don’t panic

An interesting discussion on slashdot.org got me thinking about how what we listen to has changed over the years. The gist of the article is that the recording industry has been quietly increasing the volume of CDs to make them louder. So much so, in fact, that they have been killing the dynamic range of the audio and compressing the signal to get as much volume as possible out of the CD format.

Now, I have done a little mixing, both live and recorded, and know enough about sound to get why the high-end audio community is up in arms about this. The raw sound quality of music today sucks compared to even ten years ago. But this is no surprise. And frankly, most people under 20 years of age aren’t going to notice, mainly due to the fact that they grew up with crappy quality. It is the standard.

But get real, people…. Volume is volume. Making it louder isn’t going to help you ‘hear the midtones’, as several people mentioned in the discussion. It is simply an amplification of what is already there, or not there. And it’s for this reason that I don’t quite understand the loudness trend. Maybe my hearing is just better than the average bear, but in nearly four decades of listening pleasure, I have never felt the need to bring the ‘volume’ on my playback device anywhere near it’s maximum setting. In fact, doing so would probably produce pain and certainly discomfort in my ears, not to mention that almost all of the equipment used to reproduce that sound (headphones, stereo speakers, etc.) would start to seriously clip and garble anything that I might be attempting to listen to at that volume. Maybe I just didn’t have good enough gear, but it wasn’t entirely crap either. Probably better than most in that era.

So, are people today actually listening to music at maximum volume? And are they still thinking that it’s not loud enough to hear? I think that’s called ‘loss of hearing’, rather than a recording problem. Maybe it’s that we now feel that we should be able to hear perfect audio while driving down the freeway in our convertible? Or that the base from your car stereo should be able to shift small objects from the shelves of homes as you drive by.

Then again, it probably won’t matter in another decade because all those people complaining about volume will have gone completely deaf.

So Rove snubs the Senate committee and leaves his lackey Scott Jennings to the wolves. Then again, at least Jennings had enough respect for the Senate to show up… albeit to save his own fanny from a citation, but still.

Man this ticks me off. What a completely arrogant scuzball. The whole idea that a high ranking member of our government can just blow off a legal hearing on the grounds that it “interferes with the president’s ability to receive candid advice” just makes me sick. He can’t account for his own illegal actions, but when someone calls him on it he can just say, “sorry, executive privilege”? They have a name for that, it’s called a dictatorship.

So, are we to understand then that this had something to do with the president? That maybe HE was telling Rove who to remove? Why else would it matter?

Oh, and this whole business about the White House offering to talk to the committee so long as it’s not under oath and no transcripts… what a crock. Even if you agreed to drop the transcripts, why no oath? What POSSIBLE REASON could a person in our government, under serious and substantiated suspicion of violating the law, have for NOT wanting to be under oath when they talk about it?? Is it… maybe… so they can LIE??! I mean, if they’re under oath, and they say something that later turns out to be proven false, then they get to go to jail (how convenient that no records can be taken either…). But this “fair” idea of justice the White House offers is just a legal way for Rove to say whatever he wants and then turn around to the public and exclaim, “see, we explained everything.”

THIS is America?? Damn, Bush…. You make Castro look downright saintly.