In article , Neil wrote:
On 2/25/2017 6:25 AM, geoff wrote:
On 26/02/2017 12:09 AM, wrote:
Neil Young about half-way through
got about as in-depth regarding
digital audio as anyone would,
mentioning an "error" with it that
he didn't elaborate on. Just that
digital wasn't quite what analog was.
Ah yes, his famous total lack of ability to comprehend A-D and D-A and
resultant damning of it. Apart from the Pono, that is ...
What was cool was that the filmmakers let him talk about how digital
technology makes things different but they didn't let him go off on any
of his bizarre tangents. He was edited well.
My take on it is that a lot of artists' perspective toward digital was
formed in the early transitional years, and this movie is largely about
that time period. From a personal perspective, I sold our analog studio
about that time (late 70's) simply because the cost of conversion was
unjustifiable due to many things, including the rise of home studios and
disco-based "beat" music.
Well, there are a lot of different things going on. The main difference
between traditional analogue and digital production methods is not sound
quality per se but the fact that everything is so much faster in the digital
world and you're not locked down to doing things in realtime. Add that to
being able to undo, and you have totally changed the way production is done
and not always for the better. The fast pace and not having the ability to
slow down and think about things is where a lot of artists have problems.
But you're right that early digital systems sounded pretty bad, and a lot
of artists remember those days (and many of them heard better back in those
days too). So you have a lot of the same kinds of issues that we had in
the eighties with people complaining about how bad solid state electronics
sounded, because they remembered the solid state gear of twenty years earlier
that sounded very bad.
Neil Young has a different set of problems, though. He has severely damaged
his hearing and has extreme recruitment, and likely this exaggerates the
artifacts of lossy encoding. Perceptual encoding systems like mp3 rely on
a model of how hearing works, and when your hearing doesn't match that model
they can go horribly wrong. So he likely has a legitimate concern about
lossy encoding. It probably does sound much worse to him than it does us.
However, because he doesn't have the slightest idea about the actual technology
he confuses a lot of different unrelated issues together and waves his arms and
comes out and says "everything digital is bad." This doesn't help anything.
--scott
--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."