Hey Friend,

I was thinking about the examples I suggested yesterday that demonstrate using sound effects in music to help set the mood. Well, not exactly the songs, but the quality of the audio.

Anything we watch on Youtube and much of the recorded material we hear has been compressed so much that many of the tiny nuances making a recording spectacular are usually squashed out of existence. I wonder if hearing the music in its pre-compressed recorded state would have a different or stronger effect on mood.

If you're scratching your head on this, like "what the heck is he talking about," let me clarify...

Back in ancient times, when vinyl records were the standard (you know, the 1980s), You either got your music on an LP (long play) album, a single record or a tape (cassettes - 8-tracks went the way of the dinosaur by now). These vinyl discs were pressed copies of the master tape that held the recording.

The technology is mysterious to me, but I suppose it works in a similar way to how we hear sound naturally. The album is put on  a turntable and spins at a specific rate (33 RPM - revolutions per minute). An arm with a stylus (needle) is lowered on the album in its grooved track and "reads" the bumps in the track to reproduce the recorded sound. Those bumps simulate the sound waves our ears pick up and transmit them through wires to an amplifier, where they're converted to sound we can hear.

Those grooves in the vinyls could contain so much information, and it's just amazing to me how so much data could read from such a cramped space. If you've ever looked closely at the grooves on a vinyl disk, you know what I'm talking about.

The problem with vinyl though is, it's fragile. Scratches and fingerprints could ruin a record. So the industry adopted the Compact Disk as it's next form of media. A CD has all its data encoded in a format to be read by a laser, So we went from an analog interface to a digital one. 

We could then put all the data on a disk, and there was no loss of any sound  from the original recording.

Then the complaint was that while you could include all the sound data, it didn't have the same warmth as a vinyl recording. CDs were thought of as sterile sounding. Maybe that's because there was no physical connection between the disk and the laser that read it. 

Now we have all sorts of digital formats, and depending on how much disk space we want to use, there's "lossy" and "lossless" formats for digital content. Since most of us end up listening to MP3s, we've selected a cheap copy of the recorded material.

Thee are many different levels of MP3 quality we could use, but the bottom line is that if it's an MP3, you're getting a squashed copy. MP3s typical use 3 to 5 megabytes of disk space. The original digital version of the song is typically in the WAV, FLAC or ALAC format. In fact, everything I record (on a Windows machine) is in WAV format. I then convert it to MP3 so that the size isn't too large for downloads.

But you do lose sound quality by going through that compression process. And when you finally hear it through your computer speakers or ear buds, it is but a shadow of its former glory.

So, apologies for making you listen to things that maybe don't have the same effect on you as I remember them having on me when I listened to them on albums through a quality component stereo or headphones. It's a pale comparison, but I guess you get the general idea about sound effects, right?

Peace~

Dave