The theme of the season is clearly hardware versus virtual, analog versus digital. As I write this there are three almost identical surveys floating at popular recording cyber-haunt, Gearslutz.

Leave aside, if you will — if you can — the reality that such so-called “voodoo” surveys, relying as they do on self-selected sample populations, are the antithesis of responsible social science. Forget that some college or university instructors are blithely sending their students out on a fool’s errand grounded in really bad science.

Forget all that. Let’s talk about the issues. And how I feel about them.

My emotional skin now in this game, let me say, I think the ideal is to understand what fidelity is good for — and it’s good for plenty, to my way of thinking — but to also be in a position to employ the less-than-perfect when that presents interesting alternatives or augmentations.

One thing that’s worth considering is that, at least until the current generation of designers and equipment, fidelity was typically a guiding principle — the people who designed the big iron analog tape machines that charm so many weren’t striving for “warm” and “characterful” — they were striving for fidelity.

But here’s the interesting thing: we’ve upended some facets of the paradigm and it’s that gap of failure between the goal of full fidelity and the reality of the actual machines that has become, in effect somehow inverted, an extension of the scale beyond the goal. Some might be tempted to say, like a middle school report card forgery, an extra pen mark that makes an A- an A+…

P.S… I’m hoping that last bit doesn’t end up, without attribution, in anyone’s paper… but… I’ve been around.

I understand the basic thinking — as well as the economy of scale and development structure (Apple often shifts key dev teams from one task to another in such a way that problems in one sector ripple into delays in addressing another)  – which seems to steer Apple through these continuing dramas.

What I don’t always understand is the at-times Eloi-like docility of frequently vexed high end users as they contort themselves, their practices, and even their business planning around the latest Apple issues.

To be sure, on occasion, there is a widespread revolt, as there was over the extraordinary dumbing down of Final Cut Pro to what many professional video editors — dependent on the previous FCP versions’ broad and flexible support for Apple and third party productivity and collaborative work flow enhancements that made FCP a staple in many multi-seat video editing facilities — derisively now call “iMovie Pro.” And, even in the audio world, which once sneered at Windows as a platform for serious audio production work (sometimes foolishly in the view of someone who has been carefully observing that tech milieu since the mid-90s and who was impressed when Win XP ended up being a stable, efficient platform for heavy duty audio production that typically outperformed OS X on equivalent hardware) there has been a real sea change in the attitude of many.

Of course, fears that Apple will abandon the more extensible, if quite pricey, MacPro — fears that look increasingly realistic — and that Apple will follow their own  lead on Final Cut Pro X and turn their audio production flagship, Logic, into “GarageBand Pro” play heavily into grumbling, open discontent and platform-jumping.

And, of course, the availability of cross-platform tools whose Windows versions appear in many/most cases to outperform the OS X versions is also a big factor in that growing discontent. Whether the creative communities’ restlessness and frustration will spread to the consumers that the now not-so New Apple increasingly focuses on is anyone’s guess.

But as a long time observer,I have found much that perplexes and bemuses me in the odd thrall in which Apple holds many of its customers.

[posted earlier today as a comment in this PC Magazine blog article's comment thread.]

How could that be? one might ask. I know I asked myself that a lot at one point.

Part of the answer lies in the fact that our psychoacoustic systems (ears and brain) are not designed for objective sound texture analysis — they’re designed as personal space mapping, danger-sensing systems. And that has really pervasive — if not immediately easy to grasp — significance to recordists.

Here’s an example: walk through a room with a small radio playing a long song.

Does the sound change?

Of course, not, unless someone tinkers with the volume or the actual content changes, right?

Well, close your eyes and try the experiment again, really concentrating just on the sound of the radio as someone leads you blind through the room.

You’ll note that the sound does change, and probably quite substantially, and not just in volume as your distance varies.

But when you walk through the room, the elaborate perceptual system devoted to making sense of acoustic environment is continually processing information returned from the senses and reintegrating your interpretation of that sensory data so that, unless you really stop, break down the processes, and reanalyze the raw data, your brain just essentially treats that radio as a ‘stable’ factor unless something ‘extraordinary’ happens to change that assessment.

Amp tone in a room is a bit different, but some of the same processes are going on: the guitarist may well have (and particularly studio newbs seem to have) a substantially different impression of what their amp ‘sounds like’ than is likely to be captured by a mic (or two).

There are a number of reasons, some of which I alluded to, and some of which relate to the fact that, as a guitarist plays his guitar through an amp in a room, he will be likely be continually changing his orientation (however slightly) in the room, moving his head from side to side, at an angle, up or down, or even getting up and walking around. And any and all of those changes in aspect relate to changes in sound — even if that is not immediately apparent until one has learned how to listen not to the ‘processed’ sound delivered by the complex spatial perceptual analysis but rather to the “raw sound” as it hits the nervous system. (And the one place Mr Guitarist is most likely NOT to be deriving his idea of the sound of his guitar/amp/tone is from 2″ from the speaker cone, off-axis — which is, of course, a ‘favorite’ spot of studio engineers to mic a cabinet from.)

Acoustic engineers must learn how to ‘hear a room’ in sort of a reverse process, disentangling their own brain’s interpretation of what is being heard from the actual sound.

The processes that go into a guitarist’s estimation of his own sound are related, but even more complex (at least for some), as ego and desire and even that ‘awesome rush of your first fuzz pedal’ mix with all the other factors…

PLAY A SONG. BUILD A SCHOOL. CHANGE THE WORLD.

Our vision is to inspire a global community of musicians and fans on street corners, sidewalks, cafés, and concert halls for the 1st annual Playing For Change Day. Sign up and perform to help raise money to build schools, support music and arts programs, purchase instruments, and connect students around the world. Or make a donation and help spread peace through the power of music.

Playing For Change Day 2011: Join in! from PlayingForChangeFoundation on Vimeo.

From the Participate page…

CALLING ALL MUSICIANS AND VENUES

Your participation can take many forms. You can:

• Perform for a live audience of any size and encourage listeners to make a donation
• Pledge a show, donate a portion of ticket sales, or play a private benefit – we will feature as many artists as possible through our website and Facebook page
• Support another artist’s show by making a donation
• Offer your venue - a club, restaurant, café, business, or residence – to musicians or fans who want to have an event
• Encourage musicians and fans at your venue to participate in the event by making a donation via our website or SMS/text-to-give (where available, beginning in early September)
• Send us a link to a YouTube video from a live performance
• Mentor a classroom and provide music instruction at a local school
• Spread the word by recruiting others to the cause, showing the Playing For Change Foundation Program Overview video at events and liking us on Facebook

 
This is not an unbiased consumer review –  I’m hopelessly, shamelessly in love.

Read the veritable novella-length article this post is drawn from here:
http://tkmajor.com/mbo/my-online-music-love-affair/ 

Let me first say that I’ve been a subscriber to a series of streaming music subscription services since mid-2004. I’ve used Music Match On Demand and its successor, Yahoo Music Unlimited (both now out of businesses), Rhapsody, Spotify Free, and now MOG.

I have a lot of thoughts on why on-demand subscription streaming is not just a great deal for consumers — but one of the more promising ways forward for musicians who would like to once again be paid for their work and for an industry that has found itself afloat in troubled and unfamiliar waters.

And I’m far from some consumer-johnny-come-lately lured in by the whirlwind of press-flackery over the once-Europe-only Spotify, although, after initially being nonplussed by its US free tier’s lo fi offerings and a catalog with some significant gaps, I’ve come to realize that it’s a great resource. While its $5/mo. ad-free tier is blown away by MOG, it appears that their $10/mo. premium tier will some day be a good service and a good bargain.

But MOG is there now. For the most part…

MOG features…

• unlimited on-demand streaming from an 11 million track library for $5/month
• add unlimited mobile streaming or downloading to iPhone or Android for $5 more/mo (check your mobile carrier for data limits/charges)
• all tracks are super high quality 320 kbps – best of any current service
• log in from anywhere (Chrome recommended; Firefox, Safari and most other modern browsers should work well; IE requires Google Chrome Frame plug-in)
• advanced, flexible ‘radio’ (variable between artist-only and similar artistmix)
• completely legit with full industry support (major labels are investors; Rick Rubin sits on the board of directors)
• easy to suggest catalog additions – in fact, there is a forum devoted just to that
• responsive staff – most of my questions and suggestions have been responded to within a few hours at most
• possible downside: because the player is browser-based, you can’t mix in tracks from your local hard drive

Now… speaking of shameless…  you can sign up for a free 2 week trial of MOG here:http://mog.tellapal.com/a/clk/10FlCl [And not entirely coincidentally earn this writer a free month of MOG service -- an opportunity that will be open to you, too, if you become a MOG member.]

Don’t like the idea of referral rewards? I understand. Find out more about MOG and/or sign up for the same free 2 week trial via MOG’s virtual front door, here:http://MOG.com – with no benefit to this writer. And that is perfectly cool with me. I just want to make sure MOG survives and thrives.

(PS… if you do  sign up with MOG, either way, you’ll still have the opportunity to shill your own pals into a 2 week free trial and earn yourself a month of free service.)

We humans are multi-modal creatures. And, in today’s world — and probably not unlike previous versions of same, when you get right down to it — much of our sensory perception is oriented to threat detection. That’s not necessarily a bad thing.

I’ve suggested a number of times in the past that the roots of musical perception/appreciation almost certainly are in these perceptual subsystems. Our primordial, forest-dwelling ancestors would have had a world of potential dangers to sort out.

There are the rhythms of the wind, the rain, the tides… but there are also animal rhythms: the unmistakable rhythmic cadences of animals of various sorts moving and interacting with their environment; the ability to sort out ‘dangerous’ rhythms (the heavy footfalls of a predator, the quick, furtive movements of potential game) would likely be key — and tied quite directly to the endocrine system, bypassing the upper brain to provide the fastest, most sure response to possible threats — as well as the (hopefully) inevitable release of tension when the potential threat was either recognized as benign or had passed. We see these same patterns of tension and release in our music.

But… back to that multi-modality… in today’s virtual forest — the everyday environment, 3DW or virtual, a place of delights and threats intermingled, much like the primordial jungle — we clever hunters — those of us looking to ensnare new listeners to our music — may be missing valuable opportunities to use our prey’s very animality to bring it into our grasp if we ignore the attention-grabbing potential of different media extensions for our music. Like hunting animals that use various forms of decoy and distraction, we can use video and other such multi-modal extensions of our music to further our goal of (musical) survival and thrivance.

A: Well, I’m not so sure that mic dichotomy (mic in mix context) is really a dichotomy, more like two sides of the same coin… a given mic ‘works in a mix’ in a creative context because its particular sound is — in a loose manner of speaking — a sort of ‘filter’ that is applied to that mic’s subject (target source) that doesn’t necessarily flatter the instrument by itself, but, rather, helps that target instrument ‘fit’ into the mix.

With regard to the difficulty of comparing sounds, on one level, you are at least ahead of those folks who seem to believe that they hear the same thing when they listen to a given source in different contexts and environments. In reality, very tiny changes in everything from your listening position to the pressure and contents of your Eustachian tubes [the tubes connecting your oral cavity and sinuses with your ears] can and does affect what you perceive — so it’s only natural that, when really concentrating on what you’re listening to, you would continuously hear things differently on a minute to minute, day to day basis.

But, of course, that can drive you nuts. And the human auditory processing system, the totality of it, has evolved mechanisms which allow us to selectively ignore aspects of that ever-changing sound, focusing on what is similar — and then subconsciously ‘processing’ all the tiny, ever-varying qualities as perceptual cues that help interpret things like the direction a sound is coming from, whether it’s moving, what the sound source’s immediate acoustic environment is like (ie, echo and refraction components) and so on.

Often, when folks start really focusing on sound, it’s sort of like Wiley Coyote running of the cliff and not starting to fall until he looks down and sees no ground under his feet.

Imagine how difficult it would be to play tennis or golf if you were constantly focused on every detail of your performance — and, in fact, that is one of the problem that beginning athletes often have, becoming too conscious of performance and technique details.

When learning such a sport, you have to focus on details to some extent, but, at a certain point, you have to start integrating — and trusting — what you’ve learned and allowing your subconscious and motor systems to do their thing.

Of course, the analogy isn’t perfect, since recordists must be able to continually change the ‘zoom level’ of their attention to these audio details — sometimes zooming in to focus on very minute details — and then zooming back out for a big picture view.

Part of that is a memory issue, as well. One can develop one’s ability to sort of form a ‘snapshot’ of the timbre and textures of a given sound… it’s something I started working on developing when I was 13. (I was a woefully underfunded teen audiophile; I didn’t play music until I was 20 but I was what they used to call a ‘hi fi nut.’) So I don’t, myself, have a solid grip on exactly how I developed whatever such skills I have — but a large part of it, I believe, is sort of thumbnailing key dynamic and tonal elements.

That, of course, is something that will also shift with attention and focus… your brain (most likely) doesn’t have ‘enough RAM’ to hold the entire sound in memory [although keep in mind that there is a very short term memory system attached in a very direct neural manner to the auditory system which has been called, not surprisingly, the auditory memory system — it’s sort of like a small memory cache that is neurally proximate to the neural system of the ears and it’s the bit of very short term memory that allows you to, for typically a very brief period, ‘replay’ a snippet of sound. That’s how, at times, you hear someone say something and you can’t make it out, but, after a few moments, it occurs to you that they were saying such-and-such. What’s been going on in the background is that your brain has sliced off a few process threads (in a manner of speaking) in order to replay the not-understood phrase and compare it to phrases that might have been uttered and sounded like the original sound.

Now, that auditory memory has some ‘hard-wired’ limits on capacity — but the listener can attempt to use a sort of bucket brigade strategy, looping the brief contents of auditory memory back around and re-inputting them… but like an analog bucket brigage, the contents of the ‘bucket’ degrade with every refresh.

Still, one can use that basic functionality in order to augment natural abilities, ‘holding onto’ the memory of a brief sound for increased periods.

There is an added benefit/danger there, because such bucket brigade ‘repetition’ of the impression of the sound is a form of what memory scientists have sometimes called rehearsal and which is one strategy for entering an impression (thumbnail, if you will) of a sound or sonic texture into long-term memory.

A USB turntable is probably the simplest, most direct way of doing what you want to do — assuming you don’t already have a decent phonograph with a LINE or TAPE OUT and a computer with a LINE IN.

The USB turntable is going to be almost self-explanatory (and one of my technophobe pals got one and loves it) so let’s look at the exception above.

First, your computer or sound card (or other interface) would have to have a LINE IN. (MIC IN won’t work right, causing bigtime distortion.) If not, the USB ‘table route is easiest.

But, if the computer has a LINE IN, proceed…

Now, if, say, you’re as old as me (or just a hipster), you may well have a component system, separate turntable, amp or receiver, speakers, etc.

In that case, your amp or receiver will almost certainly have a LINE OUT or TAPE OUT and your turntable should be plugged into the receiver or amp’s PHONO IN. Hi fi phono cartridges — the thing that holds the needle — have very low output and all phonos have what is called an equalization curve — typically the RIAA curve. For that reason you can’t just plug a regular turntable’s output leads into a LINE IN — it requires a phono preamp to apply extra amplification and the RIAA EQ curve.

(Essentially the RIAA curve reduced the bass and increases the treble going onto a record and your preamp must apply a complementary curve to ‘decode’ that, in effect reducing the treble and increasing the bass. The RIAA and other EQ curves were used to reduce the size of grooves required and to increase the level of the signal on the record above surface noise, scratches, etc. When the playback curve is applied, the bass and treble are restored to proper balance [you hope] and the high frequency noise from the disk is reduced.)

Anyhow, you don’t really have to know all the whys – just the hows.

Bottom line, you can treat your PC (assuming, again, it has that LINE IN) like a tape recorder. Plug the LINE or TAPE OUT from the receiver/amp into the LINE IN on your computer.

From there, you’ll use some sort of recording software. (Audacity is a free, open source software that should be adequate to the job.) Once you’ve recorded the signal from your stereo as a WAV file, you can turn it into an MP3 or burn it to a CD.

(Or turn it into an MP3 and put it on a CD-R data disk with a bunch of other MP3s and you can get up to around 10 times as much music on a single CD — assuming you have a CD player that will play back an “MP3 CD,” which many modern players — but not all — will do.)

Since you’ll be going to a fair amount of work, you may want to give some thought to finding a ‘happy medium’ if you go the mp3 route.

iTunes started out selling 128kbps AAC. AAC is Apple’s ‘version’ of MP3-type ‘lossy compression,’ which many folks felt sounded marginally better at a given file size than a ‘standard’ MP3.

Microsoft have their own entry in that derby, the WMA file, and it’s arguably about the same quality/size ratio as an AAC file, but they perversely abandoned it when developing the Zune. Of course, now they’ve abandoned that.

While an MP3 file may be a little larger (at a given quality level) than an AAC or WMA, many people prefer them because they are almost universally supported by phones and, of course, Mp3 players (even the iPod will play an Mp3). Also, Mp3s don’t have copy protection, so they’re not as big a pain to deal with, archive, move to players, etc.

For that reason, even Apple relented and, after Amazon made a splash selling 256kbps MP3s (twice the size of iTunes’ 128kbps AACs but considerably higher quality), Apple began selling 256kbps MP3s at a premium price through the iTunes store.

For your purposes, I would recommend using at least 192 kbps Mp3s if not 256. Audiophile oriented types might well want to go up to 320kbps — still less than 1/3 the size of a ‘full quality’ WAV file but almost certainly indistinguishable by most people on most playback systems from the WAV. (But make sure your mp3 player or phone, etc, will support the higher rate before you ‘rip’ your whole collection. Or — buy a new mp3 player or phone.)

Hope that helps!

But what’s an ethos without a slogan?

So, when I found myself exhorting a beginning recordist to explore, experiment, and experience… it was a head-slapper moment.

Ladies and gentlemen… the Three X’s.

You heard it here first. But it won’t be the last you hear it here… (unless maybe someone finds that package of pith buried in the historic record somewhere, coined by someone else).

Digital does linear very well. So things like summing and EQ processing tend to turn out very much as expected (and presumably desired — unless one is looking for mojo — but then he’s not really looking for just EQ).

But audio signal compression is not a linear process. And some feel that analog hardware does it better (or can have more mojo); a technical case can be made. That said, and while I do use an analog compressor in my input chain, I also have some compressor plugs that I think work very well.

Now… circuit (and tape) saturation simulation is an even more mojo-intensive sort of endeavor, it seems to me.

An amp driven into saturation by an electric guitar forms a very complex, even chaotic system with many alinear, hard-to-predict performance characteristics.

And the mojo/chaos isn’t all in the amp’s circuitry, either — and it’s not all about simple amplitude-driven saturation.

As the dynamic level and as the frequency of the signal put out by the guitar changes, it changes the impedance relationship with the amp, making — particularly at sub-saturation and low-saturation levels — that relationship extremely dynamic.

Depending on the guitar, amp, settings, and playing style, relatively small changes in playing can make very noticeable changes in the sound coming out of the amp.

When a knowledgeable, sophisticated player knows his guitar and his amp and sets it accordingly, he can often capture a wide range of timbral expression without even touch a knob.

That’s why you sometimes here folks say, The tone is in his fingers.

But if the guitarist didn’t know how to set up the relationships between his guitar to make the most of his playing dynamics, the sound of the amp might sound almost as undynamic — and uninspiring — as many amp sim presets.

And one of the main problems is that that highly dynamic impedance relationship that a guitar and amp have is not mirrored by the dynamic relationship between the guitar and the analog front end of something like a computer AD or the AD in the POD.

And once the signal is digitized, that dynamic is carved in stone, except for what little chaos one can pull out of feedback from live monitoring. You can get some typically very limited, highly undynamic feedback from your EG picking up the acoustic energy coming out of your speakers — but it is nothing like the highly complex, highly dynamic relationship of an EG going into a conventional amplifier, where there is some form dynamic signal continuity all the way from the pickups to the speaker.

This is a subject that is fresh for me because, last night, after an uncharacteristically hot day in an apartment where the heat lingered on, the last thing I wanted to do was fire up my Blues Jr tube amp and the 24 channel board I normally use to route my live tracking and cue mix through. So I pulled out the POD XT that a friend left  here a few years ago. I’ve now spent a total of maybe 8 or 10 hours playing with it and I know it pretty well.

I was able to get some OK-ish sounds. But I kept feeling like I was fighting both the unit and my interface’s direct monitoring latency — not a huge amount of latency, by any stretch, probably about 4 ms (AD/DA into AD/DA — but not routed through the computer). Still, I could sort of put myself in a head space where I ‘played ahead’ enough to make it work rhythmically, for the most part.

But the sound, while not bad, was just not anything like the glassy (but noisy), highly dynamic tones I can get out of the Fender amp.