Best Friend Forever Login

Brad on Steve Albini talk
June 9, 2004 at 3:07 pm

That is the Hat of Irreverence

Brad on Steve Albini talk
June 9, 2004 at 8:38 pm

I’m wondering if that’s a magic tax number and if he has points on Nirvana’s In Utero.

Profess on Steve Albini talk
June 10, 2004 at 2:15 am

The “digital recording” sucking really these days is nullified with hi-rez audio being availible to the masses seeing as 96 KHz reproduces more than the ear can hear. The “warm” arguement is more a nostalogia for the actual fallacies of older analog gear, such as the way vinyl as a medium is far from transparent, the effects of tape saturation, the crappiness of tube amps (they have happy 3rd order harmonics but also a ton of harmonics that aren’t controllable that mud up the sound). “Warmth” can be easily recreated and controlled more in the digital realm and applied in the mixing process. Tube amps are fine for guitars when recording since they have a plesant sound and guitars produce a relatively simple waveform but you’re a bloody moron if you use tube preamps drums, bass, and everything else.

Most of analog whoring is nostalogia wishing to make music sound like it “used to”. Growing up I had crappy cassettes when I was really young and then CDs as like my generation is. I like my sound crisp and upfront with all the detail one can ask for and more. Vintage gear is one of the biggest lies in the audio domain. Sure its great to recreate a retro sound now and then but it isn’t the end all like so many analog lovers contest.

I repeat, never ever buy a tube amp for monitors/loudspeakers/whatever speakers especially for home theater when movies often push damn near every frequency during high points with voices, action, music, sound effects as you’ll be losing a lot of detail due to the response time of tubes.

Okay, rant over. I just get annoyed.

jim on Steve Albini talk
June 22, 2004 at 3:05 am

that was cool. so cd’s loose their info over time?

John on Steve Albini talk
July 5, 2007 at 10:54 pm

I do not know anything about recording music. I do have some knowledge of independent music over the last 20 to 25 years or so. I think Steve is really subconciously trying to influence people who are interested in recording to consider the alternative to the “easy” route. If you were to purchase any album from the band Shellac you might see the hard work, dedication, and effort put into that music. It might come off flaky and half hearted but when you really take a closer look, there is more substance and raw artistic integrity sown into the tracks on the record. If you can not see that, then you might want to listen to the whole record a few times and after that, if you still can not see it then you just do not get it!

Jorgen Jergensen on Steve Albini talk
January 30, 2010 at 8:19 pm

I can see the analog being superior to digital up until the 24-bit 96khz DAWs hit the scene. As far as CDs losing information over time, I don’t find that vinyl records hold up any better. While I am not crazy about mp3 and aac, there are now lossless data compression options for storing digial media. All’s I know is when you’ve ripped and converted your CDs to lossless and back them up, you’ve got ‘em forever. Plus, if you have a large collection of “records”, you can actually find what you are looking for — it’s a sorted list that you can search. It can take a lot of time to keep a large collection of physical media organized, and if you don’t keep it up, you spend a lot of time searching…

It’s a bit sad to see Steve Albini beating this dead horse, when the technology has changed so much. I have to wonder if he really is as intelligent as I once thought. He seems more like a stubborn old man these days. His studio, EAR, does in fact have digital capabilities, but he doesn’t even talk about it. Pussy!

Of course, he also has a vested interest in promoting analog. He has one of the last analog recording studios and of course he wants bands to record there instead of DIY with less than $10k worth of equipment that they can use for the rest of their careers and share with their peers. That’s not very punk rock. Let’s face it — the low cost of high quality digital recording rigs has enabled people to DIY and that is punk rawk. He’s become a bit of a pope, and that’s not punk rawk.

I used to really have a lot of respect for Steve, but now he’s just beating a dead horse. Digital is the future of everything, from newspapers to TVs. Your flat screen TV is just a Linux computer — read the legal agreements and you’ll see the open source GNU license. HD radio and HDTV are huge improvements over their analog predecessors. His infamous quote “The future belongs to the analog loyalists. Fuck digital.” is just pathetic and shows his inability to deal with reality.

I think your average Scandinavian death metal band makes better sounding records on ProTools than what comes out of EAR. Yes, they often use MIDI and electronic drums to get super tight double kick action. That’s a good thing! Nothing worse than sloppy double kicks, and having a drummer sweat through 15 takes to get something perfect (while burning through studio time – $$)

I find some of his recordings to be just poor quality — “American Don” sounds very dull and the drums sound awful. People say “The Weirdness” also sounds pretty awful, but I wouldn’t spend a shekel on a Stooges record. There have been plenty of great digital recordings that sound much better than what Steve will ever do.

Considering the superior editing and lower costs, it’s almost a disservice not to offer digital recording to clients. Could you see Steve working with someone like Aphex Twin? Some stuff just doesn’t work well with the “recording a live band” concept. Beyond electronic music, it’s very difficult to record tight, intricate death metal with live, whole-band-at-a-time takes. There are whole genres of music that are simply incompatible with his process and aesthetics.

Jorgen Jergensen on Steve Albini talk
January 30, 2010 at 11:31 pm

As far as reliability — do backups. No media is perfect. Tape can be ruined to, but it’s way harder to backup and it loses quality with each generation. You can backup multitrack hard disk recordings onto DVDs, Blu-Ray data disks or other hard drives. Furthermore, implementing RAID will really make it bulletproof.

There’s a lot more important data stored on computer systems than indie rock recordings. Data centers constantly do backups of critical information systems. Yes, there was a huge failure with the T-mobile sidekick data being lost for all customers, but that’s what happens when you roll with Microsoft. They’re a shit company, I’ll give you that. They ran that data center and I’ve seen countless Microsoft fuck-ups at their conferences back when I was a naive developer using Microsoft technologies.

As for regular consumers, if you were to rip 500 CDs to a hard drive, in lossless quality, it will take up about 160GB. This can be backed up on 20 dual layer DVDs, for a whopping $20 worth of media. Heck, burn a few copies of your entire collection and put one set in a safe deposit box, if that helps you sleep at night. You don’t have to worry about CD’s gradually losing information from scratches. Blu-ray disks have a protective coating, which prevents scratches, so that problem with optical media disks has been ameliorated.

Yes, hard drives crash. Tape can get destroyed, and while it can be restored, it won’t sound as good as it once did.

There’s a huge advantage to storing music as data. A perfect copy can be made of data. This is not true of analog. If he hasn’t figured out how to back up hard drives or doesn’t know about it, that’s kind of sad. But reliability is a bogus claim. Tape decks have so many moving parts that need constant maintenance. He has a cadre of engineers at EAR that fix this and that.

Constant backups have become commonplace even on consumer systems. Every Mac comes with Time Machine, which is both backup and version control for your whole computer. It’s so simple, even Steve Albini could use it. They make a Time Machine hardware device, which is just a wireless hard drive with the server part of the Time Machine software.

It seems his notions about digital are simply outdated, even when he did this lecture. The truth is, he refuses to learn or use a computer for recording. If you go to EAR’s website and look at their digital setup, there is this note:

“Steve doesn’t know how to use any of this stuff, so please don’t ask him to record your band with it.”

Perhaps he should try using a DAW.

The other aspect of reliability is that computers do crash. I remember my first recording computer would crash from time to time, but that was when Cubase VST just came out on the market. Some of his gripes were true back in the 90s. If you have a Mac with ProTools or Logic, you’re on pretty solid ground, especially since Apple has gone with a Unix OS. Darwin/OS X is about as rock solid as it gets, my friends… Tape recorders have lots of moving parts that can break too.

Jorgen Jergensen on Steve Albini talk
January 31, 2010 at 12:10 am

“If you were to purchase any album from the band Shellac you might see the hard work, dedication, and effort put into that music. It might come off flaky and half hearted but when you really take a closer look, there is more substance and raw artistic integrity sown into the tracks on the record.”

Seriously? You’re kidding, right?

At Action Park is a very good record. Terraform is good, but not as great as its predecessor. 1000 hurts is less good. Excellent Italian Greyhound is kind of a piece of crap. If you don’t take my word for it, here’s what the SF Weekly had to say:

“… the new album sounds more thrown together than previous releases. The ten-minute “Genuine Lullabelle,” for example, borders on some of the silliest territory Shellac has covered. Halfway in, the instruments drop out and Albini does his best Sinatra impression, crooning, “Everybody party … party hard” before going into some out-of-nowhere lines about a woman who “really knows her way around the cock.” That’s soon interrupted by a Movie Preview Guy soundalike who says, “Well, what have we got here? A genuine Lullabelle.” “The End of Radio” is another anomaly. It’s Greyhound’s extended opener, and the song features little more than Albini repeatedly screaming “Can you hear me now?” In total, Shellac’s latest release often pushes the limits of what any non-fan would deem listenable”

I kind of feel that Shellac have been resting on their laurels. Sanctimonious Monk has so many followers, they would buy anything that Shellac puts out. A lot of people show up at their gigs. Record sales and live perfomances do slightly increase that $25k a year he makes ;-)

I find more hard work and dedication even on Kansas records than anything ‘monious has put out. I think quite the opposite is true — Shellac isn’t really about composing excellent music. If you want that, check out Thinking Plague, which sounds much more like hard work, dedication, and effort to me.

Jorgen Jergensen on Steve Albini talk
January 31, 2010 at 1:22 am

Wow… Check this out:

http://www1.chicagoreader.com/hitsville/pander.html

Basically, Sanctimonious Monk called a few journalists who tried to be “alternative experts”, fake corporate whores who know nothing. It was some attempt at being the überknob of the alternative scene. I always had a huge problem with how Steve would knock Smashing Pumpkins, but say Nirvana is so great. I really don’t care for either band and find them both to be corporate. It’s tweedledum vs. tweedledee to me.

It seems par for the course with his $25k salary and all that. He’s a phony who needs to dictate what is “alernative” (based on who is giving him money) and what is not.

I remember from his board, he says that Shudder to Think is an awful band. Really? He thinks Shellac is better than Shudder to Think?

I have a huge problem with his mob boss attitude and bullying people into accepting him as an indie aficionado. It’s just a desperate attempt to control a music scene and monopolize it so he’s the one that rubber stamps who is “alternative” and who is not.

After I read that exchange, I got a whole new perspective on this douche-box. He’s really a piece of work…

John Miner on Steve Albini talk
June 3, 2010 at 10:23 pm

Steve is correct. There really is no argument about the potential bottom line of analog recordings. Given apples to apples, analog is superior without question.

The problem with other posters here defending digital, is simply the fact they are not listening to analog on a proper system. You NEED a high quality stylus, preferable a moving coil, and you need a tube amp that has been properly maintained, where the vacuum tubes are working correctly, and the circuits have been tested for proper voltages. Then you need speakers that are going to work with what you have. Bass guitar is always going to sound better when played through a 15 inch woofer. To reproduce this sound in a home system, you need a 15 inch sub in your cabinet. Most people don’t have these kind of speakers, but if you are actually serious about the quality of your sound reproduction, then you would be wise to get the kind of gear that will reproduce sound as it was intended.

Most people, especially the younger ipod generation have been brainwashed into believing that a proper presentation of music is through ear pods. This is false.

Digital sound reproduction is a sample of analog, therefore it cannot surpass it. NEVER.

The reason things have gone digital are for convenience reasons only, NOT QUALITY.

If you favor digital as a listener, you simply have not heard music before on a proper analog system. You are forgiven. However, do yourself a favor, and DO listen, then you will understand.

The analog vs digital debate is not about nostalgia, it is about the physics of sound, and those physics have not changed in the last 10,000 years.

Steve is correct.