There’s an analog analogue: mixing and mastering audio recordings for the devices of the era.
I first heard about this when reading an article or book about Jimi Hendrix making choices based on what the output sounded like on AM radio. Contrast that with the contemporary recordings of The Beatles, in which George Martin was oriented toward what sounded best in the studio and home hi-fi (which was pretty amazing if you could afford decent German and Japanese components).
Even today, after digital transfers and remasters and high-end speakers and headphones, Hendrix’s late 60s studio recordings don’t hold a candle anything the Beatles did from Revolver on.
> There’s an analog analogue: mixing and mastering audio recordings for the devices of the era.
In the modern day, this has one extremely noticeable effect: audio releases used to assume that you were going to play your music on a big, expensive stereo system, and they tried to create the illusion of the different members of the band standing in different places.
But today you listen to music on headphones, and it's very weird to have, for example, the bassline playing in one ear while the rest of the music plays in your other ear.
That's with a naive stereo split. Many would still put the bass on one side, with the binaural processing so it's still heard on the right, but quieter and with a tiny delay.
Hard panning isn't naive. It's just a choice that presumes an audio playback environment.
If you're listening in a room with two speakers, having widely panned sounds and limited use of reverb sounds great. The room will mix the two speakers somewhat together and add a sense of space. The result sounds like a couple of instruments playing in a room, which is sort of is.
But if you're listening with a tiny speaker directly next to each ear canal, then all of that mixing and creating a sense of space must be baked into the two audio channels themselves. You have to be more judicious with panning to avoid creating an effect that couldn't possibly be heard in a real space and add some more reverb to create a spatial environment.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding him but I think he says the music track can have hard panning, and it's the headphone playback system that should do some compensatory processing so that it sounds as if it was played on two speakers in a room.
Don't ask me how it works but I know gaming headsets try to emulate a surround setup.
Yes, these sorts of compensation features have become common on higher end headphones.
One example:
> The crossfeed feature is great for classic tracks with hard-panned mixes. It takes instruments concentrated on one channel and balances them out, creating a much more natural listening experience — like hearing the track on a full stereo system.
No, they just didn't put much time into stereo because it was new and most listeners didn't have that format. So they'd hard pan things for the novelty effect. This paradigm was over by the early 70s and they gave stereo mixes a more intentional treatment.
A voice on the radio sounded better with vibrato, so that’s what they did before even recordings were made. Same when violins played.
These versions were for radio only and thought of as cheap when done in person.
Later this was recorded, and being the only versions recorded, later generations thought that this is how the masters of the time did things, when really they would be booed off stage (so to speak).
It’s a bit of family history that passed this info on due to being multiple generations of playing the violin.
And now we have the Loudness War where the songs are so highly compressed that there is no dynamic range. Because of this, I have to reduce the volume so it isn't painful to listen to. And this makes what should have been a live recording with interesting sound into background noise. Example:
If you want a recent-ish album to listen to that has good sound, try Daft Punk's Random Access Memories (which won the Best Engineered Album Grammy award in 2014). Or anything engineered by Alan Parsons (he's in this list many times)
Is this still a problem? Your example video is from nearly twenty years ago, RAM is over a decade old. I think the advent of streaming (and perhaps lessons learned) have made this less of a problem. I can't remember hearing any recent examples (but I also don't listen to a lot of music that might be victim to the practice); the Wikipedia article lacks any examples from the last decade https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war
Thankfully there have been some remasters that have undone the damage. Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge and Absolution come to mind.
Certified Audio Engineer here. The Loudness Wars more or less ended over the last decade or so due to music streaming services using loudness normalization (they effectively measure what each recording's true average volume is and adjust them all up or down on an invisible volume knob to have the same average)
Because of this it generally makes more sense these days to just make your music have an appropriate dynamic range for the content/intended usage. Some stuff still gets slammed with compression/limiters, but it's mostly club music from what I can tell.
This goes along with what I saw growing up. You had the retail mastering (with RIAA curve for LP, etc.) and then the separate radio edit which had the compression that the stations wanted - so they sounded louder and wouldn't have too much bass/treble. And also wouldn't distort on the leased line to the transmitter site.
And of course it would have all the dirty words removed or changed. Like Steve Miller Band's "funky kicks going down in the city" in Jet Airliner
I still don't know if the compression in the Loudness War was because of esthetics, or because of the studios wanting to save money and only pay for the radio edit. Possibly both - reduced production costs and not having to pay big-name engineers. "My sister's cousin has this plug-in for his laptop and all you do is click a button"...
> I still don't know if the compression in the Loudness War was because of esthetics,
Upping the gain increases the relative "oomph" of the bass at the cost of some treble, right?
As a 90s kid with a bumping system in my Honda, I can confidently say we were all about that bass long before Megan Trainor came around. Everyone had the CD they used to demo their system.
Because of that, I think the loudness wars were driven by consumer tastes more than people will admit (because then we'd have to admit we all had poor taste). Young people really loved music with way too much bass. I remember my mom (a talented musician) complaining that my taste in music was all bass.
Of course, hip hop and rap in the 90s were really bass heavy, but so was a lot of rock music. RHCP, Korn, Limp Bizkit, and Slipknot come to my mind as 90s rock bands that had tons of bass in their music.
Freak on a Leash in particular is a song that I feel like doesn't "translate" well to modern sound system setups. Listening to it on a setup with a massive subwoofer just hits different.
The bass player tuned the strings down a full step to be quite loose, and turned the treble up which gave it this really clicky tone that sounded like a bunch of tictacs being thrown down an empty concrete stairwell.
He wanted it to be percussive to cut through the monster lows of the guitar.
I have an Audio Developer Conference talk about this topic if you care to follow the history of it. I have softened my stance a bit on the criticism of the 90’s (yeah, people were using lookahead limiting over exuberantly because of its newness) but the meat of the talk may be of interest anyway.
You can see some 2025 releases are good but many are still loudness war victims. Even though streaming services normalize loudness, dynamic range compression will make music sound better on phone speakers, so there's still reason to do it.
IMO, music production peaked in the 80s, when essentially every mainstream release sounded good.
I was obsessed with Tales of Mystery & Imagination, I Robot, and Pyramids in the 70s. I also loved Rush, Yes, ELP, Genesis, and ELO, but while Alan Parsons' albums weren't better in an absolute musical sense, his production values were so obviously in a class of their own I still put Parsons in the same bucket as people like Trevor Horn and Quincy Jones, people who created masterpieces of record album engineering and production.
That’s more due to mono being the dominant format at the time so the majority of time and money went to working on the mono mix. The stereo one was often an afterthought until stereo became more widespread and demand for good stereo mixes increased.
I wasn't aware of home hi-fi but British gear for musicians was widespread when I was growing up (Marshall, Vox, etc).
I was specifically thinking of the components my father got through the Army PX in the 60s and the hi-fi gear I would see at some friends' houses in the decades that followed ... sometimes tech that never really took hold, such as reel-to-reel audio. Most of it was Japanese, and sometimes German.
I still have a pair of his 1967 Sansui speakers in the basement (one with a blown woofer, unfortunately) and a working Yamaha natural sound receiver sitting next to my desk from about a decade later.
The same with movie sound mixing, where directors like Nolan are infamous for muffling dialogue in home setups because he wants the sound mixed for large, IMAX scale theater setups.
If you like this, you may also be interested in the mu:zines archive which includes Sound on Stage, Recording Musician, and others going back to the early 1980s:
In this archive I found a 1981 interview with Hans Zimmer in Electronics & Music Maker. It included a photograph of the giant Moog he got from a member of Tangerine Dream. He also revealed he was mostly self taught, although he did learn how to read music as a young adult.
Boston Logan is surrounded by water to the point only one end of a single runway isn’t aimed directly at water soon crosses water. The city center requires crossing a bridge. Taipei is a little worse but its only runway is going next to a river here and aimed at a park on each side.
Hong Kong Kai Take would be a solid example except it closed in 1998 because of how the city grew. Look at maps from 1950 and it doesn’t look like a bad location for a small airport.
It actually requires using tunnels or a boat. I used to drive a cab and the I93 + Callahan/Sumner tunnel route was hellish. The Big Dig helped a lot, although sometimes that can get pretty backed up too.
> Look at maps from 1950 and it doesn’t look like a bad location for a small airport.
Generally, airports that are close to major urban centers were developed prior to 1950, including all 3 examples named. Songshan was opened during Taiwan's colonial period as the “Matsuyama Airdrome” serving Japanese military flights (https://www.sups.tp.edu.tw/tsa/en/1-1.htm).
For bigger cities with these old central airports, larger airports were opened later in many cases. I don't think that will ever happen in Boston, although satellite airports in neighboring states like "Manchester-Boston" or TF Greene in Rhode Island try pretty hard.
Sequoia also had to apologize to its investors for an embarrassing bet on FTX after the crypto exchange imploded
It wasn't just the embarrassing bet. It was the way it happened: a totally amateur-hour evaluation that sounded more like a bunch of kids deciding where to get take out as opposed to a serious discussion about where to park their LPs' money.
Three months ago, one of the firm’s partners, Michelle Bailhe, offered a breathless take in a firm-sponsored story about SBF:
“Of the exchanges that we had met and looked at, some of them had regulatory issues, some of them were already public,” Bailhe wrote. “And then there was Sam.” FTX, Sequoia felt, was “Goldilocks-perfect.”
In colorful language, Sequoia partners reveled in their appreciation for his pitch for FTX.com as the center of all monetary transactions. In their own words:
Enderman pointed the finger at AI, claiming it was AI that linked his secondary channel to a foreign channel, and subsequently terminated his accounts.
As platforms and service providers deploy deeply flawed AI in the name of improving efficiency and cutting staff costs, we're going to see many more cases like this, with real impacts on people and businesses.
We purchased a low-end LG OLED TV in 2022. A few months ago it started inserting LG text ads with a little bullseye at the bottom of the screen while watching OTA programs or using streaming apps. It wasn't clear how to remove them without stopping the programming or accidentally triggering some other ad display, which I didn't want to do. So the text ads sat there for 15 or 20 seconds before fading away.
WSJ is not owned by Jeff Bezos, but by another billionaire Rupert Murdoch.
By all means skip the Wall Street Journal's sneering editorials, but don't ignore the reporting. For example, the Theranos scandal was blown open by the WSJ's John Carreyrou. They've done good reporting on Tesla, Epstein, Amazon, and others.
How do you see the WSJ as not biased, when it's owned by Murdoch, who openly interferes in and biases Fox News, as has been demonstrated numerous times including in massive losses in court.
Do you think Murdoch wouldn't do that at the WSJ?
With that signal and the editorial page, I think it's wishful thinking to think the rest isn't biased - people just don't want to lose that institution. Much can be done without the reader knowing - omissions, slant, etc. In the end, you must trust them to a degree.
The core idea with this stuff is you can know about the bias and read with that in mind.
You can treat even the facts with doubts, and understanding that the descriptions used can be influenced by what the writers believe. You can come away and consciously say "I know nothing more about the world than I did before reading this article, except for what Murdoch thinks about this".
And sometimes you'll see something that is "merely" true and you can absorb that information. Or mentally correct based on the biases.
Information collection works even when the person presenting the information has an agenda! It's often possible to mentally unbias reporting when you have a good understanding of the paper's tendancies, and then pull out useful information!
Those are very good points and I agree to a degree ... but ...
You overestimate your and my ability to not get fooled, even when reading and thinking critically. In studies, more educated people are more easily fooled because they think they can detect it.
> "I know nothing more about the world than I did before reading this article, except for what Murdoch thinks about this".
Right, but how is that worth your time? It's not worth my time. There are still plenty much more trustworthy sources out there.
If I'm stuck reading a WSJ article, I do the same as you. But why not find something better?
Adding to my prior comment: The more important the subject is, the more likely they will try to manipulate you.
> Right, but how is that worth your time? It's not worth my time. There are still plenty much more trustworthy sources out there.
Very good point, you don't _need_ to read this stuff, and you can go towards things that are "better".
I find that Wapo has decently comprehensive coverage on some issues. The journalists draw "wrong" conclusions, and I just no-op that, but I've found it helpful, and there's often more detail than provided in other places. But I generally do some subsequent research after reading most of their articles. But maybe there's something else I could be reading instead.
The Washington Post has its own ownership problems, as you probably know. The NY Times is an obvious option (that I assume you've considered). If you want a signal of trust, look at their opinion section which is spread across most of the spectrum, unlike WSJ and Wapo; they do have their own biases IME - anti-Trump, anti-progressive, pro-Israel.
The Financial Times is good but insanely expensive. The Economist has a clear bias they are open about and is excellent but not really journalism - they don't give both sides a voice, dig up facts; the provide (succinct, sophisticated, lively) analysis. The Guardian obviously has a leftward bias but seem intellectually honest to me.
The Associated Press and Reuters, but they output too much. Curated news feeds can be very good, especially at finding a range of sources.
These newspapers manipulate not just with opinion, but also with the selection of what to focus on. They want you to care about certain things and not to know or even hear about others. It is a game of molding perceptions daily.
Yes, this is part of the exercise. Gotta think creatively about universes where what's written is what's written and where you could find other information. Primary sourcing is way easier than the past!
It's better when you have newspapers you can trust to do this in a way you like for you, but absent that... time to read a couple different articles
I took this train or another one that crossed to Sicily in the early 90s. It was at night, so there wasn’t much to look at while the mechanics of being transferred from the wharf to the boat and then back to land took place. But I do remember the friendliness of the Sicilian people on that train. I only spoke a little French and some high school Latin, but it was enough to have a basic conversation and even a few laughs.
I've read here for a long time but just made my account because I have been feeling very compelled by the data surrounding the huge economic effects of the animal agriculture industry and how otherwise pro-science and pro-data people find themselves with deeply entrenched unscientific viewpoints. Should I link my Google scholar to prevent people from seeing conspiracies everywhere??
I first heard about this when reading an article or book about Jimi Hendrix making choices based on what the output sounded like on AM radio. Contrast that with the contemporary recordings of The Beatles, in which George Martin was oriented toward what sounded best in the studio and home hi-fi (which was pretty amazing if you could afford decent German and Japanese components).
Even today, after digital transfers and remasters and high-end speakers and headphones, Hendrix’s late 60s studio recordings don’t hold a candle anything the Beatles did from Revolver on.
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