True story, aged 17 in 1987 I was introduced to Laurie Anderson’s Mister Heartbreak by a hifi store person demoing speakers I could never afford using “Gravity’s Angel”. Drums sounded spectacular but the track itself blew my mind. Didn’t buy the speakers but I bought the CD when I found it a few months later.
― assert (matttkkkk), Wednesday, 1 May 2024 19:45 (one month ago) link
all the cream electrets and shakti stones can make you forget that some of these fellas actually Love Music
― paul mccartney and wigs (diamonddave85), Wednesday, 1 May 2024 20:45 (one month ago) link
t/s only being able to listen to the mofi catalogue in hi fidelity or whatever you want on your cell phone speaker
― budo jeru, Thursday, 2 May 2024 01:47 (one month ago) link
I'd have to think about that tbh
― Blues Guitar Solo Heatmap (Free Download) (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Thursday, 2 May 2024 02:42 (one month ago) link
yeah, same. genuinely good philosophical problem to pose in this topic!
― interstellar anthropologist+music philosopher, (Austin), Thursday, 2 May 2024 02:50 (one month ago) link
not a moment's hesitation, phone
― papal hotwife (milo z), Thursday, 2 May 2024 03:29 (one month ago) link
oooh I am definitely hesitating - once I would have been phone no question - but after tasting the succulent fruits of mid-fi sound reproduction it is hard to settle for tinny distortion and no bass
― Kraal Disorientation Chamber (emsworth), Thursday, 2 May 2024 04:24 (one month ago) link
maybe this is just my body's way of telling me it is time to get better acquainted with the Supertramp discography
― Kraal Disorientation Chamber (emsworth), Thursday, 2 May 2024 04:26 (one month ago) link
Scrolling through the Mofi artist list on the site there are about a dozen I'm interested in ever hearing again. I don't care if At Folsom Prison sounds like I'm in the cafeteria, I want to hear it once a year, tops. I will take my phone over becoming a Deadhead out of necessity.
― papal hotwife (milo z), Thursday, 2 May 2024 04:44 (one month ago) link
I see hundreds of albums I'd gladly listen to (and this isn't the full catalog):
https://www.discogs.com/label/35095-Mobile-Fidelity-Sound-Lab
― bulb after bulb, Thursday, 2 May 2024 12:51 (one month ago) link
hi please feel free to make fun of me for asking a real question about a real thing in here but idk anywhere/anyone else that might have any clue what i'm talking about...
do ya'll know why (on mostly pre-digital) recordings in the "silence" before the song actually starts, you can still hear the song starting? on some really dynamic recordings (mostly jazz) that go from quiet>LOUD quickly in the middle of the song, you can also get a tiny, nearly inaudible, preview of the impending loud part just a second or two before it hits. what is this phenomenon? it seems like it was (is?) a vinyl thing?
anybody know what i'm talking about?
― interstellar anthropologist+music philosopher, (Austin), Saturday, 11 May 2024 21:38 (one month ago) link
smdh at using "Godstar" instead of something off Dreams Less Sweet, the one they did with Zuccarelli holophonics
― J Edgar Noothgrush (Joan Crawford Loves Chachi), Saturday, 11 May 2024 21:58 (one month ago) link
xpost I think that’s a tape thing
― The SoyBoy West Coast (Whiney G. Weingarten), Saturday, 11 May 2024 22:00 (one month ago) link
yes it's called pre-echo or something, basically bleedthrough, it's a tape thing
― I painted my teeth (sleeve), Saturday, 11 May 2024 22:02 (one month ago) link
yeah, it's the tape head reading the next layer of the tape through the current layer (because tape is coiled around a dowel)
― budo jeru, Saturday, 11 May 2024 22:42 (one month ago) link
or however you'd say that, wound, words are hard
― budo jeru, Saturday, 11 May 2024 22:43 (one month ago) link
okay...excuse my persistence, and ty for the answer, but i'm having a hard time understanding how that tranlates to me being able to hear it on john coltrane recordings when i listen on spotify.
― interstellar anthropologist+music philosopher, (Austin), Saturday, 11 May 2024 22:55 (one month ago) link
the masters everything comes from are tapes right
― Humanitarian Pause (Tracer Hand), Saturday, 11 May 2024 22:58 (one month ago) link
^^
― I painted my teeth (sleeve), Saturday, 11 May 2024 23:09 (one month ago) link
so wait... that "pre-echo" is in the master too? like if i was listening to the actual master tape, it would be there too?
that blows my mind in highly cosmic, existential ways but i'm weird. ty everyone for answering. would love any deepdives into the topic if you know any.
― interstellar anthropologist+music philosopher, (Austin), Saturday, 11 May 2024 23:12 (one month ago) link
weird shit, man
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-echo
― I painted my teeth (sleeve), Saturday, 11 May 2024 23:16 (one month ago) link
https://forums.stevehoffman.tv/threads/pre-echo-present-on-lp.229120/
― I painted my teeth (sleeve), Saturday, 11 May 2024 23:17 (one month ago) link
sleeve according to wikipedia at least preecho refers to digital compression artifacts. the tape phenomenon is “print-through” - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Print-through
― Humanitarian Pause (Tracer Hand), Saturday, 11 May 2024 23:23 (one month ago) link
thank you!
― I painted my teeth (sleeve), Saturday, 11 May 2024 23:25 (one month ago) link
Digital tapes can also be affected by contact print effects in a phenomenon known as "bit-shift" when upper or lower layers of tape cause a middle layer to alter the pulses recorded to represent binary information.
/\freaking me out.
― interstellar anthropologist+music philosopher, (Austin), Saturday, 11 May 2024 23:49 (one month ago) link
^^ one of many reasons why Albini hated DAT iirc #onethread
― I painted my teeth (sleeve), Saturday, 11 May 2024 23:50 (one month ago) link
i am genuinely unsettled by it. in a purely wordless emotional way that i can only compare to the feeling experienced by the phrase "uncanny valley." but it's an entirely different vibe because it's some real ghost in the machine shit.
― interstellar anthropologist+music philosopher, (Austin), Sunday, 12 May 2024 00:04 (one month ago) link
tyvm for those links btw
yeah this is a total rabbit hole
DuPont[3] in conjunction with Otari[4] invented a form of thermal magnetic duplication ("TMD") by which a high-coercivity metal mother master tape was brought into direct contact with a chromium dioxide copy (slave) tape. The coercivity of the mother tape is higher than that of the copy tape, so when the copy tape is heated and brought into contact with the mother tape, the copy tape gets a mirror image of the signal on the mother tape without the mother tape losing its signal. The recording on the mother tape was a mirror image of a valid video signal. Immediately before the copy tape came into contact with the mother tape, a focused laser beam heated it to its Curie point at which its value of coercivity dropped to very low values so that it picked up a near perfect copy of the mother tape as it cooled.[5][6] The mother tape was made using a special reel to reel video tape recorder called a mirror master recorder[7] and was held inside the machine in an endless loop. This system could achieve speeds of up to 300 times playback speed in NTSC VHS SP mode, 900 times in VHS EP mode and 428 times in PAL/SECAM tapes.[8]
― I painted my teeth (sleeve), Sunday, 12 May 2024 00:11 (one month ago) link
DAT tape always struck me as a "worst of both worlds" idea
― Blues Guitar Solo Heatmap (Free Download) (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Sunday, 12 May 2024 00:13 (one month ago) link
DAT was a godsend to concert tapers, so I can't disparage it - it totally had its uses.
― birdistheword, Sunday, 12 May 2024 02:31 (one month ago) link