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Thursday, August 24, 2006

Mailbag: Reader has the scoop on Bob Dylan; On Digital Content Vs. LP

Dick,

Ok, here are a few things I've learned (unless this stuff is all BS):

On Dylan's "new" voice in 1969 - he was in a sort of country music mode; also note the last paragraph).

In February of 1969, Dylan returned to Nashville to begin work on Nashville Skyline. It had been over a year since his last album, John Wesley Harding, was released, and it had been fifteen months since he produced that album, the last time he was in a recording studio.

The songs on Nashville Skyline were very relaxed with modest ambitions, something reflected in the studio work ethic. "We just take a song, I play it and everyone else just sort of fills in behind it," Dylan recalls. "At the same time you're doing that, there's someone in the control booth who's turning all those dials to where the proper sound is coming in."

Dylan was also singing with a soft, smooth, country-tinged croon, and many listeners would be startled by this 'new' voice. Dylan credited it with a break from cigarettes, but a number of friends and family members were able to draw a connection with his 'new' voice and the one he used to use when he played at the Ten O' Clock Scholar in New York City and the Purple Onion coffee shop in Minneapolis during the winter and spring of 1960.
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Here's a note on the information content:

The key to this question is the difference between a digital and an
analog recording. Natural sound is by definition analog.
When a CD recording is created, this analog is sound is digitized. To
do this, they take a lot of snapshots of the analog sound. For a CD
recording they take 44,100 snapshots in a minute. These snapshots are
then converted to digital information with a certain precision. For a
CD recording this precision is 16 bits which means that every one of
the 44,100 snapshots needs to be converted into one of the 65,536
(2^16) possible values.

You can probably see where I am going: by definition a digital
recording doesn't include all the sound information. You could
visualize a CD recording as a really large chest with a lot of
drawers. Because the number of snapshots that are taken are not
infinite (the maximum is 44,100 per minute), the process of taking
snapshots results in the loss of information. Information is further
lost because each of these snapshots must be made to fit in one of the
65,536 drawers of the chest.

A record player which plays LP’s is strictly analog. A vinyl record
has a groove carved into it that mirrors the original sound's
waveform. The record player than transforms this groove to an analogue
sound signal which can be fed into an amplifier.
In this process, no information can be lost. No snapshots need to be
taken and the sound doesn't need be converted to one of the possible
65,536 values. There basically is an infinite number of 'snapshots'
and 'possible values'. Therefore vinyl recording sound richer than CD
recordings (as long as you have a decent vinyl record player).


And please don't neglect to read this great article. It's enlightening; for example, the only music media to increase in sales recently is vinyl!!

http://www.furious.com/perfect/vinyl.html


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1 comment:

  1. Denis wrote:

    Dick,

    I have to admit that after hearing Bob Dylan at many different concerts
    over
    the years, live as well as remote, I have seen days when he was in rare
    form
    (the series at the Orpheum Theater 10 years ago come to mind), his
    artistic
    and physical peak period when he performed at The Dome with Tom Petty
    and
    the Heartbreakers but the acoustics of the Dome spoiled the event for
    concert goers, and other concerts at the State Fair and RiverFest in
    St.
    Paul where his voice was so garbled that he virtually threw the lyrics
    away
    in trying to re-event his old songs.

    However, I have never, ever heard a Dylan recording that sounds like
    the
    voice in "Lay, Lady Lay." Your music expert, who shall remain
    anonymous for
    reasons of connections to the industry, perhaps, needs to comment on
    whether
    the other tracks on Nashville Skyline were of similar voice or this one
    stood alone. I don't think I have a copy of Nashville Skyline or at
    least
    it's been a long time since I heard the other tracks on it...He should
    be
    the one to conduct the experiment of CD vs. LP. Of course, as my buddy
    Bill
    McAllister used to say, play your LP maybe 17 times but then you might
    as
    well chuck the album away because the sound has deteriorated so much.
    (Make
    a note, here, Dick, most of my old Bruce Springsteen albums would need
    to go
    in the trash by that barometer, and if I haven't succumbed to Maureen's
    encouragement to divest, I won't chuck them because they have been
    played 17
    times.)

    ReplyDelete