Tuesday, June 1, 2021

also...

lalalala - and versions, including the one on the sixth record - is one of the tracks that compresses very badly. the detail of the track is all in the reverb, which is heavier here than almost anywhere else in my discography. i've got reverb coming from a dozen different places, including the environmental audio effects. this reverb is creating all kinds of interesting artefacts and sound effects in places that an mp3 compressor (which is almost as bad as a corporate rock producer) is just going to squash out of existence.

the version on the album has this ping-pong reverb from about 4:04 to about 5:32 that you can't hear at all on bandcamp. like, i don't mean that it's been crushed or distorted - it's just gone. instead, you get about a minute and a half of silence. there should be a delay there, but it's just utterly inaudible due to the compression algorithm deciding that it exists in unimportant frequency ranges.

so, this is kind of a ubiquitous problem for a sound artist, faced with the normality of low quality sound devices. this is an extreme example - you can't even hear the song. at all. - but it demonstrates the nature of the problem.

and, all i can tell you is that it sounds great in lossless audio through a decent amp and good headphones.

for now, the best way to get around it is to feed it into an external amp at low volume and crank the amp. but, ultimately, the compression is irreversible, and the detail is not recoverable from the format.