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I've realized per my recent Pandora mix that I listen to either instrumentals or acapella than I do regular arrangements. Sometimes of the same song.

Autotuned garbage pop music on the building speakers. Do people actually like listening to that kind of noise or is it an elaborate put-on?

Haken - Visions (2011)

Prog metal very much in the vein of Dream Theater. I hear a bit of Porcupine Tree influence too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QyPmxaZVFOo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AST8rFjPIp4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D_NVVWhfiRw

Mudcrutch - Depot Street (1975)

just people sleeping

I was just listening to the radio in the car. Mostly 90s hits and newer stuff. Radio stations really don't seem to give a damn about audio quality these days. When the car was stopped, I could very clearly hear compression artifacts. It sounded like they were playing 96kb/s MP3s from 1998.

When the audio quality bottleneck is the source file and not the FM transmission itself, you know they're doing something very wrong.

Yeah, compression artifacts are a pet peeve of mine too. Like nails on chalkboard. Newer codecs (and even MP3 with a modern implememtation like LAME) are pretty clean even at moderate bitrates; early MP3 encoders generally sucked at any bitrate.

@Captain Ned - You might want to check Haken out. I know you're generally not into the prog metal stuff, but I think they may have enough classic/symphonic prog influences for them to be of interest to you.

Their debut album Aquarius (2010) is probably a good starting point: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gKkycq9Suok

I'm just discovering this band myself these past few days, on the recommendation of a co-worker.

(Sorry derFunk, back on prog for now... but I'm definitely gonna be listening to more Joe Bonamassa in the coming weeks, and will post my impressions about that too... his debut album and the Rock Candy Funk Party stuff definitely got my attention!)

Been getting really into Magma - Gojira. This album really sets the mood for autumn. The band's sound I would place on the spectrum between Leviathan era Mastodon and Korn

Had me a little confused there, I initially thought you meant an album named "Gojira" by the band Magma!

just brew it! wrote:

Yeah, compression artifacts are a pet peeve of mine too. Like nails on chalkboard. Newer codecs (and even MP3 with a modern implememtation like LAME) are pretty clean even at moderate bitrates; early MP3 encoders generally sucked at any bitrate.

Yup. I still have a few MP3 CDs that I made back in 1999-2000. Mostly 128 kb/s. At the time they sounded OK, but since then I've been spoiled by CDs, FLAC, and various high resolution formats. Even the ~290 kb/s VBR AAC files from iTunes sound great. In comparison, those old MP3 files sound so gritty and metallic that you'd think they were 22KHz encodes.

jackbomb wrote:

Yup. I still have a few MP3 CDs that I made back in 1999-2000. Mostly 128 kb/s. At the time they sounded OK, but since then I've been spoiled by CDs, FLAC, and various high resolution formats.

I came at it from the other direction -- I had been listening to CDs for over a decade, and vinyl for even longer than that. Early MP3 encoders never sounded "OK" to me.

just brew it! wrote:

(Sorry derFunk, back on prog for now... but I'm definitely gonna be listening to more Joe Bonamassa in the coming weeks, and will post my impressions about that too... his debut album and the Rock Candy Funk Party stuff definitely got my attention!)

You can't fight who you are!

Annie Haslam - If I Loved You

just brew it! wrote:

jackbomb wrote:

Yup. I still have a few MP3 CDs that I made back in 1999-2000. Mostly 128 kb/s. At the time they sounded OK, but since then I've been spoiled by CDs, FLAC, and various high resolution formats.

I came at it from the other direction -- I had been listening to CDs for over a decade, and vinyl for even longer than that. Early MP3 encoders never sounded "OK" to me.

I mainly listened to cassettes before I got my first CD burner sometime in the late 90s. MP3s certainly had a different sound, which I remember liking back then. There was a lot more treble. It wasn't the cleanest sounding treble obviously, but it made my tapes sound boring and dull in comparison.

Cassettes... heh... yes, I did copy a lot of my LPs and CDs to cassette, for listening in the car since I did not have a CD player in the car back in those days. I had a pretty high quality component deck to make the copies on though, and used high bias media. That went a long way towards mitigating the treble roll-off issue. On the recording side, a decent deck, properly used with quality media, could give you essentially flat response over the entire audio range. On the playback side, you had to make sure the heads were properly aligned (misaligned playback heads were also a common cause of poor treble response).

You also needed to pay attention to Dolby NR (or lack thereof). Playing back a Dolby coded tape on a non-Dolby player would result in overly bright treble, while playing back a non-Dolby tape on a player with Dolby enabled would result in a very muffled sound. Dolby NR also tended to exacerbate any treble rolloff caused by sub-standard media, incorrect (too "hot") recording levels, or misaligned heads.

So yeah... cassettes could sound really good, but you had to work at it.

Ahh, the "joys" of analog...

I had a lot of success with high-end "metal" tapes and good recording equipment. Less bright than MP3s, certainly, but better-sounding overall.

The main problem that I ran into, forcing me into digital formats, was the sound degradation over time. Re-writing the same tape for the 3rd time because it had been played-out is the opposite of fun.

Linkin Park's A thousand Suns songs. RIP Chester

Rufus Wainwright - Shadows

Vhalidictes wrote:

The main problem that I ran into, forcing me into digital formats, was the sound degradation over time. Re-writing the same tape for the 3rd time because it had been played-out is the opposite of fun.

That seriously takes the fun out of a mixtape. The nice thing about burning CDs is that you can do it faster than real-time. High-speed dubbing of cassettes was always sounded far worse than real-time dubs.

Busted out the Trans Siberian Orchestra today. I'm in a group that's going to play Christmas in Sarajevo at a few different events in December. I don't mind being second fiddle guitar or even third fiddle in that one. The guys doing the heavy lifting on that song are outstanding players and I always liked playing "jug jigga-jigga jug jigga jigga" stuff anyway. Rhythm is my soul.

Santa Esmeralda - Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood/Esmeralda Suite, from the Kill Bill soundtrack. Love this track. Used to dance to it with my infant son when he weighed under 15 lbs. Now he's much larger, but he still instantly recognizes the song and still wants daddy to pick him up and whirl him around like I'm a human carnival ride. Which I can do, but nowadays I need to lie down on the floor and catch my breath afterward.

derFunkenstein wrote:

Busted out the Trans Siberian Orchestra today. I'm in a group that's going to play Christmas in Sarajevo at a few different events in December. I don't mind being second fiddle guitar or even third fiddle in that one. The guys doing the heavy lifting on that song are outstanding players and I always liked playing "jug jigga-jigga jug jigga jigga" stuff anyway. Rhythm is my soul.

Many pluses. Good stuff.

Anything that Tilian sings on. His solo stuff is largely pop(ish?), but this guy's voice blows me away.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LVnl-_I_5Xo

https://youtu.be/7m630xvAJtA

^^^Title song for the bluegrass/folk group "I'm With Her"'s first album, due out in February. The Captain will be interested to know that Sarah Jarosz is one third of the group.

Back to old Weird Al classics. Current song: 'She Drives Like Crazy'
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VcM9Uou77j4

Shakatak - City Rhythm

I'm in a conference call where someone got another call and put the conference call on hold. So we're listening to on-hold music and the guy saying "thanks for holding".

Judas Priest - Sin After Sin \m/

Meshuggah - Destroy Erase Improve (1995)

An insane mash-up of extreme metal (complete with screamed vocals), placid interludes, and whacked out jazzy chromatic legato guitar solos (in the vein of Allan Holdsworth). Fantastically crazy stuff.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8FR3bnCbOY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HjMUMkhnNPo

Nickel Creek:
https://youtu.be/jFycqnOpifQ

I never thought I'd enjoy modern bluegrass as much as I do.

Sade - The Sweetest Taboo

bthylafh wrote:

Nickel Creek:
https://youtu.be/jFycqnOpifQ

I never thought I'd enjoy modern bluegrass as much as I do.

Same, came to that conclusion years ago. Was more or less dumped into it and was taken aback.

And yeah, f.ck yeah, that was great. Some lines from Rest of My Life were just damned perfect:

"I'm turning myself into / something a little less promising / a little more useful"

and:

"the battle is over / we lost but we'll live to call off the war / don't that ceiling look high from the floor?"

Sometimes the writer in me is just like, "Damn you! That's too good."

wrt Americana/bluegrass: he's been gone for 3+ years now but this track feels as alive to me now as it ever did: Brown Bird - Fingers to the Bone. Not at all complicated, and I've linked it here before, but it just touches me. I've always been drawn to these religious/religiose/gospel pieces and this persists even into my kinda-antireligious present.

wrt my synthwave status: the dive continues, but haven't sorted the listened backlog enough to link highlights yet. Next post.