Marty Michener wrote:
> In the case of the most feared "ugly", listening to LNS if you will,
> leaving a distorted nothing. Well, folks, you can listen to several
> hundred species of distorted nothings on my new EnjoyBirds CD. My summar=
y:
> reports of the ATRAC death of background sounds have been greatly exagger=
ated.
I find that one of the least understood parts of this is that many of
those using MD do their homework. When I first got a minidisc, I went
through one by one all the comments I'd read to verify them. Not all
positive comments were so, but most were. Negative assumptions were
universally wrong, by actual test on the recordings. The only hard
example available back then was Cornell's big lie. I sure wish I had of
had something to generate the test signal and analyze it all back then,
I actually thought they were giving real data on some antique MD. I have
continued to test, If I see something new about minidisc I go and test
it. I go even farther, like Marty, if something is supposed to happen I
put a bunch of effort into trying to make it happen and if I succeed,
knowing exactly how it happened. Yes, I can make sound ugly by applying
filters, but the same filter stack will make dat, cd, microphone, or
whatever sound ugly.
In my normal use of filters I always make ugly sound. In setting a
filter I rack the settings back and forth into the bad side to find the
exact sweet spot. I may save several stacks of filters and their
settings and listen over a number of sessions before deciding. When you
are working a combination of filters as I do they also interact and they
have to be adjusted against each other in combination. All of my
filtering is now done with a realtime sonogram running to check the
results. All to find the ultimate best spot with a combination of filters.
I care a great deal about getting the best recordings I can for the
conditions I have. I see no reason to believe that other MD nature
recordists are not the same. Yet implied in a lot of criticism of MD is
that those using the format are sloppy, uncaring recordists and those
using DAT or whatever are the caring ones. Or that MD users are
unscientific, and using a DAT makes you scientific. I'm sure such poor
recordists exist, but are hardly limited to one type of recorder. And
using a DAT does not make you a scientist, or even necessarily
scientific. I'm a scientist as a result of a lifetime of training and
experience, not because I use a MD. That's a tool that I, as a
scientist, choose to use, for good and sound reasons.
Finally, my son the computer science person, had this comment: If you
are afraid of compression then you better avoid digital sound
altogether, and computers. Programmers don't tell us all the ways things
are compressed, virtually everything on a computer is compressed. And
compressing sound? What do you think sampling is all about? Taking
minute parts of the sound, throwing all the rest out. The analog sound
is thrown out. And a tiny, descriptive sample kept. And that is misnamed "u=
ncompressed".
When, a long time back now, I went looking back through all the quotes
on compression messing up additional processing the oldest publication I
found on it described what's now erroneously attributed to ATRAC. And
that was talking about ulaw compression, one of the simple lossless
compression methods often applied to digital sound (like .wav files)
without telling you. I've tried ulaw compression, it needs no post
filtering to find it messing up. Just push it's settings slightly.
> The reason this keeps coming up on this group is simple: LNS has, by dint
> of all the huge library of sounds we have donated to them, rather than fr=
om
> any scientific particular capability or talent, far more influence on
> newbies than they should have. Also, whereas advice from, say, Walt Knapp
> is free, THEY charge for it. So we get dozens of complaints the "we
> haven't heard what LNS says about MD's yet?" Frustrating and endless.
>
> If we continually defend it, it is because LNS continues to put us
> off. They stop? We stop.
Ahmen!
Walt
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
|