8Sided Blog

a zine about sound, culture, and the punk rock dream

Destroying the Perfect

· 5 Comments

On the Building New Law podcast, Seth Godin had this to say:

We always destroy the perfect before we enable the impossible. For example, sonically CDs are not as good as vinyl, and MP3s are not as good as CDs. But this degradation is necessary to get to the technological point of ‘every song in your pocket,’ and audio quality will someday catch up.


And we’ve seen it before. The eight-track tape: sounded like crap but you could play it in your car. Then came the cassette, also crappy but you could go for a run with a Walkman at your hip. Compact discs eventually improved the quality and kept the mobility. But there’s another level of convenience that no one anticipated, which is the convenience of library and access. This facet was the promise of “every song in your pocket,” and that means it was a step back to move forward, courtesy of relatively lo-fi MP3s.

Are we now at the technological point of ‘catch up’ Godin mentions? For many of us, the bandwidth is now there, and bandwidth has been the primary constraint. Is it time to seriously upgrade our stereo systems for streaming? From BBC News:

Qobuz, along with rivals Tidal and Deezer Elite, offers streaming of “lossless audio” that throws nothing away.

“Is MP3 as interesting as it was ten years ago? Not really, because bandwidth has improved,” says Malcolm Ouzeri, head of marketing at French streaming and download provider Qobuz, founded in 2007. “Now the industry is going towards more quality.”

The highest quality MP3 has a bit-rate of 320kbps, while a hi-res file can go as high as 9,216kbps. Music CDs are transferred at 1,411kbps.


There is also talk of Spotify launching a lossless audio option. Some users report seeing this option in limited test cases. And then there’s the adoption of the LUFS standard by Spotify and other streamers, showing a renewed attention to sound quality. But many of these services make hi-res an add-on option. The rumor is that Spotify’s hi-res audio will be available as part of a more expensive monthly plan, as Tidal currently offers. A Qobuz ‘highest quality’ subscription is presently £349.99 a year.

I’m not sure if hi-res audio will make an impact as long as it’s seen as an add-on for those with extra change to spare. Even the option titles – such as Deezer Elite – make hi-res seem elitist. I don’t know what the additional costs are to the providers, but it will be wonderful to finally enter a world where hi-res audio is a sole and affordable option as bandwidth grows and accelerates. Once we’ve arrived, the only ticket for entry will be our choice of speakers.

‘Ways of Hearing’ Explores Listening in the Digital Age

· Leave a Comment

I’m excited about this new Radiotopia podcast named Showcase. Mostly because the first season consists of the six-part series Ways Of Hearing, hosted by Damon Krukowski who you may know as the drummer for Galaxie 500 and a member of Damon & Naomi.

Apparently inspired and culled from Damon’s recent book The New Analog, Ways Of Hearing explores how listening has changed as audio delivery moves from analog to digital. It looks to go much deeper than that, touching on subjects like modern changes in the sharing of information and how audio affects our sense of time. So far the podcast doesn’t go down the tired analog vs. digital rabbit hole, and I don’t expect that it will. Listen to the first episode HERE.

On a side note: certain bands or songs send waves of melancholy down the spine. For me, Galaxie 500 is one of those bands. When “Tugboat” starts playing in the first episode of this podcast I’m overcome with tingles. The song evokes a time and a place, an overwhelming nostalgia, a part of my life (my early 20s) filled with loneliness and sadness. I recorded a Galaxie 500 copycat song, complete with my imitation of Dean Wareham’s first album wail, and played it for a girl I liked. She asked me why I was so sad and then I never heard from her again.

And if you’d like to read the harrowing tale of a great band dissolving then you should check out this oral history of Galaxie 500 on Pitchfork.


Update: If you’re having trouble listening from the player on the show’s site then try this player on PRX’s page.

If You Are Losing the Game, Best to Change the Rules

· Leave a Comment

Ben Thompson for Stratechery:

The long-rumored competitor to Amazon Echo and Google Home was, fascinatingly, framed as anything but. {Tim} Cook began the unveiling by referencing Apple’s longtime focus on music, and indeed, the first several minutes of the HomePod were entirely about its quality as a speaker. It was, in my estimation, an incredibly smart approach: if you are losing the game, as Siri is to Alexa and Google, best to change the rules, and having heard the HomePod, its sound quality is significantly better than the Amazon Echo (and, one can safely assume, Google Home). Moreover, the ability to link multiple HomePods together is bad news for Sonos in particular (the HomePod sounded significantly better than the Sonos Play 3 as well).

Of course, superior sound quality is what you would expect from a significantly more expensive speaker: the HomePod costs $350, while the Sonos Play 3 is $300, and the Amazon Echo is $150. From Apple’s perspective, though, a high price is a feature, not a bug: remember, the company has a hardware-based business model, which means there needs to be room for a meaningful margin.

The result is a product that, beyond being massively late to market, is inferior to the competition on two of three possible vectors: the HomePod is significantly more expensive than an Echo or Google Home, it has an inferior voice assistant, but it has a better speaker. That is not as bad as it sounds: after all, the iPhone is significantly more expensive than most other smartphones, it has inferior built-in services, but it has a superior user experience otherwise. The difference — and this is why the iPhone is so much more dominant than any other Apple product — is that everyone already needs a phone; the only question is which one. It remains to be seen how many people need a truly impressive speaker.

Coming from a music industry POV, an emphasis on sound quality as a feature – as it applies to music playback – is a great move and may even raise the bar for competitors’ forthcoming hardware. I look forward to personally assessing just how good this HomePod speaker sounds, and find it fascinating that the HomePod has been successfully positioned so that the sound quality is what I’m mostly curious about.

Make LUFS, Not (Loudness) War

· 2 Comments

Ask Audio:

It appears as if Spotify have decided to join the majority of online streaming platforms and reduce their streaming target loudness from -12 LUF to -14 LUFS! By my own measurements, a solid thirty to forty minutes of the Top 50 global playlist off the free Spotify app yields an integrated value of -14 LUFS with true peaks well below -1 dbTP.



Spotify has long been the outlier in terms of online loudness, streaming a full +4 LU (1 LU = 1dB) above AES recommended streaming practices of -16 LUFS/-1dBTP and causing no end of confusion in the last days of the loudness war. So this move brings Spotify into the same Loudness ballpark as TIDAL who are normalising to no louder than -14 LUFS, YouTube who seem to be normalising high view count videos to -14 LUFS, and 2 LU higher than iTunes and iTunes radio with “Sound Check” loudness normalising to -16 LUFS.



As of now, most online streaming services are matching the perceived loudness of tracks to each other to a unified target level. So regardless of how much you worked on squeezing a few extra dB out of your hyper-compressed “master”, if an online streaming service measures your track as higher than -14 LUFS (integrated) YOUR MUSIC WILL GET TURNED DOWN!



Unfortunately for us electronic music makers we still have to deal with SoundCloud and Bandcamp, and neither service even seems to be aware of the loudness issues facing their content. SoundCloud and Bandcamp are a free-for-all at the moment with incredibly loud music being uploaded every day, and it sucks that dance and electronic music is the last bastion of the loudness war. Soundcloud was never built on its reputation for quality audio, but a target loudness value of -14 LUFS/ -1 dBTP is highly recommended regardless of your “competition’s levels”.



A Poke in the Ear (With a Sharp Stick):

So, you could care less about The LUFS Standard and will just mix and master your track or project so loud that it will blow out your listeners eardrums on the first listen. Fine, go for it. It’s your music.



Just remember that if you ever want your tunes to be on one of the major Music Streaming Services or on The Tube Of Yous they are going to turn the level down for you. If it hits the Broadcast Airwaves it’s going to be turned down even more.



Would you rather have control over what it sounds like when it gets turned down, or do you trust the Providers and Networks to do that for you? LUFS ain’t going away kids – it’s a Standard and a Broadcasting Law in the US and Europe. Start adhering to it now and you’re futureproofed, but if you do make headway in the Industry you’ll have to invest time and money to remaster your older works.


My audio nerd friends are pretty excited about Spotify’s decision. I’m thinking it’s in preparation for the launch of a high fidelity audio plan. It still probably doesn’t excuse the bad pun in this post’s title.

Sound Design: “Everything You Hear On Film Is A Lie”

· Leave a Comment

Here’s a fun Ted Talk about the role of sound design in media and how the best examples of this dark art intentionally lie to us:

Sound design is built on deception — when you watch a movie or TV show, nearly all of the sounds you hear are fake. In this audio-rich talk, Tasos Frantzolas explores the role of sound in storytelling and demonstrates just how easily our brains are fooled by what we hear.

So What Is Mastering Anyway?

· Leave a Comment

LinkedIn Pulse:

There are many definitions of audio mastering. Most commonly, though, the term mastering is used to refer to the process of taking an audio mix and preparing it for distribution. There are several considerations in this process: unifying the sound of a record, maintaining consistency across an album, and preparing for distribution.


I’ve had clients ask me why mastering is necessary, stating things like, “my mixdown sounds great … why would I need to master it?” This article is useful in explaining the need and reasons for mastering, as well as giving an interesting historical timeline of the practice.

I feel mastering is as important (and underrated) in the recording and release process as having a good studio monitor set-up. If you intend to stick with ‘the music thing’ then you will someday look back with deep regret if you allow an unmastered (or improperly mastered) release out into the world, I assure you. It’s important to keep in mind that mastering can’t fix a bad mixdown, but it will provide a sonic cohesion that will help make sense of your mix, both in context of its own sounds as well as among other professionally regarded releases.

I’m of the school of thought that you should not master your own music, though I do know some people who do this with good results. I believe you can get a much better master from someone who listens to your songs without bias (or who hasn’t heard the music a thousand times like you have). You also have an advantage when using a mastering engineer who does this as an area of focus, rather than as a side-job.

It’s a huge bonus if you can sit in with your mastering engineer and observe the process. You’ll learn much not only about the art of mastering, but also how your music and mixdowns are perceived by a professional. I once was lucky to have a three day mastering session on my music with the renowned Bob Katz who is based here in Orlando. It was like audio bootcamp … illuminating. The experience definitely shaped the way I think about sound.

Update: