Surface Noise | Hacker News Reader

Surface Noise

theparisreview.org

53 pointstintinnabula12 comments

This brought to mind the NwAvGuy discussion (mysteriously awesome no-derivative amp) nearly three years ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7451062

To be fair, his style was highly argumentative. He left no room for subjectivity or talking about subjectivity in anything. Which leaves out a fair portion about what audio really is to the human brain, whether or not you perfect its reproduction mathematically.

If you want to hear the noise that the artist intended, you need a distribution medium that doesn't screw it up. Only digital methods have a chance of doing that.

If you value getting it dirty with your fingerprints and dust and accidents, get it on vinyl.

These are different values, and only you can say which way is right for you. Your values can change over time, too.

Great article.

I had a progression to digital music and then back through analog... and back again.

First it was the Squeezebox Classic [1] - from a really remarkable startup. A hardware startup in 2000, with an open source software platform (SlimServer). For the price the DAC setup they had was remarkable. Really ahead of it's time.

Then I added the Benchmark DAC1 [2] to that, with a Cambridge Audio amplifier (solid-state, naturally). I was a major digital music nerd -- Hours spent using EAC [3] to extract CD. Hours spent finding (and downloading) unnecessarily high-detail 24bit 196khz FLACs.

Then, I fell in love with a tube amp I encountered online . The first re-release Macintosh MC275 [4]. So I bought that and removed the digital amp. There was plenty not to like. It took time to warm up, usually 10-15 minutes for the sound to really settle. Plus when you had to replace the tubes, you were shelling out big money. But the sound was warm and genuine. The amp bought personality, while not imposing on the music.

Still I was constantly having arguments with ardent analog friends, particularly given I had this warm, organic tube amp combined with a cold, digital setup. So I eventually gave vinyl a try. Definitely a less practical (and expensive) move, but I had the same warm experience. So I started switching to vinyl for any music I really treasured.

The move to analog also changed the music I treasured.

Unlike digital, analog listening was an experience. I'd get home in the evening, then immediately flick through the vinyl by hand. Choose an album, put it on. You didn't skip around. I got to enjoy full album experiences. It really turned into something of a ritual, a performance.

It changed the artists I enjoyed in ways I couldn't have expected. I loved putting on a Neil Young album and hearing the scratching of the guitar strings. Having a piece of jazz suddenly feel in the room with you.

The tracks I used to love standalone I came to find insubstantial -- and vice versa.

As I started traveling for work Spotify started to become more prominent. Beyond the portability the discoverability and sharing were amazing. I had playlist with friends, people I was dating long-distance. Discover Weekly turned up things I'd never have encountered otherwise. So suddenly all my music is on my phone, streamed, through earbuds.

In the end this drove me to getting a Sonos setup. Spotify was a big reason for this. However, the killer feature for me was the synchronized multi-room playing. This was originally for streaming and podcasts - but, inevitably I'm now listening to most of my music there too.

So this article really struck home. So much of what we do is the experience and context we wrap around it. It's really easy to focus on the quality or technicalities of the sound - but for me the difference between analog and digital goes so far beyond that.

All that said, I'll probably head off after this comment and put on a piece of dusty vinyl.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squeezebox_(network_music_play...

2. https://benchmarkmedia.com/products/benchmark-dac1-digital-t...

3. http://www.exactaudiocopy.de/

4. http://www.mcintoshlabs.com/us/Products/pages/ProductDetails...

>I had this warm, organic tube amp combined with a cold, digital setup.

What do you mean with warm and cold? You can use a digital equaliser and other plugins to make your digital setup sound however you want.

I'm always perplexed at self-described music lovers who seem to spend far more time fetishizing the medium over the content.

The medium does so much to shape that content though. When discussing songs we love, I'm not sure if it's fruitful to divorce some ideal form of "music" from its medium, any more than it makes sense to describe a guitarist's work in the form of pure music theory. It's usually not the notes in abstract that draw us to a piece, but rather its color and character. Understanding the medium and its associated recording techniques is valuable in a timbral critique of the work.

It's also impossible to explore the history of influential artists like Conlon Nancarrow, Pierre Schaeffer, or the Beatles without understanding the impact that media like piano rolls, mangnetic tape, and multitracking played in their creative processes.

I agree. I only really enjoy the cassette tape copy of one of my favorite albums. The bass has a certain character that Spotify or any other digital format can't seem to (or doesn't want to) reproduce.

Is that what you believe the author is doing? Because he's put a lot of hours into writing about specific works of music and even more into making his own.

In this article it's what he seems to be doing.

If digital leads me to listen more to the notes today's equivalents of the Beatles are playing and less to the studio air conditioning, I can only see that as a good thing.

It's the same with graphical arts. People will talk more about the tools used, the message or the concept, than the raw shapes and composition which in most cases are the core of the work and what the artist spends the major part of his time working on.

I believe that being able to talk about the core stuff means you understand it well and somewhat match the artist's skills on some level, so it's no wonder people will rather talk about more approachable stuff.

It's mostly old farts and occationally some retro-hipster that obsess over this.

Looking at most young people they are content with streaming unknown quality streams through their brightly coloured headphones of questionable quality.

Or worse, their phone's loudspeaker.

The medium is the message.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_medium_is_the_message

Reply on news.ycombinator.com