I know how to cure depression !

I went through the top songs of this week --- holy sheep dip these are awful if it does not sound like a funeral dirge or a hip hop gansta crap. Today's young people ? no wonder they are killing each other and suicide is up

Quit listening to that S**T !

As the decades have moved on less and less worth listening to, original sounding music is becoming as rare as chickens teeth. What was good they take and turn it into and make it suck. Any good music is kidnapped and murdered, for Hollyweird to punch up their lame movies.
The lyric suck the music sucks and even the videos are low class soft porn that sucks















I do like some newer stuff

 

Much of today's music is recorded to be played back though audio systems that couldn't even remotely be considered high fidelity. It basically either compensates for the poor response or it is compressed (dynamic range is artificially lowered) to make it sound louder by boosting the quieter passages.

The reason is that high fidelity systems were once a part of every living or family room, but have been replaced by either systems that have smaller decor friendly speakers (Bose Acoustimass or other "lifestyle" speakers), cool looking speakers that have no actual audio design and testing, crappy laptop speakers, or lame overpriced "Beats" headphones that cost like a Sennheiser and perform like s**t on a stick. The electronics have also suffered severely. The goal is 1) cheap, 2) cheap, 3) cheap, and the ability to produce a 1,000 Watt 1 kHz signal for 1 millisecond so it can be advertised as a 1,000 watt (or more) system.Linear response means nothing when the wife friendly speaker has dips and peaks in all the wrong places.

Looking back, music was recorded to ensure that the signal coming in was as close as possible as the signal that was recorded while reducing noise as much as possible. Analog vs digital is IMO inconsequential in this with the exception that digital typically has a much lower noise floor. Now that it's recorded the next step was to transfer it to whatever media as faithful to the original recording as possible. This part is actually still quite good. Now it's playback time, and those old heavy klunky systems had excellent preamp sections, even the inexpensive ones, and amplifiers that could deliver their rated power from 20Hz and lower to 20 or 40 kHz all day (and night, sorry officer...) long. Those bigger speakers you traded off for an Acoustamass or a soundbar were also designed to give a linear response (as opposed to looking cool), so the net result was that the music coming out was far, far closer than the music that originally went in.

There is still a lot of very well recorded music being produced, but most of isn't popular music. Some of it I do like, but I can't listen to it on my better system.

 

He don't hold back tell us how you really feel !

 

All of which is why i still have my 1968 Sansui tube preamp/amp, Boston Acoustic speakers and even a real live turntable..

 

Forgot my favorite one, Shoot to thrill ! 50 cal action at the end---

 

I like the way that depression is trivialised by attributing crap music with mediocre sound fidelity as major contributors to its incidence. If listening to 'golden age' music with good quality hifi sound systems was the cure, other therapeutic modalities would be utterly redundant.

Once upon a time, in that golden era of the 1950's, when father knew best, and women knew their place...(in the kitchen, in the bedroom, and in the laundry).....Rock and Roll was considered by old harrumphers of that time as crap music...nothing has changed in the world of old harrumphers...there is always a golden age (usually of the harrumpher's youth) when the music was almost invariably much better than that of the present age...

 

Seems to me the modern music and more exact the trash lyrics are merely symptoms of the mental illness epidemic in todays youth, not the cause.

 

Not symptoms of a mental illness epidemic.....just evidence of a change in tastes and style preferences. Mental illness has always afflicted a portion of the population....we just recognise it as being something other than demonic possession, or a dualistic cosmic struggle between imaginary gods, and the equally imaginary dark forces opposing them.

 

Classic rock and roll stations still thrive in almost all markets, a simple testament to what was considered an era of great music.

 

Each era has had music which has been considered classic....and music which has been considered crap....some music continues to be classical beyond the era within which it originated, and the crap of that era tends to disappear into obscurity.

Who remembers this Crap song...or considers it great music anymore?



or this masterpiece



Undoubtedly both were popular enough in their time.

whereas this ragtime tune would be recognisable to many people even now.

 

That's a GREAT system - those old Sansui's rock no pun intended. Tubes are far more linear than solid state and IMO even though they introduce more distortion they sound more realistic than most solid state systems. The only real drawback is that the tubes change as they age and eventually need replacement. My main amps are offline while I'm doing a chassis up restoration and I can't wait to get them back in service. They aren't tubes, but use the sole truly linear solid state technology - the vertical FET ot V-FET,so I get the best of both worlds. The difference between them and my backup amps - also very good amps - is amazing. The V-FETs just mesmerize me and make the world dissapear.

LOL - I'm all for anyone enjoying the music they like any way they like. What gets me spun up is convincing people that a superior product designed for a lifetime of service is worse than a plastic box full of the cheapest most poorly designed junk at stupid high prices. Some of the best equipment ever built wound up in landfills.

 

DANG !!!!!

 

Apparently we have found a way to cure Cruisin Sloth's depression...

 

Some lyrics I heard from the kids car next to me while filling up the truck yesterday "I grabbed a little white girl just bust a n*t, then I rolled her over and raped her in the butt." Sorry Chel that is mental illness not taste.

 

In my younger years I worked at various radio stations and was exposed to a lot of music. I somewhat kept up with the times even though I'm no longer in the broadcast industry. There is worthwhile music being produced, you just have to know where to look.

The production and reproduction values have advanced exponentially. Modern audio systems are miles ahead of the days when you weren't cool unless you had a pair of four foot high speakers in your living room hooked up to a maze of analog equipment fed by linear power supplies. A small Bluetooth speaker has better frequency response and far less distortion than the room-sized speakers of yore.

The same goes on the production end. It used to be the quality of the recording depended a lot on the type of tape used and how fast it was run. Thirty inch per second professional grade reel-to-reel recorder/editors would cost as much as a house. Now you can do the same thing with a $600 iPad and get far superior results, without the defects associated with magnetic tape and mechanical recorders.

If music sounds like crap it's probably because it has been compressed. This means the dynamic range has been reduced. Dynamic range is the difference between the loud and soft sounds. FM radio in particular is famous for this. Almost all radio stations have an audio compressor, which is a relatively inexpensive rack-mounted device.

Audio compression makes it sound more "bright" but it also dulls a lot of the subtleties and tends to make everything sound the same. Compression is not really big a deal with hard rock music but almost totally ruins classical and jazz.

As for tastes and style, that's a personal matter. But the production values are light years ahead of what they were in the analog tape days.

 

Not all taste is good taste....that one may have "bad taste", doesn't necessarily indicate mental illness....One may have a psychopathology whilst enjoying a taste for good, wholesome, sacred music. I'm sure that there were plenty of psychopathically sadistic concentration camp administrators who had wonderful refined tastes for compositions by Richard Wagner and Richard Strauss.

 

Can justify anything can't you

 

I don't justify the perniciousness of the rap lyrics that you cited...non consent is clearly wrong, though miscegenation isn't intrinsically wrong...my view is that those lyrics indicate badness, not necessarily madness, though occasionally the two do actually go together.

 

When I was stationed state side and had my own solo dorm room, I bought a super sweet Akai system with turn table, and Kenwood speakers, I could shake the entire floor with that system, and I rocked every thing I could find! Later, I upgraded the home system with a full set Martin Logan speakers driven by a Kenwood amp and sterio system, but retained my Akai turn table! This system with a double Collins sub and seporated amp at 100o watts, really puts the thunder on the mountain!