Why Do All Records Sound the Same?

So many problems with this article. I recently started recording music after a long break and I love that everything is in the computer now. I had one of the very first Pro tools systems and it cost $12,000 (25MB hard drive). Gear that used to cost hundreds of thousands of dollars is now available with a click. I had always wanted to use great compressors and they are almost all available now as plug-ins. I also took some old tracks and ran them through the Waves maximizers - what a difference. What this means is that anyone with some musical and recording skills can compete against record companies.

It seems to me that the writer of the article just doesn't like pop music, and doesn't understand the business of pop music. Pop music, and especially pop music on the radio, has its own rules. It's no use getting upset about them. There's a lot of skill in engineering recordings that work on the radio. And Autotune is great. It's like getting upset that a movie director uses special effects. Good music always transcends the technology. Do you care that Gravity wasn't actually filmed in space?

If you want your music to sound like it was recorded in the sixties you can do so either by getting the vintage equipment or using vintage-style plug ins. But if the Beatles were around today they would be using all of the latest techniques, just like they were at the forefront of recording technology back then.

Meanwhile, my ten-year-old daughter just bought a record player and Taylor Swift on vinyl.

This is the main point I take from the linked article, although it probably doesn't give enough context for everyone to do the same. One of the big improvements music-lovers were hoping for in move from vinyl to CD was the improved dynamic range on CD. It is indeed ironic that the move to CD/digital provided increased dynamic range, yet the trend of producers has been to use less dynamic range than before.

In my flirtation with being a musician I've learned a fair bit about how to record in a home studio. I think he has simplified a lot of this but considering the audience of this article I get it. The one point I do agree with is that technology isn't the problem.

I use Logic, Sonar, Reason and FL Studio quite extensively depending on the project and really have very little problem sounding like it was recorded in the 1960s or 70s. Technology is good enough that all but the most trained ear won't notice whether you used a real Fairchild compressor or the UAD dsp version.(or substitute your favorite vintage compressor/effect/synthesizer/amp vs software) However most people don't want the whole record to sound that way. It's great for setting a mood, but the average pop listener wants loud repetitive and catchy hooks. Experimenting is for the established "wealthy" and "bored" artists that need to find long term relevance.

In general the labels don't subsidize the breadth of records that they used to. One of the best ways to make the point that the industry is the problem is to thumb through my dads collection of vinyl. Some notable records he owns that would never be produced today are "Big Sounds of the drags" http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pEdfuX1ni9E The Zodiac:cosmic sounds http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Zodiac:_Cosmic_Sounds I have a ton of old vinyl from people who are not attractive enough to make a record today. Like it or not the recording industry is about image, marketing and recipes more than music. I don't think this is a revelation to anyone and it may not even be wrong. I think what many musicians get wrong is that they think they can try to latch on to the old business model and "make it"- becoming rich in a few years. These days that is .01% of artists. However if you think of a record as marketing and look for other ways to monetize your band and its brand you can get by in the middle class. Even in the hey day it wasn't a golden ticket for most artists. Really there has always been a problem with the record industry in some form or fashion, but since power is shifting towards artists and home studios labels are much more risk averse. No matter how good you are, it's a risky profession.

Neil Young talks a lot about how important it was to capture early takes. The newness of the music seems to give it a different character. A lot of his recordings have a fair amount of mistakes. Young calls it "rust". Tonight's the Night is a good example of this.

Miles Davis also had the philosophy that first takes produced the most ingenuity in improvisation.

That can't actually account for perceived loudness, which modern mastering processes do account for. The absolute amplitude of a song has always been fixed, by the technology delivering the audio. Radio, the primary medium for music discovery throughout most of our lives, has a very hard upper bound (set by both the technology and the FCC), thus a compressor/limiter is employed at the final stage before sending the audio out of the radio station to go up the tower and out over the waves. There has always been that sort of leveling going on.

Modern tools provide an entirely new dimension in the form of multi-band compression, digital phase alignment, etc. It is now possible (and being done in nearly every genre) to make a recording perceptively louder than other recordings by maximizing amplitude in specific bands (those humans are most sensitive to), reduce phase cancellation between speakers, and hype the sound (boosting high and low frequencies, which tricks the ear into hearing it in the same way as louder music...but also causes listener fatigue faster), often all at once.

Amplitude compression, even when it's smart enough to recognize that there's more activity across a broader spectrum as provided by SoundCheck, does nothing to restore the damage to dynamic range, natural frequency response curves, and "real" sounding recorded music. The music is broken by these processes...the listener has no power to fix it, other than to not buy it, and choose music that hasn't been mutilated in such a way.