Did Cocaine really make records sound over bright with Treble?

[mhardy6647]

Fleetwood Mac plus way too much cocaine (even by their standards) = Tusk.

Dunno about 'brightness' (of the treble kind, as opposed to the intelligence kind ), but I think it's safe to say that cocaine correlated strongly with, e.g., these two abominations from roughly the same era:

and

I think it's safe to assume that the late Ms Neutron-Bomb Newton-John was casualty as opposed to causality.

 

[jae]

It is well documented in medicine that acute stimulant exposure can blunt hearing temporarily. It usually more or less reverts to "normal" after a few hours/days if the SPL dose was not high, but there is no telling what low-level unmeasurable damage may exist from just a single or infrequent use. One of the implications of this is that people may turn up the volume to compensate for these temporary losses when under their influence and not even realise it. In general your body already has mechanisms to blunt your hearing/tolerance for sound (fatigue), so when both are combined such as in long listening or studio environment, that inadvertent constant increase of volume or add gain to the blunted frequencies also subjects the person to higher SPL levels and thus even more potential for long term damage.

Chronic stimulant use has been found to result hearing loss greater than that of the general population/non users. They even tested populations that regularly use stimulants but aren't exposed to loud noise, such as the nomadic populations in north Africa and found they still had significant levels of loss as well. Because of the proposed mechanisms by which stimulants damage the body in (neuronal damage, neurotransmitter depletion and receptor supersensitivity), this type of hearing loss whether temporary or permanent will always be biased towards high frequency. Even small amounts of caffeine is well known to contribute or exacerbate to many otic and vestibular conditions through other mechanisms, and can broadly affect all frequencies, both high and low.

 

[Robin L]

"A line of cocaine makes you feel like a new man.
And that new man wants another line of coke."

Derek Taylor

 

[MRC01]

...
Is there any real merritt to this? Or was it just the "Sound of the Age" kind of thing?
Really curious about this.

The observation is certainly true: most rock/pop recordings are very bright sounding. But the reasoning is implausible. This brightness isn't limited to that time era. And I don't think they were all on coke, even if it affects hearing like that (which I doubt).
One plausible explanation is that they (or the bands they were recording) had hearing damage from too much loud music and had to crank the treble way up just to hear it.

 

[Prana Ferox]

"A line of cocaine makes you feel like a new man.
And that new man wants another line of coke."

Derek Taylor

 

[Rufus T. Firefly]

I loved the 80's

 

[OWC]

As if everyone in de 80s (and 70s) was on cocaine?

I like watching Fran, but when it comes down to acoustics and some other kind of things (particularly certain scientific subjects), I like to skip the videos.
Without any decent research it's ALL guessing and I find the cocaine argument one of the least plausible.

Listening fatigue as well as loudspeaker positioning, overly attenuated tweeters and many many more things.
Even be able to market your music better, because it sounds "better" and more "detailed" is also a very good reason.
Keep in mind that you master and mix for what users are using in sense of audio gear.
Something the majority of people seem to forget (here).

It could be as well as being lack of other frequencies as well, which gives the impression of things being overly bright.

edit: Sultans of Swing by the Dire Straits was released 1978/1979.
That's definitely not a song that is overly bright.
Same for Dark Side of the Moon by Pink Floyd, 1973

Both are actually very neutral sounding and of high quality, especially for that time.

 

[Ron Texas]

Maybe she was high on coke.

 

[DonDish]

I read an interesting piece on cocaine as a driver for greed and reckless investments on wall street. When we go into recession, blame the cokeheads Anything is possible I guess!

 

[Rufus T. Firefly]

In the 80's cocaine was Gods way telling you "you have too much money".

Now it's NFT's.

 

[DMill]