the actual speakers are made differently now. Before, they were designed to sound good in the average listeners home... now they are deigned with enhancements to make them sound better in a retail environment. This is obviously done to get the sale, but where does that leave the consumer when he / she gets them home?

While I'm with you on the rest of your post, I have to take exception on a broad scale with this statement.

There certainly are speaker manufacturers that do hype certain frequencies (80-120 Hz and 400-800 Hz) to excite the listener, most speaker designers currently are actually in the pursuit of the finest speaker that they can make for the money.

Obvious exceptions would be mini-shelf-systems (which have obviously lost their popularity over the past few years) and the new craze of iPod docking systems and then of course Bose (but they've been in the business of conning customers for decades...)

Most "big-box" stores (such as Best Buy and Circuit City) carry a wide variety of speakers ranging from yard-sale quality crap to extreme high end (I've seen KEF at Circuit City - albeit their entry-level stuff and Vienna Acoustics and Martin and Logan at Best Buy - although, they actually refuse to mass load their Vienna Acoustics speakers which automatically causes detriment to the quality of the sound...) Sure, the yard sale quality junk sucks, and may be engineered to a lower standard, but I certainly don't think that the market in general has gone towards a standard of lower fidelity for the sake of better sales margins. In the end, they know all to well that this would hurt them better than serve them in the long run.

Yeah, you guys are totally right. Sorry, I should have chosen my words more carefully. I did not intend to impose such a broad stereotype or generalization. :)

Vinyl records on a capable playback system do sound more alive to me than CD's though. CD wise, I have a decent trasport with dual 24 bit Burr Brown converters, and it's HDCD compatible (anyone figured out how to burn one of these yet?). That's just my opinion of course, and the high end distortion inherent in some vinyl is rather unpleasant in most cases to me. I'm definitely not disagreeing with you though, obviously you're totally right about the dynamic range.

Also, I think The Strokes are a perfect example of why the "cookie cutter" production standards are not always a good thing. I think part of the reason they became so popular (aside from great songwriting) was the unusual production. I mean, who can't tell that it's The Strokes when it comes on? :)

hueseph wrote:

More and more, effects have become an intrinsic part of the recording process. Recorded music has lost all sense of naturalness. Guitars sound so unlike guitars. Drums are totally unnatural sounding. They don't ring. Their sound doesn't resonate at all. People have grown accustomed to over processed instruments.

I would hazard a guess that the guitarists and drummers from the 30's and 40's said the same thing in 1965.

AwedOne wrote: hueseph wrote:

Recorded music has lost all sense of naturalness. Guitars sound so unlike guitars........

I would hazard a guess that the guitarists and drummers from the 30's and 40's said the same thing in 1965.

I'm sure they did and I don't think they were wrong. Mind you I have never liked the "wall of sound" that was so popular. And, yes Marshall amps made guitars sound totally unlike anything previous to that time but these things didn't affect the performance aspect of the recording. The artist was still capable of reproducing their studio performance in a live setting.

AwedOne wrote: hueseph wrote:

More and more, effects have become an intrinsic part of the recording process. Recorded music has lost all sense of naturalness. Guitars sound so unlike guitars. Drums are totally unnatural sounding. They don't ring. Their sound doesn't resonate at all. People have grown accustomed to over processed instruments.

I would hazard a guess that the guitarists and drummers from the 30's and 40's said the same thing in 1965.

You are probably right about guitarists - they probably had a hard time getting over Leo's brainchild, but there are at least a few important examples of drummers (and for importance, you don't really need to go beyond Buddy Rich) who are on record as wishing the recording techniques of the 60s and 70s were available in the 30s and 40s. A lot of people from the 30s and 40s complained about the music that was being played in the 60s, but can you find many people who thought the recording technology made things worse? (The only thing I can think of that's remotely like that is some of the new bluegrass groups who are going back to having the whole group move around a single mic.)

BrianaW wrote: ...and I think most of the people here would agree with me, is that the old style of recording / production was made to sound as close as possible to the band actually being in the room with you.

I don't think that the old style of recording was just one thing. I think that in general it was capture a bands performance but not necessarily to sound like you were in the room with the band. Motown records don't have that type of sound and they are from the same period the as the early Beatles records.

It's been mentioned before and I agree that sound of older recordings is the product of the best use of the equipment at hand plus personal taste. I mean if you've got 2 tracks, you do what you can with them. If you've got four, you might think...I'd really like to put the vocals on their own track so that I have more control. Then if you got 8, 16 or 24 tracks you can split each instrument out to it's own track and have ultimate control.
I think that it's what is/was done with that ultimate control (or lack thereof) that gives us the difference between older and newer productions.

Just some interesting reading on the topic

http://moozeek.de/mirrors/articles/over_the_limit.htm

It seems the question is, do you want to sound like everyone else out there at the moment, or do you want to do something that sounds different, maybe even better? I guess it comes down to either riding the current paradigm, or just making something you think sounds good. If you like over compressed, brick wall limited drums, then do it that way. Just remember that what you think sounds "modern" will sound "dated" in a few years. If the whole thing sounds good and the song is good, no one will bitch about dated production methods 20 years later. Andy

Wow. I just read that article and it motivated me to check out Vapor Trails. Wow... this does sound awful!! The music is so good too, what a waste. My home recordings sound better than this. :(

[quote=hueseph][quote=AwedOne]hueseph wrote:

Recorded music has lost all sense of naturalness. Guitars sound so unlike guitars........

That may be true in some cases which I agree with, but there's also the other side to that statement.

Being a keyboard player (and frustrated drummer, arent we all?) I have found myself on many occasions sitting behind my drummers kit having a bash with the band. When there is a wall of guitars playing along I cant seem to hit the drums hard enough, not because they cant hear me, but purely because I am wanting to transfer the high amount of intense energy I am feeling at the time through the kit, and that no matter how hard I hit the damn things those hits just dont do justice to what im feeling while playing the kit.
So, I think there are people out there, producers and musicians that have merely figured out a way to succesfuly translate those types of feelings and also enhance them even further. As mentioned in many posts this is done by smashing the living daylights out of tracks and using samples,etc, but if thats what it takes then so be it. When I hear a slamming drum sound im like, " yup, thats what playing drums feels like to me". Of course this doesnt apply to everyone, which is the beauty of music, not everybody likes the same stuff and not everyone gets the same sensations from playing their instruments, would be pretty boring if we did! I used to work in a music shop and a customer dropped in a cd to me and said enjoy, he didnt tell me what was on it. When I put it on it contained a shit load of Bonhams (spelling) out takes from various Zepplin recordings. No music, just drums. These were all just takes of him playing to the songs, you can sometimes hear the bleed from the cans. Its really amazing to hear the kit on its own and after paying attention to the kick sound I understood the difference between loud and big. Big can be played at very low volumes and still sound big, that kick is proof. I dont know where this guy got this cd, im guessing it would be all over the place by now. My dumb keyboard playing 2 cents!

SammyG

Interesting thread. I feel like I'm listening to 2 different conversations. Isn't Bolero supposed to start out very soft & eventually become very loud :) ???

ENW