The Problem with new music and poor listening

Having spent a lot of time interacting with Avalon Acoustics in the past few months -- whose speakers range in price from $7000 to $360,000, and owning an amp and pre-amp that come from Jeff Rowland who produces the electronics ranging in price from $9500 to $58,000 I've been learning a lot and thinking a lot about music reproduction and how things like the law of diminishing returns applies (does a $9500 amp sound $48,500 worse than the expensive one?). Anyway, an individual replied with the idea that Millennials are just Uncool (and by implication don't make good music).

This got me to thinking about writing this overly long diatribe. So I'm ready to wax philosophical on why the state of Music sucks so bad today.

January 22nd of 2016, the sales of OLD music outpaced the sales of NEW music. I think there's some solid reasons why. Follow along, and apologies in advance for any snobby tone.

Algorithmic Music

First, lets start with algorithmic music: That's right, music made via algorithm. By algorithm, I mean computers that write songs. You've heard it and you don't even know it. See, some folks think that a computer can write a song to match the qualities of other popular songs that appeal to certain audience. This has been surprisingly effective at creating some big hits from newer artists (think Ke$ha and the Cast of Glee -- who had more billboard hit songs than Elvis). The products have names like "Band in a Box" or "Automated Composing System" and can even be used in conjunction with automated lyric creating software such as the "TALE-SPIN" and "MINSTREL". Once a song is "written" (generated?), some are run through software like "Hit Song Science" which predicts its probability of being a hit. "I Gotta Feeling" by the Black Eyed Peas is one such song and it hit the top of the Billboard pop chart after scoring 8.9 out of 10 on the "Hit Song Science" software, meaning that it got the honor of being released as a single.

Do We Listen Wrong?

Secondly, lets look at "listening to music". You ask anyone if they listen to music and they almost invariably say yes. But no. No they don't. Most people play music while they do something else. But listening to music is setting aside all other activities to sit down, in order to JUST listen to music. So, not to be snobbish about it, but odds are you don't listen to music. You clean the house and dance around and sing along and play music in the background. There's nothing inherently wrong with that. I do it! But it's a very different experience than sitting down and really listening. Audiophiles are a small group of consumers, so studios/engineers mix for "the masses" which means loudness (more on that later).

Do we listen wrong.  Part II -- Earbuds

Earbuds: Besides the fact that numerous studies have shown a clear link between earbuds and hearing damage -- millennials are the primary victims of this -- and the fact that they're just awful, they remain very popular. But there's another reason to eschew earbuds. That's not how music is meant to be heard. Music is designed to be heard in stereo. The philosophy is that on a fair stereo, it should replicate the band playing in front of you. On a superb stereo, you can get a spacial sense of where the trumpet player is standing, and where the saxophone player is standing on the virtual stage in front of you. It's how great quality music is mixed and mastered and how it's intended to be listened to. Using earbuds or headphones puts the sound in the middle of the inside of your head and that experience is lost. There is one notable exception and that's Binaural recordings, which are recorded with microphones placed inside the ears of a model of a human head. The results can absolutely stunning, but nobody really records that way because who buys music that's really only MEANT to be listened to on headphones. Now -- media with both a binaural mix and a stereo mix, that might be interesting. There's impressive examples on Youtube. Surround Sound suffers some of the same problems as above. You listen to a band playing in front of you, not whilst sitting in the middle of the band with the drummer behind you and the lead singer in front of you. Music is recorded, mixed, mastered and released primarily in stereo for a reason. Surround sound is for movies.

Audiophile or AudioFool

Audio Equipment: As an Audiophile, I listen to high end equipment, nothing says that great sound has to be super expensive. But as a general rule, a $250 stereo will sound nothing at all like a $3000 stereo (not always the case!). Don't walk into a store and buy on features and how many buttons and lights and watts it puts out (some of the finest amps in the world put out numbers like 8 watts). Go to an audio store and actually listen to what you want to buy before you buy it. Take your favorite CD with you and demo the gear. Most audio stores are very happy to oblige. You wouldn't buy a car without test driving it, would you? Same with Stereo's. That is unless you've decided only to have music as your background sound, in which case, go right ahead and buy those bose or yamaha speakers and amps. I purchased my gear used, it was a few years old and one person called them "vintage". The speaker designer said they weren't vintage they were classics. Even so, they're high end and they sound great and they're 1/3 the cost than they were new. I don't buy into the $100/foot speaker cables, or any cable that carries digital that costs more than a few bucks. People who don't understand digital buy that crap.

Audio Setup

The tv show Elementary drives me absolutely nuts. Sherlock Holmes owns a McIntosh C2300 -- a vacuum tube pre-amp that sells for $4500, an $8000 MT10 McIntosh Turntable, and a $4500 McIntosh MC152 amplifier. With that kind of gear he uses Energy CF-70's speakers (at $500/pair) arguably the most important part of the system and probably used because they look okay. But putting THOSE speakers on a $15000 plus set of equipment? Insane. He should be running speakers that more closely match the level of equipment he has in the rest of the system. There are great speakers that are inexpensive... but those, in my opinion, are not even close to being them. They are what audio nuts call "Mid-Fi" whereas the McIntosh gear is consider "Hi-Fi". He did it exactly backwards.

But none of this matters, because the smartest man in the world has his speakers set in the corners of the room facing each other. So really, even the best of the best speakers (which, by the way come from Avalon Acoustics but I'm TOTALLY biased) are going to completely lose that sense of the band "playing right in front of you" (imaging) in that configuration. He's using them as noisemakers and that's all.

Your listening position and your speakers should be in a triangle with the distance between the speakers being roughly 85% of the distance to the listening area. In other words, if you're sitting 10' away from the speakers, the distance between the speakers should be roughly 8.5 feet apart. Refer to the manufacturer and your ears to determine how much you should toe-in each speaker (i.e., point them towards the listening position).


Processing of Music

AutoTune and Vocoders: Making people who can't sing singers, since Cher brought AutoTune to the world with her song "Believe" in 1998, and the Vocoder that cursed the world with hits from The Black Eyed Peas. Hey guys! -- We hear it, it sounds like crap and we know it probably means you can't sing. As Autotune improves with technology, our artists will be picked more and more by their looks and fashion than their actual talent and they'll write even less of their own music than they do now -- which is not insignificant.


Even more processing, this time of some of the good stuff.

Finally: The Loudness War. Remastered disks are always better than the original, right? Wrong. Since the 1990's the trend in poor quality audio engineering has been to greatly increase the loudness of music. This causes clipping and distortion and compression of the dynamic range. It exploits instantaneous perception to the human ear that louder is better. If you play an original recording and then a newer "remaster" back to back without touching the volume knob -- if it's a victim of the loudness war -- you'll notice the newer "remaster" sounds a LOT louder (frequently in the range of 6db or roughly 50% louder in perceived volume). The trade off is that the already loud parts (drums or other aspects the artist intended to be louder) get cut off on the high and low end, meaning that they end up sounding "the same or similar loudness" as everything else in the song, which was not the artists intent and flattens out the song, compressing it and making it sound less dynamic. Fine if you're having a dinner party with music in the background. Terrible if you're sitting and actually listening to music.


tl;dr version of all this? Modern music sucks because we don't listen, when we do listen, we don't do it "right," the artists frequently do lack talent and are often chosen to be famous for reasons other than their musical ability and the music is so compressed that even the best of songs sound absolutely craptacular.