Dubious Drewski

At the risk of derailing the thread, I feel like asking: What artists have their music recorded/engineered to such a fine calibre anyway? I'm not being facetious, I'm honestly asking. Off the top of my head, I can imagine that recordings from Andrew Bird or Joanna Newsom would have that level of fidelity. Are there any other obvious ones? I suppose modern recordings of classical music would fit the bill too.

I ask this not because I care about bitrates (As long as they're >= 256k, they're fantastic in my opinion), but because I would love to know who out there makes music with such attention to detail.

Husky McDump

damn i learned a lot in just a 2 page thread.

__________________
not everyone can make it to the pros,
some rise to the top, others down low.

Husky McDump

also, a question to all of those who are familiar with this topic; would having your audio EQ set to various different settings make any difference in the overall "quality"? Like are there higher frequencies/lower frequencies that sound clearer at a higher kb/s quality with different eq settings? I konw most people rock "flat" because its the best overall representation of the music being recorded.

Just wonderinnnnnn

__________________
not everyone can make it to the pros,
some rise to the top, others down low.

Dubious Drewski

That's a fantastic question. I'm not an audio engineer, so don't take my word for it, but I would imagine that applying an EQ to an audio recording would have VERY similar side effects to applying curves adjustments to an image (Image editing is something that I am very familiar with).

Any given audio recording has a limited amount of fidelity to work with(Especially lossy-compressed audio), and bumping up the EQ might make noticeable some of the once-subtle compression artifacts.

If you're not careful when applying a curves(or levels) adjustment to an image, you can get something called colour banding. This is where you can start to see the steps of colour in your image - they're annoying visible bands of colour change in any areas with smooth gradients, like a sky. (I was going to post the wikipedia article for you, but I'm not yet allowed to post links. Gah!)

There's no reason audio data should behave much differently when manipulated in the same way. Now, I'm not saying that using an EQ would noticeably reduce listening quality, but in pure theory, it should have an effect that can be detected.

s_k

There's so many beautiful recordings nowadays. There's too many to name them all. Some examples would be The Raconteurs Consolers of the Lonely, Villagers' Becoming a Jackal is definitely a beautiful one, tool recordings are legend, Calexico has some very nice recordings Iron and Wines recording of "Free untill they cut me down" is very very beautiful too... There's so many bands that really put some effort in their recordings. But there's two ways of doing this. There's the 'jack johnson way'. Sounds good on most affordable rigs, but at some point the rig will show you the weaknesses of the album. And then there's the bands whose records only shine on rigs that actually are able to deliver that kind of quality.
I should add that I still play the music when the sound quality sucks. Sometimes I equalize recordings and re-record them to make them listenable. Really awful sounding recors are for example the Last Shadow Puppets' Age of the Understatement and the Nationals' High Violet. Brilliant albums, nevertheless.
An album I think has been recorded like that on purpose, but still sounds ****ty, is The Soundcarriers' Celeste. It's so compressed. It's awful. It seems as though this has been done to create a certain effect, but it almost stopped me from buying the record. I did in the end and it's brilliant, but I can't listen to it everyday. It's so pushy.

As I said, a lot of artists. It's a question of taste too.
There's always been this discussion on classical records.
The two main 'audiophile' classical labels are DGG and Erato. I love Erato, but a lot of people prefer DGG. Neverending thing, that

__________________
Click here to see my collection

s_k

Well there are some recordings that lack in lower frequencies or have far too many high frequencies. You may want to alter that using an EQ, but EQ's mess with your sound too. So it's best only to resort to those when the recording is really inaudible.
As far as compression goes: You can't really improve compressed music with an EQ. That information is just 'gone'. It's like cutting holes in a piece of paper with text on it. You can paste bits of paper on it to cover the holes, but you won't get your text back.

After you've compressed an image, you're not going to get rid of the JPG Artifacts by applying curve adjustments. Same story

__________________
Click here to see my collection

Dubious Drewski

Thanks, S_K. You've been damned helpful.

I also wanted to thank you for Calexico. How did I go this long without knowing about them? This is fantastic music. Fantastic music.

Thank you.

s_k

Really? What did I do?

Haha, I remember hearing the first chords of sunken waltz back in the spring of 2005. We were building our house then. Everything was a mess, but I had music. I heard those chords, the beautiful waltz rhythm of this song and I thought 'please please let it stay this way'. And it did. And I thought 'how have I lived without this band for all those years?'.
It is brilliant .

If you look for any albums, I have everything. The Circo soundtrack is hard to get. I bought it from their site myself. Should you want something, please send me a PM

__________________
Click here to see my collection