Bass and treble
For some reason I started wondering today why home stereos come with bass and treble knobs (or sometimes full EQ settings).
Musicians spend a lot of time getting their sound just right. And then an audio engineer spends a lot of time making sure the record sounds just right. The engineer tests the sound on a variety of speakers. Sometimes they'll even test on a crappy hand-held stereo because of times thats what radio execs will hear the CD on in between meetings. In the end they have a finely tuned piece of audio, with each frequency meticulously set.
And then someone buys it, goes home, and plays it on their stereo with the bass and treble knobs turned to some bizarre value.
I guess it's because of two things: 1) Home speakers are usually cheap, and all the effort the audio engineer puts into the tuning of the sound doesn''t matter because the home system won't do it justice anyway. 2) Everyone just likes different sounds. Some people love low end, some people high end.
In a way, I guess it's similar to food. The chef might create a masterpiece, then the customer might cover it in salt to suit their own taste. And the same goes for film colors. The director may work for days with the art director and the film guys to develop the film just right, only to have it played back on a DVD with the colors on the TV set all wrong.
I guess unless you have your audio or video set the way the original author had theirs set, you really aren't enjoying the experience as the artist intended.
posted by Jim @ 7:53 PM
2 comments
2 Comments:
How about a self-calibrating TV? A Spyder-like device would implant itself on the screen, a test pattern would be sent from the artist-who-cares' DVD, and the set would adjust itself to the artist's vision.
But 75% of home viewers would not like the result. Most likely, the colors would be too subdued for most people. There's a reason Sony pushes reds (although I disagree as to why) -- consumers like vibrant color. There's a reason consumer sets are factory-adjusted to high brightness, high sharpness, and high saturation. A video engineer cringes.
Can a home consumer even purchase studio-quality speakers? Even if so, the acoustics of the average living room, with carpeting and drapes and couches, will be much different from the studio.
Most annoying to me is a single, simple "tone" control on many amplifiers and receivers. At least with separate bass and treble controls, there exists some flexibility to achieve a sound I prefer in my own specific setting.
Another annoying thing to me are synthetic sound environments, typically labeled as "concert hall" or "rock arena" or "outdoor stadium" or "Joe's Bar". A sound engineer cringes.
Software which I work on has many optional features which other groups at my company must consider using or not using or tweaking or not tweaking. I often liken these options to a stereo with 28 knobs. How can the average person even begin to adjust these knobs? Sometimes no adjustments are better than too many.
"I often liken these options to a stereo with 28 knobs." Such things for home audio are called graphic equalizers....like duh. Laff. All the more to distort the original intent of the toneage of all those involved in creating a track. And the motto in music is if ya like how it sounds then that's all that matters. Nobody else might like it however....chuckle. It's human nature or even a requirement, at least for the gadgetoids & gizmoidals types, to be able to adjust something. Many many colds ago when I was a youngin we had record players with a speed adjustment control. Why? Because that was about all you could adjust on a record player & dag narn it....we liked it that way...ha.
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