Michael Fremer rewriting history?

[Alan O]

I hope this is the right forum for this (thanks for the move ) (and that it hasn't already been posted - I couldn't see anything). Anyway, remember the MoFi one-step digital controversy from a few years ago?

Michael Fremer immediately dismissed the digital claims, saying "You can always, always, hear when, if it's a digital source. You can hear it. It's gotten really good now but, you know, analog tape has a quality that you can hear and digital has a quality that you can hear, and you can choose whichever you like." (That's an exact quote, from the source below).

He turned out to be wrong, as we all soon learned. So did he admit his mistake, as we might expect any honest person to do when proven wrong? Nope. In fact, he's dug in and made it worse. It seems he's recently been rewriting history to say it was him who caught out MoFi, trying to take the credit from Mike Esposito who actually uncovered what happened. For your entertainment (and only 8m 47s long)...

 

[Keith_W]

Wow, Fremer can hear digital noise (-120dB SINAD) through the noise floor of vinyl (-70dB). What a remarkable man.

When you reach Fremer levels of self-deception, trying to deceive others probably becomes second nature.

 

[Redacted]

I think he could be saying that it's pretty easy to hear tape hiss, back from the days when tape was used to record music. Easy to confuse but it's nothing to do with so-called "digital noise"

Nah, I'm just being kind - the statement quoted is just not demonstrable in real life ....

And my god has bigger axe than yours.

 

[Alan O]

When you reach Fremer levels of self-deception, trying to deceive others probably becomes second nature.

I remember following it all at the time, and watching that first reaction from Michael Fremer plus Mike Esposito's MoFi interview. After MoFi admitted they'd used a digital step (which was obviously the right way to get the best from the master tape - it was the deceit that was wrong), how did Fremer react next?

He went ballistic... on Esposito. I can't remember exactly what his criticism was, but I was a bit shocked. It made it crystal clear that the only way Fremer could cope with having his self-delusion bubble burst was by attacking the messenger.

It all disappointed me more than anything, because I'd enjoyed listening to Fremer over the years - he's very knowledgable about a lot of the music business, and he could tell a good story. But the other delusion it punctured was mine, that Fremer actually had some integrity.*

(*Strangely, that's happened to me more than once with people who occasionally feature at ASR )

 

[rdenney]

This is not a topic about God. Let's please leave that topic out of this.

It is a topic about a person who thinks he is a god, which is quite a different thing, and sadly not that unusual.

Mr. Fremer is known to go ballistic in the face of incontrovertible evidence of his self-deception. Or duplicity--the phrase "methink he doth protest too much" comes to mind. When he goes ballistic, he's exposing two possible features salient to evaluating his position: 1.) he's unable to express in coherent terms why he is right, or 2.) in his heart of hearts, he knows he is wrong but is incapable of admitting it. Both of those features weigh against him as a journalist.

(Of course, a signal can be no quieter or less distorted than the least quiet and undistorted device in the playback chain. This fact should be self-evident. Fully digital processes are usually marked by a very low noise floor and high levels of linearity, and nearly always something adds noise even if just the ambient noise of the recording space. But a correctly implemented digital step doesn't add noise to an already noisy signal. I wonder how much of what Mr. Fremer listens to went through a digital mixer, even if the master recording was all done in analog.)

Rick "who has been on the receiving end of his over-reaction" Denney