yeah, here it is
https://audiosciencereview.com/foru...e-is-the-ai-audio-upscaler.30175/post-1146941

 

Sorry for necroposting, but I got two questions which I probably should've adressed to the speaker, but since you posted it I will just ask it for the sake of discussion..

First, how does it look from a perspective of psychoacoustics? What if clipping crackling is being percieved by audience as... a part of music? Audio-engineers are training their hearing so that they can hear what most of people can't. But why are they doing that? Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought that the only real mission of audio-engineer (if we forget for a moment that pathetic story about "art") is a participation in the consumer economy.

Music can make great money only when there is enough traffic. How do you get traffic? And do not answer simply "by doing good music", screw it! Everyone has his own definition of "good"! There should be some tricks from the field of applied psychoacoustics...

You are probably getting what I'm trying to say, so just the last thing: why have nobody from the audience EVER mentioned "clipping problems" in that RHCP album? RHCP is just a bad music by me, pretty popular though, but how fans NEVER were disappointed or somehow frustrated?

Listen, YOU CAN'T TEACH MASSES WHAT IS GOOD, you can possibly teach one person at a time, if you got enough patience and motivation. You can teach them, but people want to consume, and they want to consume what they think is good for them. And it is the only way for an audio-engineer who is considering himself being effective to do what is expected from them

 

Until you learn a profession, you as a layman may have a conviction to think that that task is easy or unnecessary. So many professional work focusing on details is unrecognisable by the masses but that doesn't mean they should not focus on those nuisances.

 

Yeah-yeah, whatever, sure. Neither of us are laymen now, since we're discussing it. So I'll ask again: why bother if the audience seem to be not caring, and even enjoying it?

If this truly respectable developer (which youtube video I was adressing to) would try to research the psychoacoustic field, he may have not been bothering with these highly sophisticated and yet doubtful procedures of "de-mastering" or whatever. Also, he says in the video that he "stopped listening to modern music" and "returned to classic rock", naming Queen. Although Queen isn't "classic" and isn't "rock" (new-wave at the most). So he just decided to replace modern pop-music with... old pop-music. What a nice way to think about it! One can think that he listens not to music (nor does he care for it), but to clipping and distortion. That's what is giving him the pleasure of listening! Truly an audiophile method

p.s. imagine if electric guitar pioneers such as les paul or any surf musicians were trying to "de-distort" metal guitars, arguing about their cleanness fullness etc. ))

 

Are you sure that the audience is one solid mass with the same abilities, taste, critical thoughts, sensibility, mental state etc.
Unfortunately, for most people the shitty quality that even the most expensive BT headphones can produce is enough. Which is not even mp3 that is not even CD, that is not even LP...
So, why bother mastering music over the compressed BT quality if the "audience" doesn't give a crap for the difference?
Now, you should understand what's the problem with your argument.

 

In nature, and in live music with human voice and acoustic instruments specifically (take classical for example) there is no compression, limiting, gain maximizing, etc. One does not have to teach anybody anything about what is natural and what is in accordance with laws of physic. So resorting to restoring something to its natural state does not need any further rationale.

 

But we ain't in nature. We're in a digital enviroment, with its rules, "ifs" and "thens"... And who said that they are actually restoring anything? They're making it look like it was restored. How one can know if something is damaged if it's the only way he ever heard it?

No, I clearly do not understand. Look, did you really listen to what this guy was saying? He said that distortion is bad implying that it is an art instrument, and only he knows where is correct to use it (in "hard-rock" genres, according to him).

Have you heard what examples he has been using? If we're talking here about people who listen to classical music, or other non-trivial genres (hence an experienced listeners who tend to think over music, which is a kind of mental work tbh), then why has he showed us some shitty pop-music that is playing on the radio, in the supermarkets and at the barber's? Is there really any problem with real music? Or we're again trying to teach masses how to "do it properly"?

 

Last edited: Sep 4, 2023

Everything that was simply recorded - before any DSP applied - might be called 'natural' - in a sense that it is an attempt to get a 'true copy' (as much as possible) of an acoustical event. Those people restored (reverse engineered) what was distorted by DSP manipulation - clipping and compression in this case - to get closer to a 'true copy' of an acoustical event. It was restoring of the initial state of sound par excellence.

 

Last edited by a moderator: Sep 4, 2023