and i am ready to stay up late yay
i slept unil 1:30 today which is vvery strange for me. so i am rested up. i went to disneyland yesterday and i enjoyed that
i got my Physics test back. aced it, A+. so that'll help to get my grade to an A. now to keep it there.....
i need a job. i need money too feed my addiction, i mean hobby. cause there are some models i am really wanting right about now. like the LRB 255 and the Scania R with Pendel-X 5 axle and jeep dolly.
damn i need money. i am broke and have little gas money. too bad no one is hiring these days. and its gonna be a long time until this thing is done with. i mean the whole economic crisis. yes. i have little faith in mankind. but that is another story.
well if anyone does read this, which i highly doubt, thank you
goodnight and good luck
2/28/2009
2/14/2009
I'M
GOING TO OREGON STATE!!!!
nuclear engineering.
oh boy
hopefully i get into Berkeley
so now i leave you with this all badassness
nuclear engineering.
oh boy
hopefully i get into Berkeley
so now i leave you with this all badassness
2/10/2009
2/07/2009
the death of high fidelity?
this is an editorial i wrote for the school paper
In the last 100 years, we have seen dramatic leaps in audio technology, from the original wax cylinders of the first phonographs, to the vinyl records that revolutionized music, to the CD and now the MP3. When it comes to storage capacity, the MP3 is at the top of its game, it can hold hundreds of songs in the space that could only fit a tenth of that on a CD. Sound too good to be true? Well that’s probably because it is. What the MP3 makes up for in storage capacity it lacks in overall sound quality, and that is only worsening the overall condition in the music world now.
For those of you who might not know exactly how the MP3 works, here is a crash course. For this purpose, we will be speaking in Kilobits per second (KBits/S), or how much information it can send in a set time. The average song on a CD takes up about 1400 Kbits/s for the best quality. When converting it into MP3, the song goes through what’s called a “lossy compression” that shrinks the file down to about a tenth of its size, the average being around 128 Kbits/s. With this decrease in size, there comes a decrease in quality. The MP3 achieves this by cutting out what it deems, “out of the hearing range” of a normal human, which sometimes can’t be heard, but other times can. It then compresses the file, where audio gets lost in the compression, hence the name, “lossy Compression.”
If you were to listen to one song from its original CD, then to compare it to an MP3 encoded version, the difference would be noticeable. The CD has a full sound while the MP3 is left sounding empty and almost hollow sounding. As Rob Cavallo, a music producer who has worked with such bands as Dave Matthews Band and Fleetwood Mac says, “it's like going to the Louvre and instead of the Mona Lisa there's a 10-megapixel image of it. I always want to listen to music the way the artists wanted me to hear it. I wouldn't look at a Kandinsky painting with sunglasses on." But this might not all be the MP3’s fault.
Today the music industry is locked in heated battle, not to find and sign the next hottest group, but to make everything they produce louder. This quandary has been dubbed “the loudness war,” by the many sound engineers and musicians whos music is being cranked up to the limit.
For the past 10 or so years, the industry has been utilizing a technique called “dynamic range compression,” the same technology that makes some commercials sound louder than the original T.V. program. Simply put, it makes the range between the loudest and softest parts closer together. This makes everything louder, and louder is good, at least for the music industry. However when played at a normal level, the sound is often lost and the original punch that the instruments had before they were compressed has faded away.
In 2006, Bob Dylan told Rolling Stone that modern albums "have sound all over them. There's no definition of nothing, no vocal, no nothing, just like — static." The Artic Monkey’s debut album, “Whatever People Say I am, That’s What I’m Not” is just an all out assault on the ears, with every song cranked to its maximum. Most recently, Metallica’s “Death Magnetic” was one of the loudest albums produced and was compressed to such an extent that there was clear distortion throughout the album. It was so dreadful to listen to, that a group of people started an online petition to remix or re-master the CD, so that it can at least be tolerable.
At first this extreme loudness is appealing to many, but the brain gets tired of listening to the pounding loudness and is becomes fatigued. It can be too much and some feel an urge to change the song, just to stop the abuse. Daniel Levitin, a professor of music and neuroscience at McGill University and author of This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession said, “The excitement in music comes from variation in rhythm, timbre, pitch and loudness. If you hold one of those constant, it can seem monotonous.”
From a musician standpoint, I think that when a song loses its dynamics, its highs and lows, it loses its emotion, and its soul. There is nothing left but the shell of what was a song. With a wide dynamic range, listeners can pick out individual instruments playing and hear their dynamics. Joe Boyd, who produced albums by Richard Thompson and R.E.M.'s Fables of the Reconstruction says, “When people have the courage and the vision to do a record that way, it sets them apart. It sounds warm, it sounds three-dimensional, it sounds different. “
When it comes to high fidelity, there is a format war going on right now, similar to the Blu-ray HD-DVD war that happened a few years ago. SACD and DVDA are currently the two audio formats that show the highest quality of music. The Super Audio CD and the DVD-Audio are both high capacity DVD that have music with high bitrates and sample frequency to obtain the highest standard of music quality. The players that can play these still can play the standard “Red Book” CD and most usually can play DVDs. And now with the invention of hybrid CDs, they can even be played on normal CD players. After listening to an SACD, the answer to why Sony developed this became clear. It was the clearest, most articulate warmest sounding audio format I have listened to, beating out the crummy old MP3 by a long shot.
So, why do we spend so much time on these little files that barely can call themselves songs? Well I know of one reason, convenience. It is very easy to store a lot of music in one place, and it is a lot easier to carry around our iPods instead of the bulky CD players of the past. Now there is a chance for the little MP3, or its affiliates. With the advent of large capacity hard-drives in smaller and smaller profiles, we might see high quality music
Now as a budding audiophile, I wonder, why do we let this devastation of music go on? And if we do, how far will we take it, until there is just sound, no more music or clarity of any kind? Will we just be listening to bass and everything else, a static that we can barely comprehend? From what I have witnessed, it seems as though nobody cares about what’s going on. As an audiophile and a musician, I feel for the bands who have their music cut down by the record companies’ greed to win the Loudness war. I just hope this will end soon.
In the last 100 years, we have seen dramatic leaps in audio technology, from the original wax cylinders of the first phonographs, to the vinyl records that revolutionized music, to the CD and now the MP3. When it comes to storage capacity, the MP3 is at the top of its game, it can hold hundreds of songs in the space that could only fit a tenth of that on a CD. Sound too good to be true? Well that’s probably because it is. What the MP3 makes up for in storage capacity it lacks in overall sound quality, and that is only worsening the overall condition in the music world now.
For those of you who might not know exactly how the MP3 works, here is a crash course. For this purpose, we will be speaking in Kilobits per second (KBits/S), or how much information it can send in a set time. The average song on a CD takes up about 1400 Kbits/s for the best quality. When converting it into MP3, the song goes through what’s called a “lossy compression” that shrinks the file down to about a tenth of its size, the average being around 128 Kbits/s. With this decrease in size, there comes a decrease in quality. The MP3 achieves this by cutting out what it deems, “out of the hearing range” of a normal human, which sometimes can’t be heard, but other times can. It then compresses the file, where audio gets lost in the compression, hence the name, “lossy Compression.”
If you were to listen to one song from its original CD, then to compare it to an MP3 encoded version, the difference would be noticeable. The CD has a full sound while the MP3 is left sounding empty and almost hollow sounding. As Rob Cavallo, a music producer who has worked with such bands as Dave Matthews Band and Fleetwood Mac says, “it's like going to the Louvre and instead of the Mona Lisa there's a 10-megapixel image of it. I always want to listen to music the way the artists wanted me to hear it. I wouldn't look at a Kandinsky painting with sunglasses on." But this might not all be the MP3’s fault.
Today the music industry is locked in heated battle, not to find and sign the next hottest group, but to make everything they produce louder. This quandary has been dubbed “the loudness war,” by the many sound engineers and musicians whos music is being cranked up to the limit.
For the past 10 or so years, the industry has been utilizing a technique called “dynamic range compression,” the same technology that makes some commercials sound louder than the original T.V. program. Simply put, it makes the range between the loudest and softest parts closer together. This makes everything louder, and louder is good, at least for the music industry. However when played at a normal level, the sound is often lost and the original punch that the instruments had before they were compressed has faded away.
In 2006, Bob Dylan told Rolling Stone that modern albums "have sound all over them. There's no definition of nothing, no vocal, no nothing, just like — static." The Artic Monkey’s debut album, “Whatever People Say I am, That’s What I’m Not” is just an all out assault on the ears, with every song cranked to its maximum. Most recently, Metallica’s “Death Magnetic” was one of the loudest albums produced and was compressed to such an extent that there was clear distortion throughout the album. It was so dreadful to listen to, that a group of people started an online petition to remix or re-master the CD, so that it can at least be tolerable.
At first this extreme loudness is appealing to many, but the brain gets tired of listening to the pounding loudness and is becomes fatigued. It can be too much and some feel an urge to change the song, just to stop the abuse. Daniel Levitin, a professor of music and neuroscience at McGill University and author of This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession said, “The excitement in music comes from variation in rhythm, timbre, pitch and loudness. If you hold one of those constant, it can seem monotonous.”
From a musician standpoint, I think that when a song loses its dynamics, its highs and lows, it loses its emotion, and its soul. There is nothing left but the shell of what was a song. With a wide dynamic range, listeners can pick out individual instruments playing and hear their dynamics. Joe Boyd, who produced albums by Richard Thompson and R.E.M.'s Fables of the Reconstruction says, “When people have the courage and the vision to do a record that way, it sets them apart. It sounds warm, it sounds three-dimensional, it sounds different. “
When it comes to high fidelity, there is a format war going on right now, similar to the Blu-ray HD-DVD war that happened a few years ago. SACD and DVDA are currently the two audio formats that show the highest quality of music. The Super Audio CD and the DVD-Audio are both high capacity DVD that have music with high bitrates and sample frequency to obtain the highest standard of music quality. The players that can play these still can play the standard “Red Book” CD and most usually can play DVDs. And now with the invention of hybrid CDs, they can even be played on normal CD players. After listening to an SACD, the answer to why Sony developed this became clear. It was the clearest, most articulate warmest sounding audio format I have listened to, beating out the crummy old MP3 by a long shot.
So, why do we spend so much time on these little files that barely can call themselves songs? Well I know of one reason, convenience. It is very easy to store a lot of music in one place, and it is a lot easier to carry around our iPods instead of the bulky CD players of the past. Now there is a chance for the little MP3, or its affiliates. With the advent of large capacity hard-drives in smaller and smaller profiles, we might see high quality music
Now as a budding audiophile, I wonder, why do we let this devastation of music go on? And if we do, how far will we take it, until there is just sound, no more music or clarity of any kind? Will we just be listening to bass and everything else, a static that we can barely comprehend? From what I have witnessed, it seems as though nobody cares about what’s going on. As an audiophile and a musician, I feel for the bands who have their music cut down by the record companies’ greed to win the Loudness war. I just hope this will end soon.
2/01/2009
well
winter formal was fun, although i was pretty miserable. i had a really bad cold and it music was dangerously loud. i still have a bad case of tinnitus. the music was so loud, that my brain was beginning to shut down. it was really bad. i had to leave to make it stop. then once i realized what was happening, i was doing much better and i tried to fight it off. and it turned out to be a fun night. well now i have lots of homework to do, so i will bid you ado.
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