Bob Olhsson wrote on Sun, 27 February 2005 13:19 |
J.J. wrote on Sun, 27 February 2005 01:28 | ...You mastering guys need to put your foot down to the A&R idiots and tone deaf musicians who think that louder = better....
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It's really not OUR call! Probably the best thing any of us can do is to return smashed CDs to the artist's management company and demand an undistorted copy of the CD. The only thing they know is that too low a level can hurt how a CD goes over in sales and focus group meetings which is their source of paranoia. If they get the message that too high is not acceptable to the fans, they'll do something about it. NOBODY ELSE in the food chain has the power to turn it down.
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I agree totally. The whole chain is driven completely by money and profit - and only when THESE factors are percieved to be threatened will things change. The main problem now is that the user has no real choice - if they want to hear music they have to put up with what is manufactured - both artistically and technically. Sure CDs are starting to be returned to the stores (or not purchased in the first place), but what replaces them if nothing else is available? And with every passing day our ability to hear what we want, or even manufacture what we would like to hear ourselves and distribute to others, is being steadily eroded.
As ever the madness is being generated by control - as does all such madness at all socialogical scales - when the desire to make profit transcends the product itself and the desire to retain control transcends what is good for the people within society that are supposed to be supported by the regime, they are encouraged to believe they themselves have chosen. And IMHO control is always accomplished the same way - i.e. by taking what is natural and required in the human condition that was always there before and 'graciously' offering it back again in 'sanitised' form - with strings attached, in the form of forced compliance with granted permissions(!) paradoxically made palatable and legitimised within the mass opinion by installed (and often virtual) notions of fiscal prosperity, unpredented choice, security and apparent freedom!
The very economic ethos that fuels the advances that lead to such unprecedented technical facilty and artistic potential, by dint of it's own very selfish motivations, ends up devaluing the end results to the point where it all starts to become essentially worthless. And we wake up to the fact that we had more freedom, more art and a better human condition - before such advances were ever thought possible - before the ethos itself became more important than the human condition it was apparently there to foster and support. The sad irony therefore is that by the time you can carry around an entire music collection in a box in your shirt pocket, there's nothing worth down loading onto it. It's so very sad - and I don't know the answer to it - it's the natural result of an ethos that encourages and rewards human being's desire to scramble to the 'top of the pile'
Of course the answer the regime is applying (which IMVHO we are suffering now in our art) is obviously and predictably to simply restrict your choices in order to maintain the economic ethos at all costs - whilst hiding this agenda by providing an ever increasing 'choice' that spans an ever decreasing diversity - the limits of which are decided soley on potential fiscal gain.
I.e. you have all the choice in the world, but it's all the same - so you actually have no choice at all!!