| StoreTags: snobs, quality, sound
Author: delete on December 08 2006 Viewed 3604 times. 14 people liked this blog. You can rate it below if you haven't already.
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10 years ago i was living in a small village in greece. the only music i got was cassettes brought by a friend who lived in athens and came to my village for vacation. he copied them from a copy of a copy of a copy of... of the original album, so my copy's sound quality was low even before i played it for the first time. even so, i played those tapes all day long every day, months passed before i could listen to a new one. i think you all know what happens to cheap tapes if you play them a zillion times on a crappy cassette player. still, i loved listening to them, the hiss & other noises had become one with tracks by nwa, westside connection, onyx etc and didn't bother me. i actually liked it that way. most of these cassettes were lost, given away or broken, i still have a couple of them.
a year ago i thought i'd give a listen to what i was listening to back then. i got the same albums on cd and listened to them a couple of times. although they put a smile on my face, i felt a little dissapointed. something was missing. i digged in my old stuff, found one of the tapes and played it. time had made it sound even worse but i was much happier listening to it. for me there's nothing like hearing busta rhymes screaming "the comiiiiiiiiiingg..." from a worn out, 10 year old tape.
today i'm a member of various communities and i see people snobbing music that isn't "high quality", eac + flac ripped or "the mastering in the last album(s) was bad i won't listen to the next by ... ". in the meanwhile, i'm making beats using ridiculously big amounts of tape distortion, vinyl crackle & noise in order to imitate the wear time inflicts on media. am i the only person who feels this way? is everybody here snobbing old tapes, old records or just 128kbps? what is your threshold regarding various "unwanted" artifacts in music? do you feel these artifacts are part of the music?
random lyrics from an old tape of mine:
"i'm a nigga with an attitude, thanks to y'all
and i don't give a fcuk i keep it gangsta yo" | |
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12/08/06
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FailedSitcom
delete said: "a year ago i thought i'd give a listen to what i was listening to back then. i got the same albums on cd and listened to them a couple of times. although they put a smile on my face, i felt a little dissapointed. something was missing."
That's exactly how I felt about my dad's old cassettes that I grew up with (many of which were copied from friends when he was at school), the CDs had managed to lose all the character that I loved so much.
12/08/06
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frnortnr
i  lo-fi.
12/08/06
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bla
i dont like low rate mp3s but tape hiss n shit doesnt bother me
ive got some old tape tracks as releases here- i think they sound allright
12/08/06
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reehc
I love tape
12/08/06
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cloudscapes
I made some tape mixes when I was a preteen and I loves the wear and tear! I put a little potentiometer to a walkman motor once and would record my speeds-downs and stuff, it was great
lo-fi for the win!
12/08/06
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papergoose
low-bit rate mp3s will someday sound good to someone's ears.
12/08/06
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dataplex
it really depends on everything. low fidelity often induces nostalgic feelings towards something, and sometimes it serves a purpose to set the mood. warp's broadcast for instance made an awesome album (work and non work) that sounds "bad", and wouldn't be the same in crystal clear production.
people snob on lo-fi as much as they do on hi-fi. for me either way can sound beautiful.
12/08/06
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breakscience
Fuzzy crackle warped flutter...I love lofi.
12/08/06
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Roshi
I had a copy of a replacements album that is pretty much worn down because a) I listened to it so many times and b) I accidently stuck in it my auto reverse walkman and it played it until the tape was nearly shredded.
I still dig it out to listen to "skyway" though. Such a good song.
I think there are certain instruments, singers, and types of music that lend themselves to hissy scratchy tape. cLOUDDEAD always comes to mind.
12/08/06
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quip
some of my tape music sounds much better than stuff i make now mastering on digital. i totally know what you mean about listening to copies of copies, it takes on a character of its own.
i aint no snob. my mate chastises mp3s and will only dj with original cds, i have played out with music i have made using dictaphone tapes. so each to his/her own. i guess its down to your sound, and what you find attractive in certain qualities of sound. i like to hear where a sound has been and come from.
12/08/06
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nagrom
There's a big difference between 128kbps and old tapes.
128kbps is not enjoyable. Ever. Maybe in the future when everything is high quality, fetishists (like us) will look back with a smile...
"I love the sound of that 1998 LAME encoder... very "crunchy" sound"
"well, it's a little bright from my taste, I prefer iTunes 4.5 era conversion"
Old tapes are analog distortion/destruction. This can sound good.
So, I can imagine talking about high quality DACs and FLAC conversion when recording your old tapes. I'd be trying to capture the lo-fi in the highest fidelity possible. That makes sense.
12/08/06
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relcad
i'm less tolerant of low grade mp3s (96kbps) than the noise you'd hear on vinyl or tapes, especially due to wear. Sometimes the imperfections bring back memories, like when a tape got "eaten" by a friend's car stereo on a road trip, but you manage to rescue the tape and wind it back up again. Listening to that mangled section of tape again you may still curse that lousy cassette deck but also remember your friends and the trip you were on.
from a production standpoint, i still can't get the perfect compression on a bass guitar that could be achieved by recording a track "hot" on a four track (not that i record a lot of bass guitars these days)
12/08/06
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license
for me it's not even a nostalgia thing, it's that the medium should be part of the music. most high bitrate plugin music sounds boring to me because there's no line noise and almost indiscernible artifacts with those impossibly crystal clear sounds, so there's this detached "hollywood" feel to it. whereas when you listen to a tape with an attentive ear you hear all the warbles and hiss and you say "yes. this is a cassette. this is a unique artifact that is in my life." which, to me, adds a LOT of meaning to it. even if you record MP3s down to cassette, it somehow adds something, a richer context.
12/08/06
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papergoose
there was a time when all over the net people kept saying 'stay away from digital clipping! it sounds horrible! analog clipping, on the other hand, sounds great!' . . . not so much anymore.
Just sayin'. . . and it makes sense that we wouldn't like the sound of it now, from what history shows us.
12/08/06
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bla
i like it when i stop my sequencer/drum machine and the speakers go zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz when theres nothing playing
it lets me know its alive
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