blue2blue

Push that upper threshold into the mid 20k's and you're in safe territory, Terry. Some young people have been tested into that range but, as far as I know, there's no scientific testing literature showing anyone capable of hearing much above that. (And, again, that's in free air. Bone conducted sound is a somehwhat different matter and difference tests have seemed to indicate the ability to differentiate between sounds containing and not containing frequencies as high as 50 kHz and I've seen abstracts that seemed to indicate higher frequency perception thresholds of some bone conducted tones, I'm not sure but that 80 kHz figure might have been in there. Perhaps that's what Fletcher is referencing -- but, again, that is strictly bone conduction.) And, as I pointed out in my post, harmonics are sound. There is nothing magical about them. If they exist above a given individual's range of perception, they have no measurable affect on how he perceives the sound. That said, a given piece of gear's ability to reproduce very high frequencies may be seen as some kind of an indicator that it will adequately produce lower, audible frequencies, as well. However, there may be other issues if its range of operation is so high that it passes along interference signals from RF or video signals, etc, to certain circuits. But, hey, I probably would have been an English major, if I had ever bothered to matriculate in my years at university. (That's for suckers who want day jobs, huh? )

... along with clocking and power supply, etc., etc., etc.... however these differences in this analog filter design give a very palpable difference to the quality and clarity of the audio. Make sense? There are good reasons for using a higher sample rate for lesser converters -- but scientific testing has repeatedly shown that there is no perception of airborne sound above a given person's upper perceptual threshold. (Bone conducted sound is an entirely different matter. But not really pertinent to this discussion.) If you can't hear it -- you can't perceive it. It will make no perceptual difference. Period. There is nothing magical about an harmonic overtone. It is sound. If someone could hear 75 kHz fundamentals -- they could hear 75 kHz overtones. If they can't (and no one has ever been shown to be able to perceive airborne frequencies over about 25 kHz) hear a fundamental of a given frequency -- they can't perceive the harmonic. It makes no difference to their ultimate perception of the sound. Dan Lavry has written at some length on this point and backed it up with detailed explanations. Here's a thread that addresses aspects of this issue: http://www.gearslutz.com/board/high-end/165264-96khz-better-than-48khz-multitrack-digital-recording.html Dan Lavry's first post in the thread is here: http://www.gearslutz.com/board/high-end/165264-96khz-better-than-48khz-multitrack-digital-recording-2.html#post1722158 (but that post is about a side issue relating to one of his converters -- the next post by Lavry is the first one of his that's pertinent to the overarching issue.) But (as Fletcher alludes to, though with a distracting and potentially misleading detour through phase shift issues), it's easier to design filters with a gradual roll-off than it is to design filters with a very steep roll-off. If you want to sample at 44.1 kHz and have flat response to 20 kHz, you have to have a filter that's wide open at 20k and completely closed at ~22.05 kHz. A tough order. (No pun intended.) While a really good interface may well have a good filter than can fulfill that necessity, lesser cards may not and may actually derive benefit from operating at higher sample rates. Now, why wouldn't a 'quad rate' like 192 kHz sound just that much better -- isn't it higher resolution? Yes, the sampling resolution is higher -- but it's quite unnecessarily high. The Nyquist theorem -- and real world testing -- demonstrate quite clearly that an optimally functioning AD can cover up to ~20 kHz accurately even with a sample rate as low as 44.1 kHz (although a lesser converter may fall short, as noted above). But a little overkill is OK, right? 96 kHz is plenty of overkill, even with a super gradual anti-alias filter, even if we wanted to extend the upper threshold to 25kHz or even 30 kHz. But still 192 kHz -- assuming you've got the horsepower to handle 4 times the data flow -- can't hurt can it? Well, to understand the answer, you have to understand that AD sampling is accomplished by the sampling circuit comparing the incoming voltage with a series of known internally generated voltages. The more comparisons, the more accurate the measure. At a certain point, it becomes increasingly difficult to make an adequate number of comparisons to ensure adequate accuracy. So increasing the sample rate may actually decrease accuracy -- and it certainly makes it harder to design the circuitry to make these rapid measurements.

I got a tank full of gas for under $1.95 a gallon! Of course I had to pay for it on a credit card 'cause I had no freakin' dough... But I got gas for under $2 a gallon! Woo hoo. Pull out the Woody Guthrie/Great Depression songs, ma!

The first few years when I was learning/recording, I was pretty obsessed with sound and production style. I recognized the problem from when I was a kid (around jr hi age) and totally obsessed with hi fi/audio. It got in the way of my love of music then -- I found myself buying and listening to test records and stereo demonstration records (trains going by, ping pong games, jet flybys) and would buy a superbly recorded record over one with great music (and anything with a mic list on the back, not that I knew much about mics or could afford anything better than the mic that came with my tape recorder [at least it was dynamic instead of crystal, yo]... Anyhow, once I recognized the old problem returning, I made a concerted effort to start enjoying music again for its own sake instead of continually peeling apart the sound of every new song on the radio and every new record...

Science is a process by which evidence is collected and analyzed systematically in order to develop the most accurate base of knowledge possible at any one time. Science, of course, is no more infallible than any other human endeavor, but the rigors of the Scientific Method help assure that it is the best explanation for phenomenon that can be supported by evidence at any given point in time: Scientific method refers to bodies of techniques for investigating phenomena, acquiring new knowledge, or correcting and integrating previous knowledge. To be termed scientific, a method of inquiry must be based on gathering observable, empirical and measurable evidence subject to specific principles of reasoning. [1] A scientific method consists of the collection of data through observation and experimentation, and the formulation and testing of hypotheses. [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method Of course, you are free to ignore the findings of scientists, as many people seem to feel compelled to do by superstition, misunderstanding, or simple ignorance -- but to suggest that you or any other individual knows more or better than those who have applied a systematic and rigorous intellectual methodology to the acquisition and testing of knowledge seems to me an over-reaching so extreme as to immediately deny any credibility whatsoever to the person claiming it. Talk about ridiculous...

I'm a common sense kind of guy. Climatologists and other scientists -- who are the experts, here, after all -- have cited large amounts of evidence to support their conclusions. The rest of us, by and large, are not experts and do not have our fingers on the evidence or the expertise to interpret it. But... if there is a problem with global warming and the evidence seems clear, now, according to climatologists -- whatever its causes -- it only stands to reason that human activities that contribute to that warming may not be the wisest course of action.

Okay... You've been imprisoned by a sick {censored} who has placed the key to your freedom on a ledge that you can just barely reach by sticking your entire arm through a hole. The sick {censored} has deviously placed a razor-sharp blade near the hole that will cut off part of your arm when you stick it through. At a 2:1 ratio, you stick your arm through and half of it is cut off. At a 4:1 ratio, you stick your arm through and 3/4 is cut off. At ?:1, you stick your arm through and the entire thing is cut off. Does that make it seem a little more "real"? I heard this back in fader-pushing school in the eraly 80s and it seemed to wake up the class...

Here's a reasonable, although not perfect, test. Record a track in 24 bit. Bounce the track to 16 bit. Now, play the 24-bit track simultaneously with the 16 bit track, but with one phase reversed. Everytime I have tried this, I have gotten almost complete silence (peaks in the -60dbfs to -80 dbfs range) As someone who grew up with the hi fi of the 50s and 60s, I would say to you that -60 dB wasn't too bad a S/N ratio for cheap gear... but it's nothing like the kind of fidelity we now expect out of our systems today. These results are not surprising and, to my way of thinking, are a very good argument for taking that extra amount of storage space it will require to track and output at 24 bit word length.

It's important to keep in mind that, whatever the input word length (bit depth), most modern DAWs use (at least) 32 bit internal floating point math (Mackie Tracktion uses 64, Sonar offers a choice of 32, 64, or only using the 64 bit engine for rendering, a nice efficiency that gives you the advantage of the higher processing resolution while only making you suffer the performance hit during actual rendering/exporting/bouncing). So, in those cases, the overhead will remain the same, at least as far as the CPU goes. Now, depending on the DAW, you may save some storage space by recording your original tracking at 16 bit... but the DAWs internal processing will still take place at the word length its audio engine is designed to use and processing files that it creates (in the case of non-destructive editing oriented DAWS) may well be the native resolution of the engine. Now, what are the practical implications? 16 bit, as noted has a lower dynamic resolution than 20 or 24 bit word length. 16 bit storage affords over 90 dB S/N ratio; 24 bit has a theoretical maximum over 140 dB but even the best analog gear tapers fades quickly over 110 dB S/N and most affordable gear has far less. If you're concerned about losing the least significant parts of your signal (the quietest stuff) in the noise floor (the dying of cymbal or reverb tails can be noticeably effected at times) then you want to get your input signal as far up as possible -- without smashing into the brick wall of digital distortion at 0 dBfs (digital zero, as it's sometimes called informally). OTOH, by using your converter in 24 bit input mode, you give yourself a wide amount of lattitude in terms of dynamic range and you don't have to break your neck getting your signal as hot as possible without overs.

Seems like he did a fine job for the money on basic tracking. But Weasel is right about the mix... it's pumping pretty bad. The drums don't sit consistently in the mix as things move back and forth... (I listened to "Green.") I might have some quibbles about a few things (the bass timing feels odd... as though it were put on the grid with the leading transient right on the beat instead of getting the meat of the note on the beat. But some guys play like that, too, I guess.) That said, I don't know how you could get your studio doors open for $20/hr. How could people pay for utilities, rent, and eat on that? Seems like a bargain, to me. Go back and have him remix -- and pay him for his time -- and have him back off the buss compression -- and, even if you/he want the squashed/flat sound of modern releases, I would recommend doing the heavy lifting, compression-wise, on individual parts. Compress the bass. Compress the drums. Guitars. Etc. But leave some air and life in them. And then use automation to do the major balancing act of working out the interaction of the tracks, using light to moderate buss compression for final "mix glue." But, again, I think he's doing an entirely decent job on tracking for the money.

That is exactly what this thread is, one big feel bad for me bitch about something you can remedy. In fact you never even described your problem so people could take a stab at it. There is nothing wrong with presonus, I'm willing to bet that a good percent of the people on here love the firepod and wouldn't hesitate to recommend it to someone. Email support is a joke unless your lucky enough to be dealing with a smaller company. Your basing the entire company off of one bad deal with email support is pretty silly at best. I have called the company 2 times, both experiences were stellar, this was after trying the email thing and having them fail to return anything, but unlike you I didn't go on to an internet forum bitch about my {censored}ty situation and complain that the company sucks. I called them and it worked out. No. There is something wrong with a company that so thoroughly ticks off so many people with their lack of support. I'd been keeping an eye on Presonus for a while because some initial word on some of their products was good and because, well, I'm a cheapskate. But from early on, the word of mouth I hear on Presonus interfaces (particularly) is trouble. And support issues. But, hey, that's second hand. If you want some first hand negative experiences, take another read of some of the previous posts and then Google. I think we can all understand that a company can occasionally get snowed. Customer support is expensive -- plenty expensive -- and the need for it can cluster around new products and revisions, for obvious reasons. But when a company develops, over time, a bad reputation for support, that's a real consideration for many of us. When I bought my MOTU 828mkII, there wasn't much else out there in Firewire land. Some M-Audio stuff that had really bad reps, the then-new Digi 002, not much else. Happily, I've never had to contact support but virtually everything I've heard from other MOTU users is not good. They have a terrible reputation for support. That -- combined with the fact that the 2 mic pre's always sounded like crap and then developed weird ticking self-noise -- will keep me from even considering another MOTU product. I generally don't need support because I've been working with computers since 1984 on a daily basis, been recording to computer DAW since '97 -- but when I want to get a definitive answer on some aspect of a product or some problem, I want that support and I want it to be reliable. A company that puts off answering email support so they can pick up the phone is a company that is not working efficiently. I'll bet their Fed Ex bills are through the roof form being late on everything, too. (I worked for a company like that, pingponging from one hasty compromise to another. Not the kind of company I want to do business with.)

+1. What pisses me off is when artists who can actually sing get autotuned to death. There are definitely times when slightly out of tune can sound much better. What the hell is "in tune" anyway? Unless they are singing the root, fourth, or fifth, there is no definite "in tune" pitch. I was thinking about just this issue in the wake of this and a couple other threads. A lot of folks don't realize the compromises imposed by our western equal temperament system -- but the piano keyboard (and guitar fretboard) imposed a set of very distinct harmonic compromises to allow us to move from one key to another, to modulate within keys, etc. And that's why some triads played on guitars and keyboards sound so hinky -- and crucially this is why singers and harmony groups who sing piano pitches sound a little off and mechanical. If a vocal group sings a major triad harmony (a major chord, IOW) and uses the pitches they find on a piano or organ -- the people people singing the fifth will be a relatively negligible 2 cents flat from the fifth. But the people singing the third will be a whopping 14 cents sharp from what the true third is. Here's a chart showing the equal temperament values contrasted with the true ('just') harmonic values: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_temperament#Comparison_to_just_intonation from this article on Equal Temperament: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_temperament

The bottom line is more do, than don't. AND its often done without the singers knowledge. Its not up to them, its up to the producer/label. And things like Melodyne and Autotune work way better when used less- slap them on a good tuned vocal and it becomes even better pitchwise. I love it when people think they can tell... No, you can ONLY tell when its working too hard. And then people say, "I don't like how it sounds"... Right. If you autotune a track and send it back out to the board at mixdown, it will fix 90% of the change you heard- just by returning analog. The singer is usually long gone by the time pitch correction is applied anyway. And when used properly on a decent original take - sound stellar. Now who thinks an artist is going to admit pitch correction.... I have no problem with it if I don't notice it. I mean... I have no prob with studio tricks. I'm a pretty good editor (I started with block and blade -- and took to computer editing instantly). I have no compunctions about using tricks -- I just don't want to sound like crap -- and that's how pitch correction abuse sounds. I hear it all the freakin' time when I'm unlucky enough to be subjected to "modern rock" radio. BTW, I don't buy that analog return business. Just running the signal through a stretch of analog routing is not going to degrade the signal so seriously you can't hear problematic AT-type pitch correction. Even on a crappy board.

Hate to blow the bubbel. Many pro singers have perfect pitch and timing and have littel or no need for that kind of pitch editing. Pro studios may record 15 or 20 tracks of the same vocal part. If theres a bad spot in a vocal line they just take the vocals from another track and splice it in. Switching between tracks is alot easier than jacking with software to do the job. Theres alot more to it than just pitch and timing. Capturing the emotion of the lyrics and the message of the song and dynamics will be decisive in what parts of what tracks will be used. I've had pros record in my studio who sang only 2 takes to a song. I couldnt tell any difference between the two cause it was so good and it was a toss up which would be used. The recording as is wound up being a soundtrack to a western TV series to be released next year. The pitch software is mainly something for budget studios or home recording where the singer may be one step up from a karaoke singer. Often the bands cant pay much and expect alot. Even then if the person is off alot it wont fix it. The only time I use it is when I know the singer sucks and wont be able to hit certain notes nomatter how many tracks they do. Thats usually the point where I cant hack hearing them sing anymore so I tweak it in instead. What I'd like to tell them is go take lessons and come back when you learn how to sing and ocassionally do if its got no chance. Mmmm... I've heard AT type pitch correction on some very big Nashville trad/bluegrass artists -- folks you really wouldn't expect to have to need it... and I'd have to say who don't need it but, for whatever reasons, there that warbly, obvious {censored} is... Sometimes it's just on the backup vocals -- (where it sounds like crap -- hill harmony should not be on the damn even-tempered 'piano' notes but should hew to true harmonic intervals) but sometimes it's on the main vox. It's disgraceful. Not disgraceful that it's used -- disgraceful that it's used so poorly that it's painfully obvious. I recently stumbled on to a youngish Austin-based singer-songwriter, Slaid Cleaves. Really strong songs. A characterful voice -- and some good playing on some of his albums. But starting with his 2000 album, obvious AT artifacts pop up throughout his albums -- it's just pathetic. AT is used on a lot of big name pop music -- and it can be pretty obvious. I'm not sure why WRGKMC doesn't think it is -- but he must not be listening to the same stuff I'm hearing.

... Its been a good box for 8 years and I dont like letting a good box go. Need to find a new use for it... A man after my own heart.

because MS is a commercial entity and Apple has demonstrated that a hollywood style GUI sells. that's all you're going to see from that direction henceforth. people will buy new computers to run their new GUIs faster. bonus. you can use a modern linux os with an environment like icewm that uses as much resources as windows 98, if you want. Well... I hate to be a stick in the mud but I'm pretty happy running XP. That said, I'm a huge fan of the Open Source movement and I'd love to see a time when there are applications and well written drivers for an open source *nix system. WRGKMC Thanks for the (actually quite unnecessary) apology... 20 seconds of my life I'll never get back. I've had some coffee now and feeling better... but it had me goin' there for... well... 20 seconds. As I'm sure you know, the TweakXP folks have a TweakVista site, too. And then there's that linked article above. I have to say that I had a bad feeling in my gut from the first in depth reading I did on Vista. I know it's got other, quite possibly bigger problems, but when I read about that rescaling graphics engine (I think I'd just come back from the aforementioned Mac-centric clients and was sick of sitting looking at his screen [and trust me, his old G4 flat screen iMac was even slower, as you can probably imagine], waiting for stuff to finish happening) I just groaned.

Turning off all the unnecessary screen animations and BS in XP was always a good idea. When I first updated my old Pentium 3-500 mHz machine with XP back around the beginning of 2002, I upgraded the ram to 256 MB and wasn't too bummed with the performance hit... But then I decided to try to optimize it and discovered I could turn off the hideous Tonka Toy color scheme as well as all the insipid thinks like slow-roll-out menu animations. (What moron thought menus leisurely animating out was going to look or feel cool?) Damnedest thing -- with the silly gewgaws turned off, XP was, overall, faster feeling in performance. Programs loaded much faster. And while I'd had a very stable and well-optimized Win 98 machine, the stability of XP was wonderful. It seems to me that probably the single biggest problem at MS -- especially in recent years -- is that a lot of the turkeys making decisions would really rather be at Apple. What MS does well is develop code and development environments. What it does extraordinarily poorly, is try to be a Mac me-too platform. The horrendous missteps in Vista -- notable among them the CPU-draining rescaling graphics engine, Aero, an absurdly obvious nick on OS X's Aqua graphics engine -- are so bad not just because they're clumsy and designed by people who just don't get it -- but because, often as not, they are not only unnecessary (what has Aqua ever done for the world besides the stupid 'swoosh') but drag the GUI performance down. I have to use Macs at some clients' and I can tell you that even on new Core 2 Duo Macs, I'm always sitting around waiting for things to happen. Even though my own machines are far from rocket ships (my laptop is a 4+ year old Pentium M machine and my desktop an old Pentium 4 2.8HT) -- I'm damn glad to get back on them after using my clients' Macs. One of my clients recently popped for a new 20" iMac for around 2 grand. No doubt it's a sleek, elegant machine with a great looking display (gotta love that hyped Mac gamma!) By contrast, my P4 is a refurb from Dell, a few years old, and cost $403 including tax and shipping (no monitor -- I popped for a super high contrast, fast LG 19" LCD). Why does it feel so much faster?

I suspect this won't fix all (or possibly any) of your problems but I offer it, anwya, as, perhaps a slim ray of hope: http://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott/?p=429&tag=nl.e622 I haven't had a chance to read it and it's not oriented to DAW use. While it certainly seems to be true that Vista has a number of systemic as well as particular problems, it would seem that for us in the audio world, the biggest and most pervasive problem seems to be either lack of drivers or poorly written/misbehaving drivers. Drivers, of course, are often a big problem and some vendors seem to have an extraordinary amount of difficulty developing stable, properly performing software drivers for their gear. Some devices from some manufacturers never seemed to get their driver issues straightened out for XP... BTW... it must have taken me 20 seconds trying to figure out what you meant by "op system." (If it had been a snake, it would have bit me.) I've only been doing computer work professionally since 1985, so I'd never heard that one. Call me lazy, but I guess I always thought "OS" worked pretty well for the last few decades as shorthand for operating system.

Looks like gsH covered it pretty good. I've been talking to a few people about orchestral sample libraries and it's all about the individual 'orchestra instrument' articulation idioms, which, of course, vary widely. What we need is an open standard electronic notation system that can capture the articulation and performance nuances implicit in standard notation... we could call it Musical Instrument Digital Interface or something... Just kidding.

Vista only sucks for recording because third-party programmers (the people who write the music programs) haven't written their code to support it yet. Give it time. Within a year it will be just fine. As I noted, it's already been out a year. Also, both Cubase and Sonar have had Vista-capable versions out for about that long. [bTW, watch out for the Rain Vista benchmarks, which are widely seen to be seriously compromised. I just ran into them again while I was checking Vista-capability for Cubase; frankly, I would have thought Rain would pull them down in the wake of criticism.]

Vista only sucks for recording because third-party programmers (the people who write the music programs) haven't written their code to support it yet. Give it time. Within a year it will be just fine. On the contrary... we're now about a year out from initial public release and things show little or no sign of improving. Vista is a disaster from top to bottom, with the exception of security. It's far slower overall in all meaningful benchmark sets I've seen. Support from 3rd parties has been limited and, where it exists, frequently compromised or simply unworkable. The biggest "advances" it heralded (again, aside from security) were arguably the most problematic and the least needed. Find me one XP user in ten who has really thought about it who would be willing to trade off as much as 20-30% of performance speed for a rescaling graphic engine. Yet, MS couldn't wait to foist this white elephant on us. Why? What advantages would it give us? Let's think about that for a sec... OS X has had a rescaling graphic engine (Aqua) since the early part of the decade. But just what has it given us? The swoosh. (The little animated tornado effect that slurps an open window down onto the taskbar... excuse me, the taskbar-clone, The Dock.) And the ability to thumbnail a screen so that, say, you can see all the thumbnails of your open windows at once. (Sounds handy, I'll admit. Somehow, I'm not willing to kiss off 30% of my performance to get it though.) Yet, MS, whose current management seems to give every indication of never having used a computer for real work besides maybe email and games and the occasional memo, kissed off a huge chunk of performance for us. Why? Looks like a probably terminal case of Mac-Me-Tooism to me.

If you're going to mix with headphones, better hope your ears are nearly identical in their response patterns -- which is increasingly not the case for most adults as they grow older. For people with real world ears, mixing on phones can mean reversing the phones frequently to double check left/right issues. It's not that it can't be done -- lots of us probably have in a pinch -- but there are pitfalls, for sure. A decent pair of phones will likely have as good a bass response as most small NFMs. (What you won't feel are room standing waves -- that boomy pressure that develops because of room resonance in a poorly treated monitoring room.) The length of the wave form is not a determining factor for headphone response, per se. If the rationale expressed above held, you wouldn't be able to hear anything with a wavelength longer than 2" if I understand the poster's thinking. That would be 6752 Hz at sea level/room temp. (See nifty wavelength calculator.) A 100 Hz tone -- which most any decent headphone should be able to deliver, has a wavelength of 11.25 feet. Good headphones are capable of delivering tones to the accepted normal bottom range of human hearing. There's probably more than anyone wants to know about headphones here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Headphones An interesting question came up in one of these forums not long ago... the poster suggested he simply wasn't interested in mixing for people with speakers -- he, himself, always used 'phones and it was his perception that most of his peers listened on earbuds or in the car -- and that when they did listen to a home stereo it was a crappy sounding tabletop setup. His question was, given that, why not mix on phones?

I really found myself digging the Violinaires and listened to the whole album I found on my subscription service. I've always loved good singing groups. I'm a big fan of classic doo wop as well as jazz ensemble singing like Lambert, Hendricks, and Ross, and the sister and brother groups of the 30s and 40s, too. Ironically, I started getting into gospel (first classic black gospel and later the really rootsy, hillbilly/bluegrass rural white stuff, the 'shaved-pitch' harmony stuff) when I was young and, for a number of years, considered myself an atheist. The theology of gospel didn't reach me [though I was raised in and out of church] -- but the heartfelt passion and the exuberance of black gospel did -- and the stark, somewhat darker passion of the hillbilly stuff really struck me in a different but equally profound way.) My religious/spiritual views are considerably more complex, nuanced, and ambiguous now (like life, which I've since lived a lot of) but my love for the music is every bit as deep. The funny thing is that, in the mid late 70s when I was involved with the first wave of punk, I met a lot of fellow music outsiders/punks who also loved gospel -- and country and western of all things... (Of course, we all hated Boston and Billy Joel and the Bee Gees... That was pretty predictable.)

People wonder why no one buys music anymore -- and at the same time others observe that a lot of young kids have a strong attachment to the music of past generations in ways that older generations simply didn't have -- while I always loved 30s and 40s jazz and blues relatively few of my generation did in the 60s and 70s. I think at least some part of it is the fact that so much mainstream product today is grossly overcompressed and overprocessed so much that -- no matter how slick it might at first seem -- it is fatiguing and irritating to listen to. I'm a big Modest Mouse fan but their latest album is so uncomfortable -- downright irritating -- to listen to that I've only been all the through it once. I think I could like some of the songs but when it's time to pick something to listen to, the subconscious music selector part of my brain just steers me away from the new MM -- it's a subconscious/been-burned thing -- that album is like cleaning your ears with sandpaper. BTW... I'm listening to the Violinaires right now over my subscription service and this is some hot, living music. Dang! Thanks so much for mentioning them, Platinum! I really wasn't familiar with them. Your description is excellent. This is great, vibrant, alive stuff. Of course, since the singers sing true harmony rather than (mathematically disharmonic) equal-temp keyboard notes, it's going to take some getting used to for folks who've grown up on the singers who defer to the convenient approximations of equal temperament and the AT grid.

clean power, exspensive gear, gates, and masking (when the noise is pretty much anihilated from being overpowered by the main idea or what is being played). Noise is for hacks. Well, obviously there is a real difference of opinion represented in this thread. Myself, I'd rather hear a noisy, raw track by Jimi Hendrix ANY day (and a thousand times over) than a "perfect" track by that guitar-playing sleep-inducer Eric Johnson. Different strokes...