The Beatles again
Sun Sep 20, 2009 18:56 (UTC -5)The Beatles’ entire catalog was reissued on CD on September 9. Each track has been remastered, supposedly to make it sound better in digital formats (and, no doubt, to keep up with the loudness war). I’d been looking forward to the release for months. It coincided with the release of The Beatles: Rock Band, which is probably what more people were looking forward to. As for me, meh.
Anyway, I was anxious to hear the new albums since whoever did this remastering job supposedly spent four years teasing out an unprecedented amount of detail from the original tapes. As it happened, one of my roommates bought Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and Abbey Road the weekend after the remasters came out. He let me have a listen.
First, a disclaimer. The following comparisons are meaningless. I listened to the new discs through headphones, while I usually listen to lossy copies of the 1987 CDs through speakers.
I didn’t notice a new level of detail at all. Also, the new mixes are very faithful to the older ones. The only real difference is that they sound somewhat louder and possibly a little punchier, but not distractingly so. I’m (possibly) known among my friends as the crazy guy who can discern compression artifacts. My overall conclusion is that if I can’t notice a real difference, then nobody else will.
But come on, some of you can tell a low-quality MP3 from a high-quality one, right? I can’t be the only one.
Sgt. Pepper and Abbey Road are among The Beatles’ later albums, so maybe that accounts for the sound quality not being very much improved. (In fact, Dolby noise reduction was used on Abbey Road, prompting George Harrison to decry the sound of the album as too harsh. Also, I know too much about The Beatles.) If I had to guess optimistically, I would say that the earlier albums should sound proportionately clearer. But I don’t know.
On Abbey Road, I did notice that some anomalies were fixed. Most notably, in “I Want You (She’s So Heavy),” the distortion on the microphone during John Lennon’s “Yeeeeaaaah” has been (mostly) removed, with only a faint patch of background noise to suggest it was there. I’m a bit disappointed about that. Everyone knows that if you sing loud enough to cause distortion, you’re doing it right.
I’m looking forward to hearing the other albums, especially the White Album because the original CD version wasn’t very well done. Also, the first four albums are finally available in stereo, and I’m interested in finding out what they did about the few songs that only exist in mono.
The packaging for the albums is also kind of interesting. They’ve done away with jewel cases in favor of cardboard sleeve-like cases. In keeping with standard CD case dimensions, this leaves a little extra space on the left side of the front cover. They stuck The Beatles’ and Apple‘s logos there, which is kind of lame. Imagine if The Beatles had to put their (second) logo on every album cover back in the day. The impact of Sgt. Pepper, the White Album, and Abbey Road just wouldn’t be the same. If I were in a band, I’d make sure we wouldn’t have a logo. It’s too limiting.
As it happens, I did get to see The Beatles: Rock Band in action yesterday at my friend George’s apartment. I didn’t feel like playing, but I got to see other people play some songs. My first impression was that The Beatles looked kind of creepy as video game characters. My next impression was that having people “play” the song made the listening especially enjoyable (well, it was either that or the layer of reverb added to some of the songs).
One thing really confused me. On “Come Together,” the singer is supposed to say “Shoot me” where John Lennon does the “shh…”/clapping thing. I couldn’t believe it. I’ve heard people claim that John was saying “Shoot me,” but I’ve always wondered what they were smoking. Is that in Lewisohn? He wasn’t right all the time.
There’s a “sh,” a clap, and that’s it. No vocalization is audible. And, as I recall, in the liner notes for Love, Beatles producer George Martin states that John made the sound by clapping his hands and breathing into the microphone, or something like that.
The Beatles: Rock Band might get me to play Rock Band, but it’s still kind of a weird idea.
A really trippy video: 8-Bit Trip. Do not watch under the influence of drugs. (Via waxy.org)
The Wall Street Journal asks: How Long Does It Take an Athlete to Make 100 Grand? The answers may depress you. (Via J-Walk Blog)
Filed under Computers, In the News, Music, Musings and Observations, Stuff
8 comments
#1 by Joshua: Sat Oct 03, 2009 01:50 (UTC -5)
Pearl Jam is releasing, maybe one per year, remixes of its albums. Much more recent, yes, but a 1991 album with Rick Parashar at the helm vs. a 2009 album with Brendan O’Brien at the helm is a huge difference. I adore the new mix of Ten. In addition to clarifying and de-murkifying the album, O’Brien (who produced many of the later albums) made the album fit in a lot better with its descendants. He tossed some of the more annoying things on the album (for an anarok such as I, that is) and was able to bring startling things out of the tapes. During the solo of Evenflow, a story about a homeless man, Vedder is now clearly heard to mumble (in-character) “You have a dollar? Can you spare some change? God bless you, God bless you.” Wow. I had no idea.
Some stuff I was sure O’Brien would fix, such as bringing forward the acoustic guitar on Alive he didn’t. So far it’s even harder to find it, but the only DtoA I have right now is on my laptop.
But come on, some of you can tell a low-quality MP3 from a high-quality one, right? I can’t be the only one.
Yes. And everyone thinks I’m crazy. I had actually ripped 350 CDs at a high-quality MP3, then tried to listen to some of my more complex music. The Stephen Hough performance of Scharwenka’s Piano Concerto 11 showed quantization problems: after a big hit of a complex chord, the decay would stair-step. What the hell? On some Dream Theater recordings, there was distortion where there shouldn’t have been.
Friends say that I’m crazy, because CDs are themselves lossy. So I’ll take them to a frequency generator. I’ll play 60-cycle. “That’s what a fluorescent light sound like, right?” If they don’t agree, the rest is kind of pointless. I play them a 440 A. That wave is “a musical note”. Then I take them up to 2k and 3k squeals, but not for long, as they are obnoxious. Then I play them 22k.
“Here that?” I ask.
“Hear what?” they say.
“Precisely. That’s 22kHz. It’s frequencies above this pitch that you can’t hear that are lost by CD sampling.”
I do a similar thing with accents. I’ll be watching a movie and will say out loud, “That person’s not American.”
People will say, “Sure s/he is, that’s just an interesting voice.”
“No,” I say. “Her accent is wrong.” And no one else can hear it. I can’t imitate accents — at all — and I’m pretty crappy telling some certain British accents apart from some other British Accents — but I absolutely know it when I hear it.
#2 by Jordon Kalilich: Sat Oct 03, 2009 18:24 (UTC -5)
Good point about CDs, but any digital audio is lossy if you want to think about it that way. Is analog audio lossy as well? Matter is discrete, but are electromagnetic waves?
I had a similar accent moment recently, sort of. My friend was showing me the web site of a UK-based accent coach, and the site had some audio samples of his work. His standard US accent was convincing, except that he pronounced “during” as “door-ing” rather than “durr-ing,” which is how I (who actually have the accent) say it. Maybe both pronunciations are acceptable, but that was a giveaway for me (beside the fact that I already knew he was faking it).
#3 by Joshua: Sat Oct 03, 2009 19:55 (UTC -5)
Good point about CDs, but any digital audio is lossy if you want to think about it that way.
Of course it is. But native CD audio is at 44.1kHz. If done properly, it can, with a good D2A, reproduce frequencies up to 22,050Hz. That’s really high. Think about doing a FFT on an analog audio stream: CD encoding is essentially a low-pass filter for frequencies under 22kHz, which are notes squarely in the “who gives a shit?” range. This doesn’t throw out much information, which is why the files are so big. MP3s want to be small, so their filtering is more aggressive. How high can you hear? Well, certainly not to 22kHz! Play with “beep”. Start at 10k:
beep -f 10000I’m assuming reasonable fidelity with the Piezo speaker (I believe this is founded). If you have yours routed to a sound card, even better. So go do so, I’ll wait. :-)
I drop out about 16kHz. But notice how quiet it gets up there? The last “loud” note is 12kHz. So I’d be cool with their throwing out everything past 12kHz.
But, if I remember the spec correctly, they are not only doing more aggressive filtering, into ranges I can hear clearly, they are also doing “psychoacoustic” stuff that people aren’t supposed to be able to hear. One thing that it seems is happening is that they are quantizing volumes (this is another way that all digital audio is lossy, but CDs are much higher fidelity). And the problem is, I can hear a lot of this. So, apparently, can you. So, yeah. FLAC, son. :-)
#4 by Jordon Kalilich: Sat Oct 03, 2009 21:15 (UTC -5)
I actually installed beep just for this, but then I remembered that I’ve disabled support in my kernel for the… whatever part makes the beeps. They would come up at the worst times, like when my roommate was sleeping.
Anyway, I generated some tones in Audacity. 16 kHz is still pretty loud for me. 17 kHz is quieter. For 18 and 19 kHz, I need to turn the volume way up. I think by the time I got to 20 kHz, it was not only too high, but it was also too much for the 44.1 kHz sample rate. I heard what seemed to be a lower-pitched but still high-pitched tone. Some sort of artifact?
For giggles, I changed the sample rate to 96 kHz and tried the 20 kHz tone again. I don’t think my sound card could take it because my speakers produced a lower (but still high) tone quite clearly.
When I listened to the remastered Sgt. Pepper, I was horrified to discover that I had missed the 15 kHz tone at the end. Then I opened up Audacity and realized that its amplitude is pretty low; I just wasn’t playing it loud enough.
#5 by Joshua: Sat Oct 03, 2009 22:04 (UTC -5)
I actually installed beep just for this
I think it was another discussion with me, wasn’t it? :-)
16 kHz is still pretty loud for me. 17 kHz is quieter. For 18 and 19 kHz, I need to turn the volume way up.
Enjoyz it while you’ve gotz it. My ears are only a decade older than yours, and I’ve been hella protective with them. Can you hear the squeal of a CRT with no image?
I think by the time I got to 20 kHz, it was not only too high, but it was also too much for the 44.1 kHz sample rate.
I don’t follow. What’s running at 44.1? And even if something were, why would it matter? 20 is not an even divisor of 44.1. A pure 22.05 tone could theoretically be sampled at the bottom of the wave each time — or really anywhere in between — but you’re getting samples all over the wave of a 20 kHz tone.
I may be misunderstanding something, either what you’re saying or what the science is.
#6 by Joshua: Sat Oct 03, 2009 22:09 (UTC -5)
disabled support in my kernel for the… whatever part makes the beeps
It’s a little piezoelectric speaker wired to the MB. What distro? Ubuntu, right? Re-enable it in the kernel, then use the volume control in your GUI to mute it. Or if you like the beep for, up,
beep, for instance, and only hate it for those (*Y@#($*Y keyboard “errors”, put a line in your .bashrc to disable it for terminal sessions. I can look it up, but so can you. :-)#7 by Joshua: Sat Oct 03, 2009 22:16 (UTC -5)
only hate it for those (*Y@#($*Y keyboard “errors”
The best for muting it seems like your .inputrc, actually, but it looks like Firefox (as one example, and maybe there are more) uses the system beep as well. Also, I don’t know if adding the line in .inputrc would keep
beepfrom working. So, if there is an easy answer, I don’t know it. What I do: mute it all the time, except when I want to use “beep”. :-)#8 by Jordon Kalilich: Sat Oct 03, 2009 23:23 (UTC -5)
Yeah, I can hear the sound of a TV turning on, if that’s what you mean. A computer, too, I guess, although I haven’t had a CRT monitor in a while.
I was using the default sample rate of 44.1 kHz when generating tones in Audacity. As for the rest of what I said, I don’t really know what I’m talking about.
Also, I pretty much never want to hear the beep, ever. Actually, now that I think about it, I shut it off because it started sounding as my computer booted, which was particularly annoying.