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Topic: Pink Floyd Engineer Alan Parsons Rips Audiophiles, YouTube and Jonas B (Read 5301 times) previous topic - next topic
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Pink Floyd Engineer Alan Parsons Rips Audiophiles, YouTube and Jonas B

Got it from slashdot.

"Famed 'Dark Side of the Moon' engineer Alan Parsons, who also worked on the Beatles 'Abbey Road,' says audiophiles spend too much money on equipment and ignore room acoustics. He also is surprised the music industry has not addressed the artists' rights violations taking place on YouTube, wonders why surround-sound mixes for albums never took off, and calls the Jonas Brothers 'garbage' all in one interview."

http://www.cepro.com/story/alanparsons.html

Pink Floyd Engineer Alan Parsons Rips Audiophiles, YouTube and Jonas B

Reply #1 –
Though he might be a bit harsh on MP3, and I question the necessity of high-res formats for consumers, I pretty much agree with everything he said. It's always refreshing to see a notable audio professional with a good head on his shoulders.

Pink Floyd Engineer Alan Parsons Rips Audiophiles, YouTube and Jonas B

Reply #2 –
I didn't hear him even hint that the Jonas brothers were garbage.
Interesting article, though.

Pink Floyd Engineer Alan Parsons Rips Audiophiles, YouTube and Jonas B

Reply #3 –
Yeah, this summary was copy-pasted from Slashdot (who also likely copy+pasted it from somewhere else), and I think it's a little sensationalist, he doesn't really talk mess about the Jonas Brothers.

Parsons sounds like a levelheaded guy. About high-res formats, he said:

Quote
Engineers will always go for the highest-quality format available. I don’t think consumer enjoyment values suffer much if we have to use slightly lower-quality delivery formats.


Seems very reasonable to me. He doesn't state exactly what the "highest-quality format" is, but he goes on a few sentences later to directly attack lossy compression like what's on YouTube. For all we know, he could be thinking about 16/44 FLAC files as "high resolution", and lossless downloads are sorely missing from every major online download service. So there's definitely some quality gains to be had in the digital download arena.

And he's right, from a purely theoretical standpoint as a recording engineer, you'd want to have the highest resolution for your studio work and your digital masters. Even if you can't hear the difference between the 96 kHz original and a 44 kHz resample, I don't see any reason why a studio wouldn't use high-res audio, if it's available, cheap, and easy to implement.

Personally, I wouldn't mind 24/96 lossless digital downloads. I'd probably just downsample them after downloading. But at this point, we're stuck with lossy downloads across the board...

Pink Floyd Engineer Alan Parsons Rips Audiophiles, YouTube and Jonas B

Reply #4 –
Does anybody know what are the the nearfield monitors (in the photo from the article)?

Pink Floyd Engineer Alan Parsons Rips Audiophiles, YouTube and Jonas B

Reply #5 –
Quote from: derty2 on
Does anybody know what are the the nearfield monitors (in the photo from the article)?


The side profile reminds me of  Genelecs, but the two-level front doesn't look familiar.

Pink Floyd Engineer Alan Parsons Rips Audiophiles, YouTube and Jonas B

Reply #6 –
Quote from: slks on
lossy compression like what's on YouTube


Well at the risk of having TOS#8 roasting my ham: if there's one place you would send someone who wonders what compression artifacts really can sound like ...

(I have never actually uploaded anything to YouTube, but I suppose the usual mode would be (1) grab an mp3 and some moving picture material, (2) edit together a video, with at least one transcoding in this step, (3) uploading to YouTube which transcodes it again.)

Pink Floyd Engineer Alan Parsons Rips Audiophiles, YouTube and Jonas B

Reply #7 –
I enjoy listening to my Alan Parsons Project "I Robot" audio DVD. 

Too bad HDAD hasn't became more popular.
EZ CD Audio Converter
 

Pink Floyd Engineer Alan Parsons Rips Audiophiles, YouTube and Jonas B

Reply #8 –
Quote from: Porcus on
Quote from: slks on
lossy compression like what's on YouTube


Well at the risk of having TOS#8 roasting my ham: if there's one place you would send someone who wonders what compression artifacts really can sound like ...

(I have never actually uploaded anything to YouTube, but I suppose the usual mode would be (1) grab an mp3 and some moving picture material, (2) edit together a video, with at least one transcoding in this step, (3) uploading to YouTube which transcodes it again.)

I'm surprised that it took so long for something like SoundCloud to really take off (or for me to find about it!). To me Youtube quality can be OK 360p and up, but what bothers me most is is not the sound, but the blatant use of "Lord Privy Seal" on every damn song that youtube uploaders edit.