The Facile Eclectic

 Just ran across a cool blog for those interested in religion and how it's reported in the media. It's run by a number of professional religion journalists and has lots of interesting articles. One looked at a recent article saying that Fred Thompson was endorsed by 40 million US conservative Methodists. 40 million? Lets see the US population is roughly 300 million, 1/3 of whom(100 million) are conservative Christians, of whom roughly 1/2 are evangelical(50 million). Wow the Methodists are kicking the Babtists butts! In fact there are about 14 million Methodists in the US and that includes the liberal ones. It's an informative site and the commenters are usually intelligent and not prone to the normal ranting and raving. I recomend it to thinking relgious folks(of all stripes, Wiccans too!) and non-beleivers alike.

GetReligion.org

Posted by Ben Wortham at 01:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Just today I finished recovering my wife's PC from a rather nasty bit of malware that had completely corrupted her hardrive  My wife, I'm afraid, has always been a Mac user so she is unaware of the darker side of computing that haunts Windows users. She said "This window popped up and said I needed to download something, so I did". To quote Charlie Brown "AAAAARGH!". On to the always joyful task of reformatting the hardrive and installing the system from scratch. This took five hours. I've done this on my Macs recently and the process takes less than 2. In addition the recovery script was buggy and I had to massage it a number of times along the way. This has been my Windows experience in general in the two months since I got this machine. When the thing does an update the desktop flickers and icons flash in and out of existence for no apparent reason. It's like the machine is prone to epileptic seizures. Despite a 2ghz AMD dual core, the system is also painfully slow. And god forbid if you click the mouse too many times during one these arduous background processes. The thing will seize up like a reptile thrown into a bucket of ice water. It's clunky, slow, poorly designed, the graphics are cheesy, it blows up at the slightest provocation ...... And then it struck me.  It's a Pinto. Windows is the Ford Pinto of computer OS's and Bill Gates must be the greatest huckster of all time. He's managed to convince most people in the world that a vehicle thats poorly designed, under powered, has a tendency to self destruct, and is just plain ugly, is the one to buy simply because it is cheaper. Imagine the world if he had worked at Ford instead. They could have just changed out some plastic wheel covers, added fuzzy dice and bolted on some curb feelers every five years, then call it a new car! And with Bill's PR campaign to play down the explosion issue, they could have sold the same vehicle for twenty years at an enormous profit. You know, you rarely see a Pinto on the road these days. It seems folks have more sense when it comes to cars.

Posted by Ben Wortham at 02:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

In the late eighties I was fortunate to witness a digital revolution in the making. As a kid I'd been dabbling with recording technology since middle school and I was always attracted to the idea of being able to create a professional recording at home. By the early eighties the standard in pro studios was the 24 track DASH digital recorder. It was capable of 20 bit resolution and automated editing but the cost of such a machine was about $500,000 or more. At this time a 3 bedroom home cost around $60,000, obviously access to this type of equipment was only available to a few. By the late eighties we did have access to some semi-pro analog gear that was good but not up to pro audio standards. The piece of gear we most needed at the time was a good reverb unit. Professional digital models cost several thousand dollars and analog units really hadn't changed much since the sixties.  The cost of digital reverb had to do the complexity of converting analog sound to digital data and applying the sophisticated algorythms required to simulate a convincing reverb pattern. With processor power low a reverb unit was a collection of multiple computers, one to convert analog to digital, one to process the algorythm, and one to convert digital back to analog. Each computer stage had a seperate processor, ram memory, rom memory, and other associated components. In a stereo unit this entire architecture was duplicated. This made these devices very expensive to build. What changed in the late eighties was the invention of two new electronic components. The first was analog to digital converters that were completely contained on a single chip. But the really important device was the DSP(digital signal processor) which performed the complicated task of simulating a complex reverb pattern on a single chip. The result of all of this was the Alesis Microverb. It was a good quality digital reverb and at $100 it cost only 5% of the price of previous units of its quality. It was quickly followed by many other effects units of various types and other manufacturers quickly joined in. Within a few years a musician could have a reasonable facsimile of a $500,000 effects rack for about $3000. The major sea change was the result of another Alesis product, the black face ADAT. ADATs used digital VHS technology to record 8 tracks of 16bit audio on an inexpensive cassette. These units could be linked together to record as many tracks as needed. The resolution was not as good as DASH machines but since CD's are made at 16bit resolution, the end consumer really couldn't tell the difference. For $3000 you could have 24 tracks of digital recording capacity. Compare that to the $500,000 price tag of a DASH machine and you get the idea. When Eddie Brickel and the new Bohemians recorded there first album on ADATs the cat was out of the bag. What followed was an explosion of home studios. For the first time in the record business the means of production was no longer the exclusive domain of the folks with deep pockets.

Posted by Ben Wortham at 09:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In my last post I covered the history of the record industry up to the 1960's. At the beginning of the sixties recordings where still a way of capturing a live performance. Basically you got the band or orchestra in a room along wih the the vocalist(s), miked everything up, and mixed directly to a stereo tape recorder. After the development of multitrack recorders it became possible to do more. You could for instance sing a second vocal part with yourself after you recorded the first. This meant recordings could be made that could not be duplicated live. In this way records evolved into a more complex artform. A few early examples are Brian Wilson's "Pet Sounds" and the Beatles "Sergent Pepper". In addition new technoligies like synthesisers gave muscicians an increasing range of sonic possibilties. By the seventies artists like Stevie Wonder where producing recordings where a single artist performed all the various parts of the piece. This trend led to the conclusion by industry people that sales could be grown by increasingly perfecting and improving recording thechnology and audio quality. This drove up production costs and increased sales where needed to offset those costs. As a result, starting in the seventies, more money was put into promotion. Concert touring took on new dimensions. Even when the tour lost money it was considered a good investment to sell the product, records. When MTV came along it added another expensive layer to the industry business model. This is when sales hit their peak. It all culminated with Michael Jacksons "Thriller". It had all the ingredients, high production values due to Quincy Jones expert hand in the studio, a massive world tour, an award winning video, and even a high profile product endorsment. We will never see it's kind again which in my opnion is not a bad thing. The reasons for this, as most young folks know, is digital technology. If you think I'm talking about CD's you are wrong.

CD's where a big improvement in audio quality and industry folks thought that people would be willing to pay more for that improvement. They anounced the death of the LP record was iminent and would soon go the way of the 8-track. For engineers like myself they where great. For eus the holy grail has always been acoustic accuracy and CD's made that possible for the first time. Now you can hear on your home system exactly what I hear when I'm mixing a project. Other media like LP's and analog tape always lose some acoustic quality in reproduction and aren't faithful to the orginal master recording. The problem is that this sublety is lost on most music lisenters. They really care about a good song or a piece of music that moves them. LP's already sounded "good" and CD's sounded different but not necessarily better. In addition CD's where more expensive than records. The only reason people bought them is because the major record labels stopped making vinyl. CD's became the only game in town. And with the costs of recording, promoting, and production so high, no independent could play the game. The only source for music was the major labels. Thats what really changed and it didn't start with the internet. It really started with musicians. Tune in next time for the conclusion.

Posted by Ben Wortham at 01:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

With bands opting to sell their recordings themselves for next to nothing, and rampant piracy everywhere, its no wonder record companies are in a panic. The old business model of selling an album as the principle product is rapidly disappearing. Many artists have begun to realize that their principle income is derived from the performance of their material and not from CD sales. In any case, whats to lose, since the labels always got the larger share of the pie? I would contend that this state of affairs was inevitable and record labels have fundamentally misunderstood what the principal product they are selling is for a very long time.

A brief history of the record biz. In the early days of Edison recordings the machines where expensive and the drums were difficult to make. They were viewed as a pricey novelty. Things got better with the introduction of flat disks but they were still pricey. At that time most artists made their living from live performances. Records where a promotional tool, something to give away at concerts in hopes of luring ticket buyers who might get an expensive souvenir in a drawing. It wasn't until later, as disk sales increased, that people realised records could make money. These were the golden days when selling a few thousand copies could net you substantial profits. In a time before radio and television many people would pay the substantial price of a recording in order to hear a popular artist who they probably would never hear in person. The performance was still the product, the record was just a means of delivering it to a wider audience. Then came radio and things changed. People now heard their favorite artists for free no matter where they happened to live. However recordings still offered the convenience opf hearing your favorite performer any time you like without depending on the whims of the programmers. The technology was getting cheaper and more widespread as well. As a result record sales continued to grow as did the profits. The record companies continued to inovate their product into the television age. They increased the length of time that could be placed on a single disk while simultaneously making them cheaper. More bang for your buck! Then came stereo Hi-Fi and improved audio quality making it seem more like you where really there in person. Then came the 45rpm single. They we're extremily cheap and the phonographs that played them where inexpensive enough for parents to buy them for their kids. They really where the I-Pod of their day. Bubble Gum Babylon(term for the teenage market) was born. Sales of these singles reached volumes that we're never seen till then. They became the standard by which artist success was measured and gave birth to the Billboard charts. At this point we've arrived at the early sixties. Up till now the record industry had stayed profitable, despite competition by other media, by contniously innovating their product and finding new markets to exploit. Sales levels continued to grow and would for sometime more. In my next post I'll take you to the industries peak and explain why I think it went wrong.

Posted by Ben Wortham at 11:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Recently I got involved in an in-promptu discussion with my doctor about the current debate over health care. During the course of this my doctor asked where I had gotten the information I was using to support my argument. My facts did not agree with what he thought he knew about the issue. I responded that if I had known we were going to have a debate I would of prepared a bibliography. The sources I access are too numerous to recall off the top of ones head. I've found over the course of my life growing up in the information age that this has become a serious problem. It seems that what we think we know to be true is increasingly nothing but a fiction. The internet has given us access to huge volumes of information but as yet we do not have the tools to gauge the quality of that information. Previous generations where able to do this more easily when all information was in the form of the printed word. Even the traditional method of using reputable sources is becoming less effective in determining truth. As an example, if I want medical information I might go to a well established medical journal as a source to inform me on the best diet to eat. What I find is thousands of studies from molecular nutrient interactions on up to population studies showing various links between diet and disease, nutrients and disease, etc. Many of these make conclusions that may or may not be causal which means thousands more studies are required to understand the various mechanisms involved just to prove carrots are actually good for you. You could sift for a lifetime and not find a definitive answer to any question you pose.

Another disturbing phenomenon is how incorrect information spreads so quickly that it lodges in our group mind before any correction can hope to root it out. A recent example was the "Jena six" story which I started following a full week before it bubbled up to the national level. In early local reporting teachers and students said that students of both races had gathered under the what was later dubbed "the whites only tree" for many years before the noose incident. The nooses where probably not hung there because it was a "whites only" tree, they where more likely hung there because it was in fact the only tree on campus. This small fact does not signifacantly alter the overall story of the "Jena six" whatever your opinion of the situation. But it amazed me how quickly once the story broke how many times I saw "whites only tree" repeated in hundreds of reports and blogs. In all the reports I read from across the world it was repeated and no-one backtracked the story to correct it. It would be pointless now anyway. It is an established fact that Saddam Hussein had no part in the 9-11 attacks but to this day, like most americans, my wife thinks that fiction is true. The ancient Greeks discovered the earth is round but most continued to think it was flat for another 2000 years. The information was never lost, it just took that long to change the old point of view. How many flat earth fictions are we carrying around in our heads now that the internet makes disseminating them so easy and rapid? More importantly, how long will it take for us to root them out?

Posted by Ben Wortham at 10:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)