Why isn't there more of a focus on the things that matter to music quality?

[bachatero]

Something that's been REALLY bugging me is how there has been a focus (not recently but always) on tiny little details that nearly don't matter. For example, just look at cables, MQA, effect plugins for mixing and mastering, better-than-audible SINAD, you get the idea.

Meanwhile, "nobody" is paying any attention to the factors that make music good, like a memorable rhythm and beat and melody and harmony, interesting lyric writing, flat response (speakers), Harman response (headphones), low distortion, smooth directivity, good mixing, and most importantly of all, skill.

What's curious is how the things "nobody" is paying attention to also happen to be hard problems. You need to be a good musician to make good music and a good engineer to make good technical products. Is that really all there is to this situation?

 

[threni]

memorable rhythm and beat and melody and harmony, interesting lyric writing

They don't write tunes like they did in the old days, huh!

 

[bachatero]

They don't write tunes like they did in the old days, huh!

This has always been an issue, not just now.

 

[IPunchCholla]

This has always been an issue, not just now.

Good point. People really need to get over “music that was made popular when I came of age” equaling good music.

There is more good music being produced now than ever before. And it is easier to find than ever before. Is popular music crap? Yes it is. It always has been (except maybe for brief moments here and there) popular music isn’t meant to be good. It is meant to be an easily engaged, easily danceable, community bonding on the shallowest level type of song. Something a trubidor could play and everyone in the bar already knew. It’s mostly ritual to the lowest common denominator.

You know the solution for that? Find music that you like and listen to it without regard for if other people like it.

 

[BeeKay]

Meanwhile, "nobody" is paying any attention to the factors that make music good, like a memorable rhythm and beat and melody and harmony,

AI will be fixing that soon. No need to wait for real persons to produce something more acceptable.

 

[Philbo King]

It's because poorly written / arranged / performed music can't be fixed by buying a gadget...

 

[SuicideSquid]

Something that's been REALLY bugging me is how there has been a focus (not recently but always) on tiny little details that nearly don't matter. For example, just look at cables, MQA, effect plugins for mixing and mastering, better-than-audible SINAD, you get the idea.

Meanwhile, "nobody" is paying any attention to the factors that make music good, like a memorable rhythm and beat and melody and harmony, interesting lyric writing, flat response (speakers), Harman response (headphones), low distortion, smooth directivity, good mixing, and most importantly of all, skill.

What's curious is how the things "nobody" is paying attention to also happen to be hard problems. You need to be a good musician to make good music and a good engineer to make good technical products. Is that really all there is to this situation?

These are completely separate issues. This is like saying "Why do people care about their TV image, they should care about the content of films".

How to make a good playback device, how to make a good content storage system, and how to make good content are completely independent problems. "Which speakers sound good?" and "What album do I want to listen to?" are likewise totally independent questions.

If one wants to focus specifically on how to build a good audio system for playback, yes, you're correct, nonsense like speaker cables doesn't matter. You won't find focus on that stuff around here. The question of what compression VST the mastering engineer used is completely irrelevant to determining how to build a good playback system, but it's very important to doing a good job of mastering an album if you're a mastering engineer.

 

[SuicideSquid]

It's because poorly written / arranged / performed music can't be fixed by buying a gadget...

No one has ever asserted that it could.

 

[fatoldgit]

Meanwhile, "nobody" is paying any attention to the factors that make music good, like a memorable rhythm and beat and melody and harmony, interesting lyric writing

So I was exclusively a Blues Head ** from 1970 - 2000 (basically every musical trend since the 60's has passed me by!!!!) and started my audiophile journey in 1980.

I never had any pretensions that my Blues albums were going to be well recorded (very uneven quality overall) but wanted to extract the best sound from whatever I spun.

I had always like Count Basie (Jump Blues Bands are in the same mold) so in 2000 I got some stereo Count Basie albums plus some others from the big names like Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins, John Coltrane etc.

This really started me on a journey of discovery and the interesting thing is the sound quality of stereo Jazz recordings (can't stand mono in general ****) is consistently very high. To the point that I would listen to artists that weren't (at least initially) my cup of tea purely to luxuriate in the stunning sound.

Jazz is any interesting (easy?) genre to mine given the fluid nature of lineups. Take any headline artists album and backing them up are an equally amazing set of artists...so you then start to follow the backing artists and find they have become leaders and then you start looking their backing artists and .....

The bonus is now after collecting 2500 Jazz albums, none have any lyrics aside from my Billie Holiday ones. Lack of lyrics (as I discovered) suits my mental state/inner workings.

I guess my point is, no need to look at the current state of music offerings...there most probably are a mountain of genres that you have yet to discover that have well recorded music of an historical nature or historical genres that are ancillary to whatever you currently like that are ripe for the mining.

So no need to lament today's musical landscape... get in your time machine (streaming makes that easy) and go searching.


Peter

** And no, Hendrix, Grateful Dead, early Stones, Led Zep, Allman Brothers etc are not Blues.

**** I do have a reasonable number of mono recordings that I spin cause they are historically significant but I do generally restrict my Jazz collection to stereo albums from 1957 - 1969. I find Jazz after 1969 went all fusion (jazz rock, jazz polka etc) so like to stay in the big band and bop veins.

I have never stopped collecting Blues albums, so have modern artists in that genre, but it's thinning out as I find the really young ones in their 20's are too rock orientated....too Hendrix like.

 

[ahofer]

One of the issues is getting yourself exposed to the new music being made. As described in The Long Tail, music is divided into so many genres, and there are thousands of independent acts self-publishing. So there's a lot of good stuff buried in mounds of indifferent stuff in every genre. The search costs have increased.

I've gotten a bit better at using forums and such to figure out who is well-regarded within certain genres, but it's time consuming.

And, honestly, many doing interesting musical things aren't paying too much attention to their recording methods...

 

[EERecordist]

On ASR there are many discussions and suggestions of great recordings. It can't be measured with an Audio Precision instrument.

A long time ago I recorded a top level classical music school student solo cello concert. The audience was moved, it was very emotional. When we got it back to review the recording, the pitch was all over the place. I don't have pitch, but certainly the audience understood it.

As to measuring subjective quality, you might look the music genome project and hit science research. That software extracted patterns from music and compared them to new data.

Based on the above, pattern matching, and friends of friends liking "quality that matters" are the basis of all streaming platform personalized suggestions.

If you are really curious I would look into psychology research on individual music aesthetics and the book This is Your Brain on Music. I would also suggest asking musican friends which specific recording of a specific composition they like, or discussions like that on social media. The musicians I know can spout that endlessly.

 

[DVDdoug]

Meanwhile, "nobody" is paying any attention to the factors that make music good, like a memorable rhythm and beat and melody and harmony, interesting lyric writing...
...good mixing, and most importantly of all, skill.

Sometimes we discuss those things but the forum is mostly about the science of sound reproduction rather than the art of music production.

flat response (speakers), Harman response (headphones), low distortion, smooth directivity.

That's included in the science of reproduction and we talk about that everyday!

 

[kyuu]

Like anyone, I have (and will probably always will have) a soft spot for the music from my "coming of age" period. However, unlike many, I haven't formed the myopic attitude that everything that has come after is meritless dreck. One antidote for that attitude is just to realize that your parents had the same attitude for the music you liked and remember how many times you rolled your eyes.

If you can't find any modern music you like, it's not because "nobody makes good music anymore". It's because you have fallen into the usual trap in your own mind, or because you aren't looking the right place. There's more music being made now than ever before, even ignoring AI-generated garbage, and there certainly is a lot of that is damned good. Perhaps better, even, than the stuff from your youth, if you can manage to take off the nostalgia-glasses.

Not to say that there aren't any problematic trends in music production (*cough*loudness wars*cough*).

And as the self-harming ocean critter said above, the music being made really has nothing to do with discussions of the equipment used for playback systems. We here can control what equipment and software we use to try to reproduce recordings well. We have no control over the actual recordings themselves, short of getting into writing, performing, and/or recording music ourselves. Even here there certainly are plenty of discussions about music production, though of course that's not the focus of this forum.

 

[kemmler3D]

Meanwhile, "nobody" is paying any attention to the factors that make music good, like a memorable rhythm and beat and melody and harmony, interesting lyric writing,

These are music topics, this is an audio forum, the difference between a painting and a tube of paint...

flat response (speakers), Harman response (headphones), low distortion, smooth directivity, good mixing, and most importantly of all, skill.

As others have said, I think a lot of the industry resorts to "bikeshedding" because the obstacles to real quality improvements are either really difficult, or already solved.

What's easier - show up one day and improve on voice-coil based speakers which are a 100-year-old technology? Or: Put an additional chip in the box to make SNR go up a little more?

By the same token for people who commentate on these things - the ACTUAL problems with sound quality are much more complicated and harder to understand than things that seem superficially problematic.

"Electromagnetic interference" intuitively sounds bad. Understanding why it's not usually a problem is not intuitive. "Cheap capacitors" sounds bad, understanding why that's not a problem but the spacing between the drivers is a problem is very unintuitive.

So why "nobody" is talking about the real issues... it's because most of the easy-to-understand problems are solved and neither the audience or the commentators really understand the unintuitive problems.

 

[obsessive9119]

I talk about (what I consider to be) good music all the time; just not (much) on gear forums.

 

[Chris A]

...What's curious is how the things "nobody" is paying attention to also happen to be hard problems. You need to be a good musician to make good music and a good engineer to make good technical products. Is that really all there is to this situation?

I believe this is a "system view" that, as you have noticed, is typically lost. Should forums focus on the end-to-end problem? I always thought they should (and some actually try to). That's how I've personally approached the domains of knowledge that make up home hi-fi audio, generally:

a) the music reproduction part (a "segment")
b) the recorded music part (another segment--identifying good recordings, spread over several music genres and periods of time of compositions)
c) the listening space part (room acoustics--often one of the most important segments)
d) ear training (the formal subject taught in music school, probably the most neglected segment--training the ear to hear more)

I've found that none of these are easy. Each requires its own set of skills and required expertise. So I've spent time learning each domain, and in some cases, that means decades. Why? Because I wanted to be effective wherever I needed to be in the entire domain to achieve a truly effective home listening experience.

The forum is typically focused on the elements which together form "segment a", with many only comfortable with smaller pieces of this segment. Others tend to follow their noses around more than one segment. Few seem to show up to learn in all of them. Some even try to limit themselves (and others) to narrower portions of segments. I've always ignored those limits.

Chris

 

[Chris A]

Something that's been REALLY bugging me is how there has been a focus (not recently but always) on tiny little details that nearly don't matter.

People apparently like to talk about subjects that they believe they understand/feel comfortable with, and avoid those subjects that are much more important but opaque to them.

I believe that it is actually a lack of useful knowledge that fuels "audiophilia" today. It's no wonder why so many threads on hi-fi cables and spiked loudspeaker feet exist--people just don't know where to begin. They're searching for what can help their sound reproduction experience, and they're finding answers in really odd places.

To that end of resolving that issue, I've been compiling a book--tentatively titled "21st century hi-fi audio"--which is focused on the high-value Pareto elements that actually make a real difference in sound quality. So far, the book touches on each segment that I enumerated above. Much more work is needed to complete all the sections of the book, but the basic structure has been formed--and the most difficult-to-generate subject areas drafted.

Some of this was inspired by what's not in the most common and widely read books related to home hi-fi audio, as well as...well let's say...the more casual writing attempts at "getting better sound", which I find filled with problematic advice--the type of advice on hi-fi audio easily found in AIs today.

Chris

 

[Robin L]

Something that's been REALLY bugging me is how there has been a focus (not recently but always) on tiny little details that nearly don't matter. For example, just look at cables, MQA, effect plugins for mixing and mastering, better-than-audible SINAD, you get the idea.

Meanwhile, "nobody" is paying any attention to the factors that make music good, like a memorable rhythm and beat and melody and harmony, interesting lyric writing, flat response (speakers), Harman response (headphones), low distortion, smooth directivity, good mixing, and most importantly of all, skill.

What's curious is how the things "nobody" is paying attention to also happen to be hard problems. You need to be a good musician to make good music and a good engineer to make good technical products. Is that really all there is to this situation?

I feel like this is a bit like the "Argument Clinic" sketch of Monty Python - "I'm sorry, this is abuse".

Audio Science Review, as far as I can tell, is about audio in the context of what can be measured and how those measurements apply to what can be heard. While there are music subforums here, many applying to specific genres, the primary focus of ASR is measurements of audio gear and how those measurements relate to what can be heard. Those issues relating to quality of music are going to be subjective, they really can't be measured. Some kinds of music use techniques that are antithetical to the requirements of others. What is considered essential to the performance of classical music does not apply in any way to the requirements of Punk or a lot of other comparatively simple musical forms. So, the music fora will focus on the kinds of music the followers of that genre enjoy. What people will find in "memorable rhythm and beat and melody and harmony, interesting lyric writing" has nothing at all to do with the limits of what is audible or what can actually be measured. And "flat response (speakers), Harman response (headphones), low distortion, smooth directivity" doesn't have anything at all to do with musicianship. There are plenty of lo-fi recordings of Classical music and Jazz, Bluegrass, etc., that display fantastic musicianship. And there's lots of Hi-Fi crap. The two concepts are not co-joined.

 

[MattHooper]

I feel like this is a bit like the "Argument Clinic" sketch of Monty Python - "I'm sorry, this is abuse".

Audio Science Review, as far as I can tell, is about audio in the context of what can be measured and how those measurements apply to what can be heard. While there are music subforums here, many applying to specific genres, the primary focus of ASR is measurements of audio gear and how those measurements relate to what can be heard. Those issues relating to quality of music are going to be subjective, they really can't be measured. Some kinds of music use techniques that are antithetical to the requirements of others. What is considered essential to the performance of classical music does not apply in any way to the requirements of Punk or a lot of other comparatively simple musical forms. So, the music fora will focus on the kinds of music the followers of that genre enjoy. What people will find in "memorable rhythm and beat and melody and harmony, interesting lyric writing" has nothing at all to do with the limits of what is audible or what can actually be measured. And "flat response (speakers), Harman response (headphones), low distortion, smooth directivity" doesn't have anything at all to do with musicianship. There are plenty of lo-fi recordings of Classical music and Jazz, Bluegrass, etc., that display fantastic musicianship. And there's lots of Hi-Fi crap. The two concepts are not co-joined.

Will put Robin!

(I just felt like Batman for a moment there..)