@Stan_Halen, I’m really sorry if that came across the wrong way. That last thing wasn’t directed at you in any way shape or form. You were never one to insist that great tools (such as an amazingly tuned room) won’t help a guy get the job done easier. That was coming from a lot of people over time, but not you.
I realize that was harsh. I apologize…and I’ll think that through better. I just could hardly believe it when someone said “yes!! I hear a difference and its sounds amazing!”…so many people have gone on and on for years about how the differences are only in our imaginations, and finally someone acknowledged that this stuff is real.
Man. I’m sorry. First of all, I know I can’t take back what I said, but that came across wrong after years of just being frustrated with this stuff. I’ll make an effort to be more considerate in the future.
Its not. One of the best things about this group has always been that people were honest. What I wrote was disrespectful though, and I apologize.
Look, I never had anything against that. And I don’t now. What was infuriating to me was people who actually get a chance to sit in a perfectly tuned room like that, with talent like some of these nationally known engineers, and then leave there going 'meh…his gear doesn’t matter. A converter is a converter, and (he) ‘insert name here’ probably can’t even tell the difference between his own converters, so therefore it’s not real and its all in his head. I felt this was incredibly disingenuous and disrespectful to the people who spent their lives perfecting their craft, and learning to use their tools in a way that really worked for them. I have really got to learn to brush that off, and its immature of me to let it annoy me like it does at times.
I understand. I can’t take back what I said, though I wish I could. And I regret letting my frustration get the better of me here.
CPF, I ~do~ agree with you on that first part. I always have. I think I was reading a lot of people wrong on the second part. I realize this hearing Eric’s @redworks thoughts.
Your post was kinda shitty, but I wasn’t going to say anything because I know I could mix pretty well in a vacuum chamber, and nothing you could say about spending as much on gear as NASA does on a vacuum chamber was gonna change my mind.
I do agree that this attack on expensive gear and the people that work them is mainstream counterculture bullshit if the people critical don’t have any solid reason. I’m not saying there aren’t reasons, but some people just bitch to bitch. People seem happier bitching than being content. We don’t have to get in a circle and see who has the bigger audio boner. Just do the best you can on the budget you got, and fuck the naysayers. Jonathan, do you have a website for your studio? Could you direct me to it?
I don’t think it matters if people can own it or not. I assure you, I have no intention of buying a pair of speakers like that myself. The awareness of what they’re capable of, and your knowledge of what speakers/amps/rooms like that can bring to the table at the mastering level shape and refine the process of how you use your own gear, and ultimately how you mix. A good example is hearing problems in my own mixes on a system like that, made me instantly aware of low end imaging problems I didn’t even know existed, but that I will be super careful to watch out for in the future. Or knowing that I have a tendency to overscoop at 250 and 400, because my room right now is far from perfect. That’s all stuff that you can learn and grow from by listening on a system like that. Look, there’s no other way to develop an awareness of this. You can say ‘scoop less at 250 and 400’, but until I actually HEARD FOR MYSELF WHY, I didn’t truly understand the problem.
I don’t think that’s any different for older people. Instead of saying younger/older, it seems to me that are simply people who have found a way to develop a true frame of reference for this and those that haven’t. This is not to shame people that haven’t…but the value of having exposure to those high end systems is just so priceless!
I’m not obvious to the fact there’s an ~overemphasis~ on tools. And I think some of the push back against tools in this community was indeed warranted. I just pissed a lot of people off by failing to acknowledge that many people on here probably have a very healthy balanced understanding of the two.
I don’t think this could have possibly been better stated.
Really the heart of the problems is that no one can agree on the definition of a solid reason. I think attacking Diamond Quest for marketing a $13,500 HDMI cable is a solid reason. I think Wes Lachot or John Storyk handing out a quote for $300 pr square foot on a studio project buildout is perfectly reasonable under necessary circumstances. So There’s an argument to be had over necessity vs benefit. I won’t condemn either side, as long as neither is at an extreme.
Your favorite web design company TechBear is work on it.
Thanks Jonathan. To be fair, I did give you some grief on some related topics over the last few years. Like doing a shootout of multiple iterations of 1176 hardware clones and whatnot. I always tried to make it a good-natured poking fun at high end gear, not from the standpoint that it’s not worthwhile, but that as the digital revolution has given us affordable alternatives … that it’s just fine for many of us to go that (affordable) direction if it suits us. I personally really enjoyed Brandon’s ball-buster approach to challenging the big boys and audiophiles on the marketing hype around high end gear. Not that that gear is a bad thing or useless, but simply that the average audio engineer might never get that opportunity to experience it, and it’s like dangling champagne taste to someone with a beer budget (which may be the majority of members of this forum, as well as RR).
While Brandon’s ranting could be quite dramatic, in it I found a realism and a discernment to question the marketing claims and audiophile boasts. Concepts like “confirmation bias” have been extremely helpful. Blind A/B shootouts, etc. I haven’t seen anybody do that like Brandon did it, and I give him immense credit for taking on the ‘system’ and his courage for speaking the truth. After all that had panned out, what I gleaned from all that is that high end gear might at most offer a 5-10% increase in performance or accuracy, sometimes at 5-10x the price! That makes the ROI unreasonable for many people these days, and has empowered the digital revolution benefactors. That doesn’t mean someone is bad or wrong for going that direction: just that it’s a choice if they’re able to afford it, if they think it’s worth it, if their customers will pay for it, and if the overall business decision makes sense for them.
Believe me, when I look to the past I definitely appreciate how all that gear (and rooms) made great recordings. It’s all they knew! It’s all they had. It’s been an evolution. Those consoles, those tape machines, those hardware compressors/EQ’s/processors - it’s all fantastic stuff! The million dollar studios. Fantastic! That’s what made so many of my favorite artists from the 70’s and 80’s and their songs popular was the great sound they created.
Things changed. The digital revolution turned much of that on its head. Then you hear guys on forums talking about packing their home studio rooms with Roxul to tune it acoustically. Of really good studios created for maybe a few thousand dollars. It creates this divide between what “used to be” (and to some degree “still is”), and this new ‘virtual’ reality of doing nearly the same thing at a grassroots level yet with very high quality. I tell you it’s a revolution. That’s why it’s so controversial. Hearing about high end gear vs affordable gear reminds us of Marie Antoinette (supposedly) saying “Let them eat cake.” It invokes the economic inequality that appears in many other realms of society.
To elaborate, I had an experience a few months ago with high end gear. It was kind of bizarre, frankly. I’m not going to go into a lot of detail because it was a private individual, but I was shown an acoustically tuned room in a house, with incredibly expensive gear that I had never even HEARD of before, and speakers/monitors I had never even imagined before. The owner spoke with me at length and seemed impressed with my knowledge … then placed a $10,000 stereo Blumlein microphone in my hands to examine. SHIT!!! What if drop the thing? I wasn’t worried, was quite calm and competent, but just the thought of it blew my fucking mind.
I did a lot of mental processing on that afterward. The first thing that came to mind was Brandon’s myth-busting. Was a $10k mic really THAT much better than one that cost a few hundred or even a thousand dollars? When the studio owner first talked about high quality microphones to me, I said “Oh, you mean Neumann?” He guffawed in near disgust at the thought. To him that was ‘cheap’ gear. Not even worth his consideration. I was blown away.
For some time, I thought that experience was very cool, yet very surreal and not anything that most of us could get our heads around. Ironically, he recorded at 96k with his hardware. This too I thought was extravagant, but it certainly took me out of my comfort zone enough to ask the question “Is that worth it?” Within a few weeks I saw a video Warren Huart had posted saying 96k would soon become the new recording standard … and I thought “damn, I just saw another guy who said that”. It seemed like a revelation. I even created a thread about it here based on Warren’s video.
I know you have felt lonely at times. I give you kudos for persevering in the face of opposition. Your embellishments felt foolish at times, in light of what many here have to work with. Even resentment from one member (who is no longer present). You might even qualify for “Defender of the Faith” from Her Majesty the Queen someday. You’re pushing the envelope Jonathan, at least from our point of view. I have always found you to be helpful and encouraging, and took your attempts to enlighten and educate us as that high school or college teacher that made you think and work for the grade even though you’d rather sail through the course with an easy time.
That’s a misquote, but luckily I don’t think anyone on here is as bad off as the people were prior to the French Revolution. The reason the French Revolution happened was because the mothers couldn’t feed their kids. Mama’s got pissed and they destroyed that monarchy. The U.S. government just shut down again, so whoop dee fuckin’ do.
WE AAAAAARRREEEE!!! DEFENDERS OF THE FAITH!!!
The guy’s knowledgeable for sure, but I wouldn’t give him that much credit over the rest of us. Then again, I hate authority.
He’s felt lonely? I cry myself to sleep at night with only my Hairball Rev D for comfort.
I don’t think I can add anything that hasn’t already been said. Johnny just needs to be kept in check once in a while, even though his intentions are as innocent as a kitten cuddling with its mother on a rainbow bridge of love and prosperity. Reading Jonathan’s posts reminds me of getting shot up the ass with a double-barrel pleasure machine gun.
Heck man…I’m still kind of processing the experience from last Thursday. And from the week before in the mixing room at Gat3 studios.
So it seems that people agree there’s a difference. Right? So the REAL question is really how much difference justifies the exponential price hike. And each persons perception of cost to value is based on so many things that are subjective to their preferences and relative to their business/client/cashflow circumstances. So who is anyone to really call anyone out or judge someone else assessment of gear worth? Ya know? So unless someone is totally getting sold a ‘moon rock dildo’ as CPF says, then I realized I need to do a better job at just let things go and stop trying to convince the whole damn world that my views on this are ideal.
Justifies for the buyer? Or justifies the manufacturer having the exponential price?
For me the prices come down to what I can afford (money wise) to the balance of what I can’t afford (wasting time to come out with the same sound after excess hours of tweaking to get just what I want.) Working on my own works I can spend as much time as I want… it is effectively free for myself if I don’t have a deadline. (I’m learning so that time is experimental anyway.) Wasting time working on someone else’s project may get me fired.
I was referring to the buyer. But that is a really good point. The manufacture can justify ad nauseum, but ultimately the buyer has to justify it for themselves, or there won’t be a sale!
Same here really. And even for the things you can afford, there’s still valid reasons to pass. Say you don’t have room or space. Say its just not a tool you’d use. Apart from not really ‘needing’ it, maybe you don’t have time to fully learn it *like me and the NI Maschine…or the some of the new synth software programs. I’m a pretty accomplished keyboard player, but I’m already up to my neck in software I haven’t even scratched the surface of.
Yes, it all depends on perspective. For instance, a certain scientific instrument here on Earth might have a certain cost point and specifications, but if you were to sell it to NASA to launch into outer space, all of a sudden it has to meet certain criteria for temperature, G-force, cosmic rays, zero gravity, and a buttload of other stuff it never would have to on Earth. So then the contractor must manufacture a bionic version of their regular product and the price may be 10x what it was on Earth because of the increased testing, redundancy, and extreme tolerances it will be exposed to. If you can justify a certain cost, then it must be worth it to you for some reason. But it may not be for someone else.
Hell, @holster, you should award @StylesBitchley a golden ears award for finally making that observation.
I’m still waiting in nervous anticipation, and will wear ear muffs to protect myself, even in Florida. It would be my Flava-Flav thing.
My knowledge is superficial. I do not see the electrons flowing through the wire, caressing each solder joint with a light touch of gratitude until the next component arrives on the river-like flow, building, building, building, in a poetic crescendo only to be reborn as a pulsating wave of pleasure causing the ballet to begin in your aural canal.
You’re pushing the envelope Jonathan, at least from our point of view. I have always found you to be helpful and encouraging, and took your attempts to enlighten and educate us as that high school or college teacher that made you think and work for the grade even though you’d rather sail through the course with an easy time.