my band recently recorded with a guy that told me all about the problems audio engineers are having with groups entering the studio with these expectations of having a “huge” sounding record by just compressing and boosting the shit out of everything. interesting stuff, and it’s kind of funny then to record something but not want it to be dismissed as “quiet” or less dynamic because it’s not as balls-compressed as the latest records are.

I have a good ear for musical tones. I had noticed quite a bit of odd sounding music over the years. Just a couple weeks ago, I found a link to a YouTube video about the sound manipulation in order to make it sound louder. The video has a sound graph (sonogram? that doesn’t look right) that ran while the music was being played. It showed the difference in decibels while you listened, so the difference in quality was more than quite striking.

After I watched that video, I said, “So that’s what I have been hearing.” Thanks for more info.

Digital, by comparison, doesn’t have much in the way of signal processing. What you put in is what you get out, in the case of CDs.

Digital is less forgiving, though, and if you don’t take care in mastering your original recording, digital audio will reveal those shortcomings.

In the early days, many albums originally recorded with analog tape were transferred to CD by people who (like just about everyone) were new to the technology. Often, these transfers were poorly done. This is one reason there’s a lot of “remasters” of classic albums cropping up in recent years. People know a lot more about handling digital audio these days, and many early mistakes are being corrected.

A well-mastered CD can be just as amazing-sounding as vinyl, without the inevitable pops and scratches or rumbling. MP3 files are a compressed and degraded version of digital audio, and I liken them to cassettes - cheaper and more portable than CDs, just as cassettes were cheaper and more portable than LPs before CDs came along. Most folks don’t seem to notice (or care about) the difference in sound quality.

One problem, though, with modern CDs, is the tendency to make CDs “louder” by compressing the sound signal. Compare most CDs made in the ’80s with those produced today, and the later CDs will sound louder when played at the same volume settings. In order to achieve what sounds like a louder sound, the sound signal is compressed*, and the “louder” a CD sounds, the more it is compressed, and the more the dynamic range is reduced. What’s more, the compression distorts the sound, in much the same way turning up one’s speakers louder than they can handle will introduce distortion. Some sound engineers are pretty good at minimizing the effects of this distortion, but as the years have gone on, the push has been for louder and louder CDs.

(*This signal compression is a bit different than the signal and data compression that happens as audio is converted to the MP3 format.)

Once this compression is further processed by encoding the CD file to MP3, you can get a pretty crummy-sounding signal, compared to vinyl LPs. But this is not necessarily a fault inherent in the formats themselves - this is a result of trying to push the formats to their limits, to unreasonable extremes.

Right now, you can get an older tablet PC and easily turn it into a comic book reading machine for about $100. The screen size and dimensions are just about the same as the standard comic page, so no scrolling required.

You forgot the most important piece of advice “For those worried about the size of WAVs…”

Don’t worry about it…

It’s the motion of the ocean.

There are at best a half million print comics readers currently. Getting the cost per unit down to something affordable and mass-marketable is going to be a tough thing to do anytime soon.

The trick is going to be making the currently non-comics reading masses to desire the device, and if THAT was easy, they’d already be reading the print comics.

For those worried about the size of WAVs, there’s always the FLAC format, which is lossless and about 1/3 smaller.

A true analog record is sort of like a hand-printed comic; you’re getting a duplicate of the sound as actually created, the vibrations having been picked up by a needle similar to the way the human ear actually works. It’s a much truer copy of the actual sound. A CD or MP3 is like a scanned copy of a printed book.

Interestingly, with comics today much post-production - cleanup, coloring, even all of the inking in many cases - is done digitally to begin with, so we may actually be getting a truer picture of the art in its digital form, rather than printed. Just some food for thought.

OK, man?

Far out.

(But not in the bathtub. Nothing personal, man. Whatever turns you on, dude.)

To me, WAV files sound like the original analog recording — as opposed to the standard MP3 file used for music downloads and for commercial CDs, which, to the discerning ear, will always sound inferior to both. And all MP3 files are not the same. Depending on the MP3 sampling rate used by a given CD producer, two MP3 recordings of the same song can vary greatly in sound quality.

The downside of WAV files is that they are much, much larger than the average MP3 file. For example, a WAV file of, say, the 17-minute LP version of In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida will be about 175 MB, while a “dumbed down” MP3 file of the same song might only be a tenth that size.

So I wouldn’t be too quick to write off digital recordings completely — perhaps just the lower-quality MP3 recordings.

Regarding digital comics, I think as soon as a low-cost player with reasonable screen size hits the market — one that can be viewed anywhere (even in, say, the bathtub) — then I think the widespread acceptance of digital comics will quickly become a reality.

Brian: 10-15 years??? No way! They already have e-paper. I was reading the SkyMall catalog on the way back from London and was tickled to see that you can now buy digital picture frames that project your favorite pictures electronically. They even have one with wifi so you can beam your new favorites into the frame.

The Kindle is the first truly desirable eBook — it won’t be the last.

The first real-time MP3 player software was released in 1995. Napster came along in 1999. The iPod launched in 2001. A lot of that history has already laid the groundwork for what is coming with comics. The only thing holding the evolution back will be content providers and those that hesitate (as the RIAA did) will lose.