Craig Anderton's Sound, Studio, and Stage

[nat whilk II]

So we pre-paid for this great-looking vacation resort getaway for an off-season getaway. Nice enough place, multiple huge pools, workout rooms, views of the surrounding hills, decent rooms and restaurant, etc etc. Touted as a "natural environment" sort of resort with walking trails and so on. Wow! great! ok! we're here!-- so nice to get away from the madness, let's go a walk and start really relaxing....and every walking trail was lined with fake-rock speakers playing crossover country stuff like Eddie Rabbitt, Ronnie Milsap, Juice Newton, etc. LOUD, too.

nat whilk ii

[nat whilk II]

So we pre-paid for this great-looking vacation resort getaway for an off-season getaway. Nice enough place, multiple huge pools, workout rooms, views of the surrounding hills, decent rooms and restaurant, etc etc. Touted as a "natural environment" sort of resort with walking trails and so on. Wow! great! ok! we're here!-- so nice to get away from the madness, let's go a walk and start really relaxing....and every walking trail was lined with fake-rock speakers playing crossover country stuff like Eddie Rabbitt, Ronnie Milsap, Juice Newton, etc. LOUD, too.

nat whilk ii

[Ernest Buckley]

Originally Posted by nat whilk II

So we pre-paid for this great-looking vacation resort getaway for an off-season getaway. Nice enough place, multiple huge pools, workout rooms, views of the surrounding hills, decent rooms and restaurant, etc etc. Touted as a "natural environment" sort of resort with walking trails and so on. Wow! great! ok! we're here!-- so nice to get away from the madness, let's go a walk and start really relaxing....and every walking trail was lined with fake-rock speakers playing crossover country stuff like Eddie Rabbitt, Ronnie Milsap, Juice Newton, etc. LOUD, too.

nat whilk ii

Wow, thats horrible. Worst vacation of my life was a family cruise around 8 years ago. Loud music on deck all day and too many people. Not my idea of relaxing.

[rasputin1963]

This new trend towards having a TV set on the wall blaring in the waiting room of every doctor. Turned up loud, and blaring the false cheer and glib rah-rah of daytime television. And nobody is watching it. Seniors sitting in their uncomfortable waiting room chairs, staring blankly in every direction except towards the TV set. It's not clear at all who is profiting from this broadcast....(?)

[Folder]

Originally Posted by rasputin1963

This new trend towards having a TV set on the wall blaring in the waiting room of every doctor. Turned up loud, and blaring the false cheer and glib rah-rah of daytime television. And nobody is watching it. Seniors sitting in their uncomfortable waiting room chairs, staring blankly in every direction except towards the TV set. It's not clear at all who is profiting from this broadcast....(?)

Yeah I've seen that too..

And now all of the new re-designed McDonald's where I live have the obligatory gigantic flat screens on the wall blaring Fox News all day while the easy listening music is "simultaneously" playing over the sound system. I'd rather go through the drive through.

[MrKnobs]

Originally Posted by rasputin1963

This new trend towards having a TV set on the wall blaring in the waiting room of every doctor. Turned up loud, and blaring the false cheer and glib rah-rah of daytime television. And nobody is watching it. Seniors sitting in their uncomfortable waiting room chairs, staring blankly in every direction except towards the TV set. It's not clear at all who is profiting from this broadcast....(?)

The clinic I go to now has non stop infomericals on their giant TV which seem designed to scare the crap out of you about various diseases and conditions while simultaneously assuring you they can be treated right in the very clinic where you're sitting.

All in all, though, a step up from daytime television.

Terry D.

[veracohr]

Yeah, I tend to notice acoustical details and sounds other people miss. Reverb properties in big spaces I notice a lot.

When it comes to people talking, in person or on a TV, I get easily distracted. The "cocktail party effect" is mostly absent for me; if I'm at a busy place with lots of people talking, I often have a hard time understanding a person whose face is a foot from mine. I find it's the opposite with music for me: I often have a hard time stepping back and hearing the whole, I'm always focusing on one thing. It can be a problem for writing and mixing sometimes.

[blue2blue]

Originally Posted by Folder

[...]
I like the in-house music they play over the speakers at Kroger. Sometimes I'll hear a really cool old obscure classic rock song but then when I get over to the pharmacy section they'll usually have the radio playing real loud on the cheesy pop or R&B station.

I guess you could say I'm the kind of person who would rather hear one really bad song instead of two good ones at the same time.

Kroger owns the Ralph's chain out here. I typically have earbuds in but when I don't, I typically hear the robo-drone of tuned pop and rock -- something about that sound just seems to rise above... I can't really tell what they're singing, or even necessarily hear well enough to know if it's a man or woman, but that auto-tune keen sticks out like the proverbial sore thumb...

[blue2blue]

Originally Posted by rasputin1963

This new trend towards having a TV set on the wall blaring in the waiting room of every doctor. Turned up loud, and blaring the false cheer and glib rah-rah of daytime television. And nobody is watching it. Seniors sitting in their uncomfortable waiting room chairs, staring blankly in every direction except towards the TV set. It's not clear at all who is profiting from this broadcast....(?)

Sadly, that's been the case for a while out here, depending on the doc.

The more institutional, the more likely they'll have the TV blaring... hospitals and clinics and the like. And there are probably correlations with economic scale/clientele, as well. Let's face it. Most hospitals and clinics and probably most docs' offices are not going to have Atlantic Monthly and Architectural Digest lying out on the cheap, molded plastic table in the waiting room and Vivaldi on the muzak. They're going to have Oprah blaring from a TV and some torn up Sports Illustrated and People magazines.


If they wanted to make hospital emergency waiting rooms a less stressful experience (and they really, really need to), the first place to start would be to nuke the freakin' TV that no one is watching.

[Folder]

Originally Posted by veracohr

When it comes to people talking, in person or on a TV, I get easily distracted. The "cocktail party effect" is mostly absent for me; if I'm at a busy place with lots of people talking, I often have a hard time understanding a person whose face is a foot from mine.

I'm usually not distracted by the soft rumble of people talking to each other in a crowd but the very second that I hear somebody start yakking on a cell phone their voice seems to jump out of the mix and becomes the most annoying sound in the world.

[BlueGreene]

I haven't lived in a home with a TV in years. But whenever I'm around the standard programming, I can't handle advertisements. There's something about them that makes my eyes twitchy and I impulsively grab the remote to mute it. Once the audio is off, I breathe a huge sigh of relief.

Plus, I cannot sleep with music. Hours and hours can go by.

[americansinner]

Originally Posted by Folder

I'm apparently always listening to my aural environment.

Sometimes I'll be in a restaurant or some other public place and I will make a comment about a song playing in the background and someone will inevitably say "What song ?" or "Oh yeah, I didn't notice it." - I can't help but notice it.

I can't stand the sound of multiple audio sources playing simultaneously.

I recently had lunch in a restaurant that had two TVs blaring on different stations. Also there was pop music playing over the sound system. I could hear spanish language music wafting out of the kitchen and then somebody had the nerve to put a dollar in the jukebox.

As I sat there with the cacophony of five different sound sources blasting around the place I looked around to see if anybody else was as irritated as I was.

Not a single person seemed to notice it.

Do you think as a musician or audio engineer you hear differently than normal people?

I am always sitting in the spot where I can get decent stereo positioning in public. Or I should say trying to... so many coffee shops n restaurants don't even try to put speakers in a reasonable place.

[Raymar]

I've just turned off the tube, it got me through the Holidays. If I haven't had it on in a few months the ads get to me, then I'll just hit the mute button or toggle to another show, but I do get used to it, then get to the point where I have to let it go. I do tend to notice a void after that and I'll start reading or learning some music.

If I can adjust the environment I will, if not I'll either leave it or endure it until I can leave. I do own some ear plugs.

[Anderton]

I was waiting for a plane at LAX and found a corridor that had power outlets. Great!! I could use my laptop without running down the battery!

BUT because it was an isolated corridor, I could hear the muzak in all its glory. Wow, did it ever suck. The sax player sounded like a morph between Kenny G and Honey Boo Boo. After a while I just couldn't take it any more, and went back to the main part of the terminal. I did find an outlet

[Folder]

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philbo wrote:
I vote with my feet and dollars whenever any shop or restaurant decides they know what I want to hear and how loud. I just leave.

I'm musically in tune with my environment.

If any music is playing and I have a guitar in my hand I automatically find the key and try to play along to it. Guitar Center always has music playing and when I've been there trying out guitars I always play along to it. Often I hear other people doing it too but it amazes me how many people don't. Some people will sit there playing their "Stairway to Heaven" or "Smoke on the Water" totally oblivious to the music playing over the sound system.

Lately Guitar Center has had TV screens playing concert videos throughout the store, sometimes more than one, but they also still play the music over the loudspeakers. It's very distracting and when you add in the "Stairway to Heavens" and "Smoke on the Waters" it becomes a cacophony of noise.

The other day I went there to try out the digital pianos and they had a big TV screen playing some sort of Jazz piano tutorial in the keyboard department. I don't improvise on the piano the same way that I do on guitar so I wanted to sit down and play some original piano pieces. The whole time I'm there the guy on the video is talking and playing all these Jazz riffs very loudly. After a few minutes I got frustrated and just left. They lost a potential sale that day because I couldn't hear the keyboards over the video.

[philbo]

Well, Guitar Center has it's own issues - - Every Saturday every teenaged kid in town is there with their girlfriends, dressed in leathers, badly (and loudly) playing instruments they can't afford.  It's like the scene in Wayne's World, only without the talent, and times 100.   It's almost as bad as a casino!

[blue2blue]

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Anderton wrote:

I was waiting for a plane at LAX and found a corridor that had power outlets. Great!! I could use my laptop without running down the battery!

BUT because it was an isolated corridor, I could hear the muzak in all its glory. Wow, did it ever suck. The sax player sounded like a morph between Kenny G and Honey Boo Boo. After a while I just couldn't take it any more, and went back to the main part of the terminal. I did find an outlet

---

I once spent fully eighteen of 48 hours  listening to a ~5 minute 'seamless' loop of someone doing a pretty reasonable 4 and a half minute David Sanborn imitation. (Could have been Sanborn himself.)   Every once in a while, a support rep from my erstwhile mobile carrier came on to walk me through an ever changing but never successful succession of steps intended to reactivate the phone they'd accidentally knocked off their network while trying to transfer my old landline number to it.

I couldn't leave the phone because I was in the middle of trying to close escrow on the house I'd just moved out of -- and where the landline phone was I that my mobile carrier was trying to transfer the number from.

So I had to drive over to my old, empty house and camp on my old, still-connected landline, on hold, listening to the same hyperactive, Sanbornesque solo over and over and over and over... 

And, yes, I did miss the first scheduled closing of the escrow because, even though I was at the house I was selling, they kept calling my then-disconnected mobile, getting no one, no voice mail. Nothing but an endless ring.

And when the real estate folks tried to call my landline, of course, they couldn't get through because I was in the not-so-smooth-jazz-from-hell marathon concert of a lifetime.

And then, after all that, after 48 hours of freakin' hell and still no phone, hearing every manner of excuse and wheedling to persuade me to keep trying, I finally get fed up, tell them, sorry, you had me on hold for 18 hours out of 48 hours, I talked to 12 people (I think), that's it. You've had your chance.

I then got in my car, I drove to the old Circuit City, and less than two hours later, I had a new phone number and a new phone. And -- of course, a new carrier.

[coyote-1]

I turn down sound usually, because it interferes with experiencing the here and now. And long ago I got past needing to analyze every piece of music I hear.

The aural environment is FAR more than the man made sounds within it.

[blue2blue]

The desert -- way out where you can hear the blood pulsing in your own timpanic membranes -- sounds amazing.

You just have to wait and let the sound come to you. At first it just seems quiet.