Imogen Heap is a genius.

A mad, crazy genius, but a genius nonetheless.

I knew this already of course, but the full magnitude of her mad, crazy genius-ness didn’t really hit me until last night, watching the live Facebook webcast of her new song – “Me The Machine” (aka #heapsong6).

And it made quite difficult watching, if I’m honest.

Because this was Immi as we hadn’t seen her before – un-prepared, un-happy and perhaps even a little out of control. As the fascinating, scary “making-of” movie that opened the webcast vividly described, this was a project with “thousands” of things that could go wrong – and they all depended at the last moment on Imogen’s slightest gesture.

And things did go wrong – as Imogen herself admitted afterwards. And it was obvious that she was unhappy about it. The performance didn’t go as she wanted it to – but how could it be ? She wanted it to be perfect.

Well, it wasn’t perfect – but it was stunning, spine-tingling, and extraordinary, all the same.

I’ll describe the performance as it seemed to me in a moment, but first I’ll quickly summarise the circumstances, to give you a little context of the craziness:

• Over the last two years, Imogen has been developing “The Gloves” – a new musical instrument that transform her movement and gestures into music
• She also composed the soundtrack to a film, “Love The Earth“, which was premiered live at the Royal Albert Hall last year. All the footage was crowd-sourced from her fan-base
• She has also been writing her new album, one song at a time, and involving her fans at every stage of the process. Song five took place during a 6-week trip to China; the sixth of these was to be “The Glove Song”, and last night, Earth Day, was chosen for the premiere
• Not only would she be performing the new song in it’s entirety using The Gloves without a backing track, but she’d also be wearing clothes that respond to the sound of her voice
• In a huge dome constructed in her back garden, and broadcast live on the internet
• The film of “Love The Earth” would also be shown, with a newly recorded and mixed soundtrack – also completed only in the last few weeks
• And the whole thing would be powered entirely off-grid, by a fascinating blend of green technologies…
• …including both solar power and 50 people on bicycles, who would get to hear her performance at the same time on headphones – because they were part of that same performance
• And as if all that weren’t enough, only days before the event, Imogen hadn’t had enough time to finish writing the lyrics

I told you it was crazy !

But she did it – it all happened, just as she said it would. And even though almost everyone interviewed in the making-of film said at some point or another words to the effect that “we may have made a mistake”, that’s not how it came across on film.

The vast majority of the performance was literally spellbinding.

As it begins, Imogen stands, arms outstretched, gathering (I think !) sound samples of the 50 power-generating cyclists around her from the microphones mounted in the wrists her Gloves.

Slowly she begins to move and sway, and as she does the whispering textures of the cycle samples begin to move with her, swirling around the stereo soundfield in response to her 21st-century conducting. She sculpts the sound with her hands, filtering and shaping it, crafting a gentle pulse that will run throughout the whole song.

Somewhere within this delicate texture she begins to sing, the sound of her voice blending seamlessly into the cycle-sample textures around her – and the singing is simultaneously refracted, reflected and bounced back on itself as she twists and turns her left (gloved) hand to control it.

Everything floats for a moment, suddenly she sweeps her arm around and a synthesized chord sequence swirls gradually into view – deep, brooding and complex, and controlled by the movements of her hands. Over this she sings the first few lines of the song – “A break in the algorithm, a break in the clouds…”

Around her the cyclists pedal steadily, including at least one person under the age of ten. The melody winds its way through the song, Imogen simultaneously playing the synth line, processing it by opening and closing her fist, and triggering delicate bell-like chimes with her other hand – and then she clenches her fists and she’s playing drums, air-drumming the beat, looping it and adding to it – all controlled by gestures to subtle for us to see. Just as suddenly everything freeze-frames, judders and stutters – and then relaxes back into the second verse.

The next section is where some of the rough edges begin to show, perhaps – Imogen later explains that she completely forgot the words, which is hardly surprising, given that she’d only finished them in the early hours of that same morning, after days in a row without sleep ! Hardly surprising too, given that the new “instrument” she is playing the song with is still being invented. She’s scarcely had time to learn how it works, let alone how to play it, perform and sing – all at the same time.

No-one has ever heard this song before, so we can’t know for sure if the heart-felt cry at the center of the song – “I can’t do everything” – was improvised or not, but for a moment it sums up the performance up perfectly.

But what might have spelled disaster in a performance that relied on a pre-recorded backing track, in fact succeeds here in comprehensively proving the entire concept of The Gloves themselves. Immi is able to “jam it” – to improvise for a moment, take a step back and allow the sounds to speak for themselves while she collects herself – and then against the odds pull everything back together brilliantly for the close of the song, as her arms stretch out again and her voice drifts hauntingly away into the shifting, swirling cyclist-textures again.

Imogen may not have felt ready for her performance (she said she was “terrified”) and it may not have gone quite as she had hoped, but the end result was truly mesmerising, and proves that very soon in the future she will be able to do everything she wants – musically, on stage, at least – if she chooses to.

The applause was rapturous, the response from her fans in the Facebook chat-room even more so – most people seemed not to have realised that anything went awry until she mentioned it – and echoed the sentiments of the replies Imogen got from her fans on Twitter when she tweeted earlier in the week that she was worried the event might be a disaster:

@MimAbbyMason: “Remember humanness and beautiful imperfection is more poignant and moving than perfection”

Sunday’s performance proved that – beyond a shadow of a doubt – in every way.

Perhaps what’s most impressive is that this was a real song, performed on this new instrument, not just some looped-up improvisation. Imogen is successfully dancing her way along the bleeding knife-edge of music technology in the 21st century, and I for one can’t wait to see what this mad, crazy, honest and brave genius does with it next.

To watch the whole live event yourself on the Facebook live event page, including the fascinating “Making-of” video – click here.

[Update - Imogen took plenty of time after the show to give full credit to the large team of people involved in developing The Gloves and performance. Kelly, her engineer, posted a great photo of the whole team celebrating afterwards - you can see it here.]

Me The Machine – Imogen Heap and The Gloves Live Broadcast on Earth Day is a post from Ian Shepherd's: Production Advice
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So as the dust starts to settle on this year’s Dynamic Range Day, I have a moment to revisit “Mastered for iTunes” – hopefully for the last time !

Why do I need to ? Because since my recent posts about this subject, I’ve been criticised for them. Some of it’s justified, but much of it isn’t, and I wanted to answer some of the comments.

The story so far

So first of all, if you haven’t already read my summary of what “Mastered for iTunes” is – and what I think of it – please read this post:

Mastered for iTunes – the saviour of great sound?

(Short version – I applaud Apple’s initiative; I’m excited by the implication that lossless audio from Apple may be just around the corner; and I fervently hope that MFi will ultimately lead to an improvement in audio quality – but the early signs aren’t enouraging.)

Now, the other two posts I’ve made about MFi are both more critical of the way the idea is being publicised, and they focus particularly around the suggestion made by some engineers that we should be making special “tweaked” masters to compensate for way that AAC encoding changes the sound of our audio.

(Bear in mind – the hype about this process was how we first found out about “Mastered for iTunes”, not via the recently released Apple guidelines.)

If you want to read the posts, here they are:

Mastered for iTunes – sonic revelation, or meaningless sales hype ?

Mastered for iTunes ‘sounds closer to the the CD’ – I’m calling BS

These are the two posts that have attracted the most criticism. I’ll go through some of these points and address them.

1 – I only demonstrates my test on one song – that doesn’t prove anything

True !

Hands up – absolutely, and in the heat of the moment when making my “null test” video I completely ignored this, and used words like “proof” – I should have known better. Small sample sizes can never prove anything.

On the other hand, I’ve yet to hear an example of “tweaked” MFi audio that lives up to the hype…

2 – Apple never said MFi sounded “closer to the CD”, they said it sounded “closer to the source”

Well yes… and I never claimed they did.

The “closer to the CD” comments were made by the engineers who worked on the RHCP album, after my original post.

Many sites picked up on my “null test” post, and some people interpreted it as if I were saying that Apple were trying to deceive us – but that was never my intention. I added updates to the original post to make my point clearer.

On the other hand, Apple do have a section in the iTunes store called “Mastered for iTunes”, featuring albums like “I’m With You” and “Beyond Magnetic” which actually disregard Apple’s own guidelines. These clearly state that “clipped” samples should be avoided – but here’s the output summary of Apple’s own “afclip” utility from the song “Hate Train” from “Beyond Magnetic”, developed to help mastering engineers avoid this pitfall:

total clipped samples Left on-sample: 105510 inter-sample: 286969
total clipped samples Right on-sample: 130525 inter-sample: 360890

Whereas the whole second half of “Bredan’s Death Song” from “I’m With You” reads an intersample peak level of +1dBFS.

Until very recently this release was one of the first you’d come across in the MFi section of the store.

And even Coldplay’s “Mylo Xloto”, mastered by the legendary Bob Ludwig – who has often spoken out against the loudness wars – fails to take maximum advantage of the extra quality offered by the new 24/96 masters requested by Apple. It’s DR values are indisinguishable from the CD, sadly – although they are at least more reasonable than many recent releases.

Bob has even confirmed in an interview that unlike the engineers I mention above, he has no special approach to mastering for an AAC encode:

The creative part of the mastering process hasn’t changed one bit with the Mastered for iTunes program. Ludwig said he masters his music exactly the same way. The change comes after the creative process is finished — that’s where Mastered for iTunes comes in.

This makes perfect sense to me, but confirms my instinct that the benefits of Apple’s new MFi guidelines at this stage will be minimal on most music.

3 – Null tests don’t tell you anything about the way things sound

True. (Although they can give you clues.)

But again, I never said they did. I used a null test because my ears told me something didn’t sound right first, and the test simply confirmed this – ie. that there was a bigger difference between one pair of files than the other.

4 – My null-test was invalid – I don’t have the original files

The suggestion here is that to do a “scientific” comparison, I need access to the original 24/96 masters.

Actually, no. Because again, I wasn’t testing Apple’s claim that their new AAC encoder sounds closer to the source, I was testing the engineer’s claims that their tweaked masters sounded closer to the CD. So all I need to make that comparison is the CD, and their final files – which I have.

But while we’re on the subject:

DO Apple’s new encodes sound “closer to the source” ?

Well, perhaps theoretically – but in my tests, not much. Not in their current 16-bit, 44.1 kHz form, anyway.

I took a few 24/96 masters from my own archive and encoded them using Apple’s new “droplet” utility, and the standard iTunes encoder from my own CD down-sampled and dithered versions.

There was a difference, yes – but I doubt if most people will hear it. So how do I know there really was a difference ? Because the null test shows it. But unlike the EQ tweaks revealed by testing the MFi “tweaked” masters, this null revealed differences so small I could barely hear them at normal listening levels.

Of course, it may be that the files I used just happened not to reveal any differences – but they all had plenty of >20 kHz frequency content, which is the only area that could make a significant difference.

More likely is that whereas as mastering engineer, I’ve chosen the very best sample-rate conversion and dithering software I can find, there’s plenty out there that isn’t as good – and Apple’s version may well sound better than these options.

That in itself is enough justification for supplying hi-res files as Apple suggest – but won’t make much difference to professionally mastered audio.

Conclusion

Apple’s “Mastered for iTunes” initiative is great, and I’m behind it all the way. Sadly, I’ve yet to hear an MFi release that even begins to realise the potential of the idea, and several that change the sound in pointless ways – in my opinion.

Null tests and clipping-detection utilites are far less important than what our ears tell us of course, but so far they are backing up what my ears tell me – that “tweaking” masters for AAC encoding is misguided and ineffective, and despite the hype and it’s genuine potential, “Mastered for iTunes” is a concept that has so far failed to make any real impact on the quality of the audio we’re hearing on mainstream releases.

Mastered for iTunes – null and void testing ? is a post from Ian Shepherd's: Production Advice
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The third Dynamic Range Day is on March 16th – only a week away !

And to get the ball rolling, in collaboration with TurnMeUp.org, we’ve published an open letter to the music industry calling for and end to the Loudness War.

To read the letter and find out what the infographic above is all about, click here.

About Dynamic Range Day 2012 – The Competition

Everything is coming together nicely – there’s going to be a competition again, with prizes from Solid State Logic (SSL), Bowers & Wilkins and new supporters TC Electronic – with more supporters coming on board every day.

Local Events

“#DRD12” has also taken on a truly global aspect this year, with local MeetUp events already announced in North and South America as well as all over Europe.

Colleges and courses like the San Diego Art Institute of California are holding Dynamic Range Day themed events for their students – Northbrook College in the UK is holding an open day that anyone can attend – while other MeetUps are just meeting for beers with friends to play great-sounding, dynamic music.

In Iceland, long-term supporter Sigurdór Guðmundsson is planning a new recording of John Cage’s legendary 4’33″ – which will then of course be mastered to “loudness war” levels – we love it !

To find a MeetUp group near you, or organise your own, click here.

The Award

We’ll again be giving an award to a great-sounding dynamic album from 2011-12 – and this year you can nominate entries and vote for your favourite on the “People’s Choice” award on our Facebook page – click here for more details.

We’re also hoping to arrange a love online event you can join in with – more details on that when we have them !

Get Involved

There’ll be more details about all of this soon, but in the meantime, please help publicise the event:

• Like and share the Facebook page

• Post links to this page on all your favourite social media sites
• Sign up to attend a MeetUp event – or even host your own !
• Post one of our promotional “meme” images with a link the the DRD site
• Put a post on your blog or website talking about the Loudness Wars

Whatever you do though, please do it now - start spreading the word so we can get as many people involved as possible on March 16th

Thanks for reading !

An open letter to the music industry – Stop The Loudness War is a post from Ian Shepherd's: Production Advice
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Apple’s new “Mastered for iTunes” has been causing quite a buzz recently – and causing lots of confusion.

I’m going to try and explain it all as clearly as I can.

[Update edit: I started out sceptical, but after new clues have been discovered about Apple's plans for "Mastered for iTunes", I'm actually very excited by the opportunity it presents - check out the "Stop Press" update at the end of this post.]

There are four five ways that the term “Mastered for iTunes” can be interpreted.

1. Mastered for iTunes is a set of utilities and guidelines

The easiest to understand and least controversial definition of “Mastered for iTunes” is described on this page on Apple’s site, here:

Mastered for iTunes – the guidelines

Basically it’s a set of guidelines for people to follow, to ensure you get the best quality versions of you music files available in the iTunes Music Store. Apple also include free utilities that allow you to preview how your files will sound once they’re encoded.

The guidelines are great – they encourage you to submit the highest quality files, and suggest how avoid falling into common traps that affect the quality – for example avoiding clipping and not over-cooking the music’s level because of the so-called “Loudness Wars“.

At the moment, the final files are still 44.1 KHz, 256 Kbps AAC files – so, they’re perceptually encoded files, using lossy compression – basically like high-class mp3s.

Whether you’ll hear a real difference from submitting a 24/96 version of your music is debatable – my quick tests suggest the answer is “not much” – but Apple also hint that in future they will use the high-quality masters to offer better downloadable versions in future, which can only be a good thing.

So far, so good.

2. Mastered for iTunes is a section of the iTunes Store

Here’s where things get a bit messier. Apple have also created a specific section of the iTunes store for files that have been mastered according to the “Mastered for iTunes” concept.

Mastered for iTunes – in the iTunes store

BUT this section includes examples that clearly don’t follow the guidlelines!

So for example, titles like Metallica’s “Beyond Magnetic” and the Red Hot Chili Pepper’s “I’m With You” are both clear “loudness war” casulties – mastered at a ridiculously high levels and lifeless and full of distortion as a result.

They may have been supplied as hi-res files, but when the vinyl sounds better, you know something’s gone wrong.

3. Mastered for iTunes is being used for hype, hot air and BS

Talking about “I’m With You” brings us to the area where this all gets really murky.

Because no matter how good the new “Mastered for iTunes” files are, they’re still made using lossy compression. A certain amount of detail is thrown away, so they sound different to the source.

Some engineers go so far as to say that AAC encoding actually changes the sound. And in fact, that you need to “compensate” for this in the mastering. They’re making new masters to account for this, that they claim sound “closer to the CD”.

This is nonsense. I made a YouTube video about it – to hear it for yourself, click here.


BUT

4. Mastered for iTunes is also an opportunity

Just because the masters for “I’m With You” sound less like the CD than a straight rip, doesn’t mean they had to be that way.

There’s nothing wrong with the option of making an iTunes master sound different to the CD – in fact, there’s the opportunity to make it sound better.

Imagine if the “Mastered for iTunes” version of “I’m With You” had sounded more like the vinyl !

In that case, I’d have no reservations in declaring the process a huge success. The disadvantages of the lossy encode would be completely outweighed by the improvement in sound.

This would be nothing to do with high sample rates or bit depths, but everything to do with great mastering. It wouldn’t sound “closer to the CD”, it would sound better – because it would have more dynamics, more depth, more space, more punch – just better.

Maybe there are already “Mastered for iTunes” titles out there that already achieve this goal – if so, I’d love to hear them.

5. STOP PRESS – Update: Mastered for iTunes will use a new lossless format

Since I wrote this post, Tom Davenport has unearthed some very interesting new information over on Gizmodo:

Apple is secretly upgrading your iTunes library

In a nutshell, Tom believes Apple are going to use the new HD-AAC format to allow us fully lossless access to files that have been “Mastered for iTunes” at some point in the future.

You should read the full article for all the details, but this is huge – and it makes it all the more critical that musicians, labels and mastering engineers take advantage of this future format upgrade.

What’s the point of lossless 24/96 masters if they don’t sound great ?

The good news is that according to this post, Dynamic Range Day supporter Bob Ludwig has already done this, with Coldplay’s “Mylo Xloto”, for example.

It still sounds pretty squashed to me, unfortunately, and I don’t see a difference in the measured DR values, but this is what we need – engineers making new, better-sounding masters for future higher-quality formats.

Tell the world you want this

So is “Mastered for iTunes” the saviour of great sound after all ?

No.

Apple have given us the opportunity, but it’s still up to us to make the most of the new guidelines and future format upgrade to get great sound.

I’d love this to become a reality – for the “Mastered for iTunes” label to come synonymous with Great Sound – and even better sound when Apple eventually increase the quality of their download format.

If you agree – spread the word !

Post social media updates, start forum threads, support Dynamic Range Day – let people know we want “Mastered for iTunes” to really mean something.

Mastered for iTunes – the saviour of great sound? is a post from Ian Shepherd's: Production Advice
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[Edit: Some people are getting confused about exactly what "Mastered with iTunes" means, and what it is - for all the details, click here.]

So, the “Mastered for iTunes” concept has been getting a lot of press in the last couple of days, and there’s a claim that’s being made that bugs me.

Specifically, it’s being said that the “Mastered for iTunes” versions ‘sound closer to the CD’.

Not true.

Test-ably not true.

Don’t believe me ? Watch the video. It proves this claim is untrue, by using a technique know as ‘null testing’ to highlight the sonic differences.

As I say in the video, people may well prefer the “Mastered for iTunes” versions, and there’s absolutely no reason not to make a specific master for a particular release format – but to say that it sounds ‘closer to the CD’ is just wrong.

Let me know what you think in the comments !

Update

Just to be clear, it’s the specific mastering processing that’s supposed to be “optimised for mastering” that I’m calling out here – the sonic choices made by the mastering engineer.

Apple have release an excellent set of guidelines on Mastering for iTunes, and I’m delighted to see a clear discussion of issues like the loudness wars, sample rate conversion, dither and clipping.

BUT the fact that the new Apple encoders can correctly handle high sample rates, and should make a better job on the conversion, STILL doesn’t mean that the files will sound ‘closer to CD’.

In fact, since at the end of the day we’re still getting a lossy encode, it’s my opinion that the advantages of higher bit-depths and sample rates will be completely outweighed by the AAC encoding.

If Apple really care about giving us high-quality audio, they should offer lossless formats… but that’s a whole other blog post !

Update 2

A few people have asked me where the claim that “Mastered for iTunes” masters sound “closer to the CD” comes from.

To be clear, this isn’t something that Apple themselves have said, to my knowledge.

The phrase originally came from Scott Hull’s comment on the first post I wrote about Mastering for iTunes, discussing the RHCP release:

http://productionadvice.co.uk/mastered-for-itunes/

September 2, 2011 at 4:14 am:

“The goal of the unique AAC master of the Chili Peppers album was to make it sound as close to the CD as possible. The ears involved in the process felt it was a success. Pick up the CD and compare to the AAC file with your ears. It’s really damn close. Keep in mind, I’m not addressing whether or not you like the sound of the CD. It was RR’s goal to make the Itunes file as true to the sound of the CD as possible despite the data reduction. A lot of time, effort and careful listening went into this project. This was not just media hype.”

And, here’s Rick Rubin saying that AAC encoding needs to be compensated for:

http://read.mtvhive.com/2011/09/01/rick-rubin-explains-what-mastering-for-itunes-means/

The video in this post was was prompted by the Ars Technica article recently:

http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2012/02/mastered-for-itunes-how-audio-engineers-tweak-tunes-for-the-ipod-age.ars

- which included quotes like

“The problem? The AAC compression algorithm is “quite quirky.” Without compressing a song, and carefully listening to it, then comparing to the uncompressed master, there’s no way to predict how the sound will change. Vlado Meller, another engineer at Masterdisk, described mastering for iTunes “like polishing your Bentley in total darkness, then turning on the lights to see where you missed.”

“There are no accurate real-time tools to help you hear what the algorithm will do,” VanDette said. “It was not uncommon to revise tracks three, four, even five times until I got something that compared well with the CD.”

Slightly different words, but the same spin. And still not true.

Mastered for iTunes ‘sounds closer to the the CD’ – I’m calling BS is a post from Ian Shepherd's: Production Advice
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OK, enough is enough.

There are two kinds of audio compression, and they’re not the same. But people get them confused all the time, and it’s driving me nuts.

Today, it was Bob Stanley from St Etienne, being interviewed on Radio 4′s PM programme. The discussion was prompted by  Neil Young‘s recent claims that the sound of music today makes him angry. You can hear PM’s discussion of this issue here, about 41 minutes in.

(Neil Young, by the way, made one of my favourite-sounding albums of last year.)

During this discussion though, they managed to completely mangle the distinctions between the two kinds of compression, and the whole ‘analogue versus digital’ debate, too.

They’re not alone though, it happens all the time.

So in an attempt to clear the water, I’m going to explain the difference, using sponges.

So what IS compression ? And what’s all this about sponges ?

Imagine you’re holding a sponge.

Now squash it in your fist.

When you squash the sponge, it takes up less space. The more you squash it, the less like a sponge it looks. But when you release it it springs back again, unharmed.

You can do the same thing to audio - that’s audio compression. Good old-fashioned audio compression, as has been widely used in pop music since the 60s at least – The Beatles started using it on Paul’s bass around the time of “Paperback Writer” and from then onwards, for example.

Using a compressor on audio does the same thing as your fist does to the sponge – it squashes it into a smaller space, so it can be packed more densely. When you record a compressed audio signal it’s like taking a photograph of the squashed sponge – the results become “locked in”. If you squash it so much that it doesn’t “look like a sponge” any more and then record it, you’ve dramatically changed the sound of the original audio.

This is known as dynamic range compression, and it’s used to control very lively sounds (like the human voice, or a bass guitar) to reduce contrast – originally to make the most of the limited “headroom” on radio and vinyl, and often as a creative effect.

In the past this was all done with analogue electronics – valves and transistors – but nowadays you can get digital audio compressors that do the same thing. Musicians and sound engineers argue about whether digital compressors sound as good as analogue compressors, but they do the same job.

If you overdo compression, it often sounds bad - and modern digital compressors have enabled people to take that to a whole new level. But that’s a whole other discussion…

Back to the sponges

Now get your sponge, and cut it up with scissors.

It no longer looks like sponge, right ?

BUT (and this is where the sponge analogy breaks down a little, I admit) if you had some magic “sponge glue”, you could re-assemble the sponge to it’s original self again, if you were careful about how you labelled the pieces in the first place.

Now of course there’s no such thing as “magic sponge glue” in the real world – that would just be silly (!) – but in the digital world of computers, there absolutely is.

Once the sponge (or the music, are you still with me ?) is recorded as digital information, it can be chopped up, re-packed into half the original size, sent halfway round the world and re-assembled again – perfectly. No magic sponge glue is required – the reconstructed digital sponge is identical to the original digital sponge.

This what happens when you make a zip file of something before you email it.

It’s called lossless data compression - “compression” because the original digital items data is re-packed into a smaller space, and “lossless” because nothing gets damaged along the way – but it’s an entirely digital process, and it’s nothing like dynamic range compression (sponge squashing) at all – either the analogue or the digital variety.

Here’s where it gets really messy for the sponge

NOW imagine that instead of cutting the sponge up with scissors, you gouge it’s heart out.

(Relax, sponge-fans, this is just a thought experiment ! No sponges were harmed during the writing of this post.)

Seriously – cut a small hole in the sponge and pick all the insides out, until you’re left with only a thin outer shell. If you’re careful, you’ll end up with something that still looks like the original sponge. It’s had it’s heart ripped out, true – but it still looks OK.

The digital equivalent of this process is also known as data-compression – but it’s different to the “chop-up-and-reassemble” variety, because at the end of the process, 90% of the original sponge is missing.

This is what happens when you make a jpeg or mp3 file, and it’s called lossy data compression. “Compression” because again, it’s been squashed into a (much) smaller space, and “lossy” because something has been lost – the 90%.

It’s important to notice that the process is permanent – once the heart of the sponge is thrown away, you can’t put it back. So, you need to be careful which bits of the sponge you pick out, and not to take too much away. In the same way, it’s vital to make a good job of using lossy compression on your audio when encoding an mp3 file.

The chances are though, looking at the digital sponge after lossy compression, you won’t spot the difference – in the same way that many people don’t notice the quality lost in an mp3 encode.

What does all this have to do with Neil Young, Bob from St Etienne and the PM show ?

Both over-squashing a musical sponge, and gouging the heart out of it, damage the sponge.

In the same way, both over-compressing music when recording it, and mp3 encoding it, can spoil the music.

And both of these happen all the time, at the moment – music is hugely over-compressed in futile attempts to win the so-called Loudness War (hint – the only way to win is to not fight) – and most people listen to music that has been through lossy compression almost exclusively.

Digital TV uses lossy data-compression, digital radio uses it, mp3 files use it, the iTunes store uses it, Spotify uses it…

So, which type of compression is Neil Young talking about, when he complains that the sound of modern music makes him angry ? Well, both, actually – in different interviews ! He has complained about both over-compression and lossy data-compression – and he’s right.

Digital technology has given us the possibility of recording audio to the standard of most professional studios in the 70s and 80s – on a laptop.

But it’s far more commonly used to squeeze the life out it – using both over-compression (sponge-crushing) and poorly implemented data-compression (sponge-gouging). The result in both cases can be music that sounds no-where near as good as decent piece of vinyl. But for entirely different reasons.

Which is probably where Bob Stanley and Eddie Mair got themselves confused, to be honest.

If only they’d known they should have been talking about sponges, instead !

(If you enjoyed this post and would like find out how to set up an audio compressor using cushions, click here.)

Original image by alancleaver_2000

What is compression ? Sponges hold the answer is a post from Ian Shepherd's: Production Advice
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I love live music.

I don’t go out and see live shows nearly as often as I should, in fact. [Note to self !]

And I really love hearing acoustic music live. I love enjoy loud, distorted guitars as much as the next man, but there’s something magical about hearing music in it’s simplest, most honest form.

The superb video above captures that, beautifully – and also explains in only a few minutes how the internet opens up a whole new world of possibilities for independent musicians to tour, build their audience and see the world, if they have the desire, determination and drive.

And if they’re lucky, they might even pay the bills along the way !

My personal experience of “house concerts” is limited, but fantastic – you can see a video extract here – but I’d love to go to more. Not only do you get an intimate, personal performance, you get the chance to meet and speak with the artist, maybe spend a little more time with them – priceless internet connection magic. And you’ll always know that the gig you attended was absolutely unique.

So, go to (or organise !) a house concert yourself, now. Well, as soon as possible, anyway.

To find out more, check out this excellent post by Steve Lawson:

House Concert Hosting: a Beginner’s Guide

(And in fact, Steve and Lobelia would be great people to invite for your first concert ! Or of course, Susan : )

House concert magic is a post from Ian Shepherd's: Production Advice
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If you’re a regular reader you’ll know I like to start the new year off with some good news.

Something you may not know though, is that I also like it when I’m right : )

And the PDF above hits the spot on both counts !

Almost 3 years ago now, I wrote a blog post called

Do the kids prefer “mp3 sizzle” ? Bullshizzle !

It was a response to a study by Professor John Berger of Stanford University which he claimed showed that young people today actually prefer the sound of mp3 to CD audio.

Now, you probably already know what I think of mp3:

Why mp3 sucks, and how to hear it

- so it probably won’t come as a surprise that I disagreed quite strongly with Prof. Berger ! You can read my full response on that link, but the reason for this post is to present some new evidence that I was right.

Just yesterday, Dr Sean Olive posted a comment on my old site with a link to research he has done on the same subject, which

(a) is fully documented (unlike Professer Berger’s work) and

(b) draws the exact opposite conclusion !

The high-school students who took part in his tests preferred the sound of CD over mp3, and can hear the difference between very high quality speakers and less accurate models.

In fact, 67% of the people who took part in his test preferred CD audio.

For more detail I recommend you scroll through the PDF embedded above, or read Sean’s full article here:

Some New Evidence That Generation Y May Prefer Accurate Sound Reproduction

But whatever you do, next time someone tells you “no-one cares about audio quality these days” – please remember to show them this post !

Let’s start spreading the word that people prefer dynamic, lossless audio quality, as confirmed by the success of sites like Bandcamp, which offer lossless hi-res downloads as standard.

And with over a million dollars worth of sales in December alone, Bandcamp also proves that people are still happy to pay for music they love.

Happy New Year : )

 
Edit to add – several people have rightly pointed out that this is a promotional piece for Harman. Yes, it is. But the testing and methodology are sound, so I’m inclined to trust the conclusions . And yes, the “preferred” speaker is made by Harman – but personally, if a speaker manufacturer is going out of it’s way to prove that better speakers are desirable, and happen to sell a few along the way – I’m all for it !

Kids today CAN hear great audio quality – and they prefer it: new evidence is a post from Ian Shepherd's: Production Advice
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The message of this post is simple, short and sincere. In fact, it could almost be an open letter:

Dear Peter Jackson,

PLEASE ask your audio engineers to stop auto-tuning the dwarves.

Please.

Yours sincerely,

Ian Shepherd

PS. Please…

What the hell am I talking about ? Well, check out the first official trailer for the new film of the “The Hobbit”, above.

It’s a great trailer. As a massive fan of both the books and the films of “Lord Of The Rings”, I’m very excited. But after seeing this trailer, I’m also now very nervous.

Why ? Just listen to the use of auto-tune in that song. It’s not blatant – not like the X-Factor’s ill-fated experiment last year – but it leapt out at me within the first few notes, and again and again throughout the song. (The close-micing and miming doesn’t help either, but let’s stay focused.)

Now, call me a stuck-in-the-mud fuddy-duddy traditionalist, but I don’t quite recall the exact moment where Tolkien described how Gandalf fired up a quick “sound like T-Pain” charm while the dwarves sat around Bilbo’s fire and sang of gold and dragons. I wouldn’t put it past the elves, mind you, but not the dwarves…

Seriously though…

Which film in the “Lord Of The Rings” trilogy was the best ? For me, unexpectedly, it was the second – “The Two Towers”. In no small part, because it relied least heavily on CGI.

It felt more real, and personally that’s what I want from a film of Tolkien – I want a cinama experience that will immerse me as deep into the story as the books did when I first read them as a ten-year-old. And as they did again when I read “The Hobbit” to my seven-year-old for the first time last month.

And there’s nothing that will jolt me out of my state of suspended disbelief faster than hearing that most unnatural of 20th-century music tools, the auto-tune box. It made Cher sound like a robot, it makes Michael Buble sound like a robot, and it makes Thorin sound like a robot.

And if there’s one thing they don’t have in Middle-Earth, it’s robots.

There may yet be hope

I haven’t given up on the film just yet – mainly because this is only a trailer, and since the song features prominently, I can imagine some exec somewhere suddenly deciding that the dwarves’ vocal performances were a bit shaky right at the last minute, so auto-tune may well have been applied as an after-thought, and it won’t come anywhere near the finished film. I really hope so.

And in case anyone misunderstands, this doesn’t mean I want out-of-tune dwarves.

Because the good news is – its perfectly possible to improve the tuning of any musical performance, without auto-tune – even a dwarf.

How to tune a dwarf

You do it by hand.

(Stop sniggering at the back, Gimli ! Oin and Gloin, don’t even get me started on you…)

You work through the performance, note-by-note if necessary, and tweak the tuning by hand – pitch-shifting or time-scrunching the audio up and down as necessary, through a process of skill and trial-and-error to find what works.

But wherever possible, you only do it to whole notes, not within the note.

Which means, you retain all the essence of the original performance. Slight shifts and twists in tuning that aren’t problems, they’re character and emotion. Exactly the things you get from real, great vocal perfomances.

The result is something that still sounds real, true, natural – and also in tune.

It takes longer, it takes skill and patience, but it sounds so much better – especially with harmonies. Auto-tuned harmonies end up sounding like synths, somehow – or like choirs of robots out of the Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy (Share And Enjoy!) Check out the dwarves in the trailer at 1’26″ and 1’42″ to hear a milder version.

Whereas well-tuned vocals, like those from a great singer (or a well-tuned less-great-singer) sound rich, and exciting, and emotional – exactly the feeling you need from a ragged band of dispossessed dwarves singing gloomily about regaining the long-lost treasure that’s rightfully theirs.

A challenge

So come on, Peter – do the right thing, if you weren’t going to already – send the songs in the film back to the studio and get them tuned by hand.

Care and attention is lavished on every other aspect of these films, the songs deserve it too. You can do what you like with the end credits (although seriously, did Annie Lennox really need autotune ?) – but in the film, it’s just plain wrong.

And if your engineers look blank, or tell you auto-tune sounds better ? Send it to me, and I’ll prove them wrong.

Why dwarves don’t need auto-tune is a post from Ian Shepherd's: Production Advice
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I’m signed up to the Facebook group “End the Loudness War“. Last week Harman Aaron Loučka posted a heads-up that an example of the vinyl release of the new Red Hot Chile Peppers album, “I’m With You”, had been posted on YouTube.

I headed over to check it out, since vinyl releases often show as having better dynamics (“crest factor”, to be strictly correct) than their CD equivalents in the Dynamic Range Database. I don’t have a record deck though, so hadn’t had a chance to check it out, until now.

The results were pretty clear, and I’ve made my own short YouTube clip to demonstrate the difference. Take a listen, and see if you can hear a difference, and which one you prefer.

This is not a vinyl versus CD thing

Whatever you decide, it’s important to know – what you’re hearing is NOT some inherent limitation of the quality of the CD format.

CD and vinyl do sound different, but with identical masters, they should sound very close to each other. Much closer than this.

These are not identical masters – on the CD, the crest factor is about 6 dB less than on the vinyl, and there are some EQ differences too. (And, the vinyl is playing at a slightly higher pitch)

Yup, it’s the loudness war again.

The loudness war is insane

This means that the quality of the CD version, which is theoretically a far superior format technically, is lower (in my opinion) than the vinyl.

This is insane.

At the very least, they should sound similar, so that people who prefer vinyl can choose it for it’s particular characteristics.

As it is, since I prefer the mastering of the vinyl release, the only way for me to hear this version is to buy a record deck or download an illegal rip of the vinyl. Madness !

Why does the vinyl sound different ?

Of course, it’s sadly no surprise that a RHCP CD sounds like this – “Californication” helped kick-start the loudness war in the first place, and producer Rick Rubin is a serial offender, mistakenly believing that people always prefer a more heavily compressed version – they don’t, as research shows.

What’s interesting is to notice that the vinyl was released a couple of months after the CD. Since they were all mastered by Vlado Meller at Masterdisc, the question is, why does the vinyl sound different ?

Was this simply following the ironically perverse trend of “audiophile” vinyl releases ? Or might it be in response to the generally harsh reception of the album’s sound all over the web ?

We can only hope it’s the later…

For more information on the Loudness War, click here.

PS

As an interesting side-note, notice how YouTube’s lossy data-compressed audio sounds worse for the CD version – more artefacts.

This is further proof that higher-quality, more dynamic music actually survives better when mp3-ed, and makes it even more sadly ironic that the CD master was the basis for the so-called “mastered for iTunes” version.

And, a sadly missed opportunity – since there were separate masters for CD and iTunes, the iTunes version could actually have sounded better…

Red Hot Chili Peppers – ‘I’m With You” vinyl sounds better than CD is a post from Ian Shepherd's: Production Advice
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