Christopher Herot's Weblog

Does Vinyl Sound Better?

In the latest chapter of the resurgence of vinyl records, Tom Petty's reunion band, Mudcrutch this week released a vinyl version of their recent album.  The package also includes an "Audiophile CD" that is made from the same master as the vinyl record.  To quote one review:

The included Audiophile CD is made from the same uncompressed stereo masters as the vinyl pressing. It reproduces the music’s full dynamic range, so the quiet parts are quieter and the loud parts are louder-- just as they were performed. To achieve full dynamic range it’s necessary to master with less overall level, so the Audiophile CD may not sound as “loud” as the standard CD or download. To compensate for this, put it on a high quality system and turn it up!

Judging from the coverage this release has garnered in the mainstream press (NY Times, USA Today), the public is gradually becoming aware of the loudness wars which have raged behind the scenes in the music industry.  While all recordings undergo some amount of dynamic compression in order to avoid distortion, the situation got out of hand when songs were competing for attention on the radio, especially in autmobiles where the quiet passages could be drowned out by road noise and the listner was apt to change stations if the music wasn't immediately engaging.  Just as chefs have learned that tossing in a handful of salt can make a drab dish more appealing, music engineers learned that turning up the volume can make people pay attention.  And in both cases consumers eventually tire of the excess even if they can't quite pinpoint the cause.  Now that the influence of radio has declined, the stage is set for a return to quality, even if that trend is currently confined to a niche audience of serious listeners.

The loudness issue illustrated that the perceived superiority of vinyl may not be inherent to the format itself but lies more in how it is used.  Indeed, the signal that gets pressed into a vinyl record was most likely in digital form during part or all of its recording, mixing, and mastering.  Many labels even cut the vinyl directly from the CD.

So why does vinyl sound better?  There can be several reasons.  The most important is that an artist who makes a vinyl version of an album is making a record for a more serious listener, and may make different decisions about dynamic compression as described above.  There is also the matter of digital-to-analog conversion.  Making good, linear D/A converters is expensive, and a vinyl listener can benefit from D/A conversion that is done with studio-grade equipment rather than what can be provided in the typical consumer gear.   Also, some engineers theorize that although the RIAA curve that is applied in recording is theoretically balanced out by the inverse curve in playback, that in reality the result is some extra boost in the low frequencies which produces a more pleasing sound.  Finally, one must not discount the listening environment itself.  Just as it is more pleasant to consume a fine meal in a nice restaurant, the experience of opening a large album with artwork large enough to see creates a setting where the music may really sound better.

In any case, it is encouraging to see that artists and their record companies are taking note of the increased interest in quality - something that will benefit the fans and artists alike.

Employee Non-Compete Agreements: Stifling Innovation

On Thursday I went to a panel sponsored by the Harvard Berkman center on the effect of non-compete agreements on the high-tech business in Massachusetts.  Unlike California, where such covenants are illegal, in Massachusetts they are both enforceable and quite commonplace.  The consensus of the panel was that these restrictions are bad for the economy and whatever small benefit they may have for a company seeking to retain its employees is more than offset by the difficulty that same company will have in recruiting.  Prof. Lee Fleming of the Harvard Business School presented some research which showed that non-competes reduce employee mobility by 20 to 30 percent and Paul Maeder of Highland Capital Partners put forth a model that showed how this could reduce the formation of new companies and the growth and innovation they could have provided.  Bijan Sabet of Spark Capital added that his firm discourages companies in its portfolio from demanding non-competes.  Maeder does the same for companies where he sits on the board, but so far has not persuaded his partners, or colleagues in neighboring firms, to take the same stance.  Rich Miner added that Google, which is headquartered in California does not require non-competes from its Massachusetts employees.

WIth all this agreement on the negative effects of non-competes, the mystery is why they persist.  The panelists were not optimistic that the Massachusetts legislature would change the law, since there was not a powerful constituency lobbying for change but there were large employers in the state who like things as they are.  More likely the change would come as newly educated employees weigh job offers in Massachusetts and California and refuse to work at companies that want them to sign.  Also enlightened VCs such as Maeder and Sabet stated they would continue to lobby their collegues at other firms.

Other coverage:

• PC World
• Bijan Sabet's blog
• Scott Kirsner's video

Berkman Panels Thursday on Massachusetts Competitiveness

The Berkman Center at Harvard will be presenting two panel discussions this Thursday on the Massachusetts high tech environment.  The first is on the issue of non-compete agreements, something that we see often in Massachusetts but which are illegal in California.  Is this difference the cause or the result of the relative success of the two regions in fostering new companies?  Find out here on Thursday, although I notice that all of the panelists are from the East Coast.  The second panel takes on the case of Massachusetts' competitiveness in general.

Admission is free, but pre-registration is required.

4:00 Employee Non-Compete Agreements: Protecting Innovation or Stifling It?

• Rich Miner, VP for mobile technology, Google
• Paul Maeder, general partner, Highland Capital Partners
• Lee Fleming, associate professor of business administration, Harvard University
• Bijan Sabet, general partner, Spark Capital
• Moderator: John Palfrey, clinical professor of law and executive director of the Berkman Center

5;15 Making Massachusetts More Competitive

• Lita Nelsen, Director of Technology Licensing, MIT
• Pano Anthos, CEO, Hangout Industries
• Bill Aulet, Senior Lecturer and Entrepreneur-in-Residence, MIT Entrepreneurship Center
• Moderator: Paul Maeder, Highland Capital Partners.

Time: Thursday 19 June 2008 4:00 pm EDT
Place: Ames Courtroom, Austin Hall, Harvard Law School

Paul Otlet and the Mundaneum

Before there was the World Wide Web there was Vannevar Bush's Memex, and before there was the Internet there was the telegraph, a.k.a. the Victorian Internet.  Now on the tenth anniversary of the reopening of the Mundaneum, the Belgian lawyers and inventors Paul Otlet and Henri LaFontaine are getting their due for their introduction in 1910 of their "universal catalog of knowledge."  Occupying 150 rooms in the Palais Mondial, they attempted to index every book ever published and went "multimedia" with magazine articles, photographs, posters and the like.

The staff serviced more than 1,500 inquiries a year from all over the world (at 27 Francs per 1,000 index cards) inspiring Otlet to propose a system for mechanically storing information and transmitting it to researchers over an "electronic telescope."  He also coined the term "link" to describe the connections among documents which he envisioned being connected in a réseau, or network.

The Mundaneum fell on hard times when Belgium lost its bid to become the headquarters of the League of Nations and later was invaded by the Nazis, but has been reconstituted as a museum and has a staff that will perform research in response to an online form.

More information:

• BBC Guide - The Mundaneum - a Universal Catalogue of All the World's Knowledge
• New York Times - The Web Time Forgot
• Video

Mundaneum
Centre d'archives de la Communauté
76 rue de Nimy
7000 Mons
Belgique
Téléphone : +32 65 31 53 43
Fax: +32 65 39 54 86
Email : [email protected]
www.mundaneum.be

 

Trent Reznor Online

New York Times pop music critic John Pareles wrote a lengthy piece on Trent Reznor in last Sunday's paper, Frustration and Fury: Take It. It’s Free, in which he describes how Reznor, recording as Nine Inch Nails, is at the leading edge of several trends in the music business, such as eschewing a deal with a major record label in favor of distributing the music himself from his own web site.  In fact, the download of his most recent album, The Slip, precedes its release on CD and is available for free, a tactic that may very well be repaid in ticket sales for the upcoming tour.

The download is available in a variety of formats:

• mp3 at 256 kbits/sec
• FLAC (open source lossless)
• FLAC 24/96
• Apple lossless
• WAV 24/96

The high bandwidth files are labeled "recommended only for advanced users
and are distributed by BitTorrent.  And, of course, no DRM.

Reznor also gives away the raw tracks from his albums for fans to remix, saying “I’m done with them.  Why not?”

 

T Bone Burnett on ΧΟΔΕ

WNYC's John Schaefer interviewed T Bone Burnett on Soundcheck this Monday.  In addition to discussing T Bone's distinguished musical career and his recent collaboration with Robert Plant and Alison Krauss (who gave a fabulous concert in Boston last week), T Bone described the ΧΟΔΕ (pronounced "Code") project which he started and in which I've been privileged to take part.

ΧΟΔΕ is an effort to create a musical experience for the listener that's as close as possible to what the artist intended but often wasn't heard once the music left the studio and went through the process of digitization, down-sampling, and compression to finally arrive on CD or as a download.  In its first incarnation on the forthcoming John Mellencamp album Life, Death, Love and Freedom, ΧΟΔΕ delivers Mellencamp's music on a DVD with stereo 24 bit/96 kHz uncompressed (Linear PCM) audio tracks.  That's the same format used in the studio to mix and master the music, as opposed to the 16 bit/44.1 kHz files on a CD, which is included in the box, at no extra charge, for backwards compatibility.  And rather than challenge the purchaser to figure out how to rip those files, the DVD also includes a file system with the 24/96 tracks as WAV files that can be played on a computer, and compressed (AAC and MP3 at 256 kbits/sec) files that can be downloaded to portable music players.  Those compressed files are professionally created from the original hi-resolution masters instead of the usual practice of making them after the fact from the CDs.  While all of the above files come in the CD case, those same files can be offered by download sites.

You can hear the complete interview here or read Steve Guttenberg's blog post on CNET.

Note:  ΧΟΔΕ releases are not DVD-Audio, a format that required the purchase of new equipment, were heavily laden with DRM and never saw widespread adoption.  The Mellencamp album is a conventional DVD that will play in any player that supports 24/96 audio, which is almost all of them.  The album is formatted as a video title.  The video is just a still frame, but that's enough to persuade the player to play the audio.  In summary, ΧΟΔΕ is not a new format but makes maximum use of existing formats which have become available since the CD was invented 25 years ago but have not been fully exploited for music until now.

Apple iPhone 3G

When the Apple iPhone came out last year it made me mad.  Now Apple has announced an updated version of the phone and I'm even more mad.  Not at Apple, who have done a fine job, but with the rest of the mobile phone manufacturers who still seem largely asleep to the possibilities of what a mobile phone can be.

First the iPhone 3G features that are not new to Apple but give it parity with other leading-edge devices:

• HSDPA (3G) data connectivity - although this higher-speed network was available in most parts of the world when Apple introduced its original iPhone and has long been available on competing products such as the Nokia N95, Apple took a year to support it on the iPhone, probably due to size and power requirements of the chips that were available then.  Better late than never.
• GPS.  Ditto.
• Enterprise features.  Apple went in one release from claiming they were not interested in business users to providing just about every feature an enterprise IT department could want, such as VPN, remote deactivation.
• An SDK so we can have applications from developers other than those hand-picked by Apple.
• A return to the traditional (in the US anyway) carrier subsidy model, in which AT&T will subsidize the purchase price of the phone but not share any on the recurring revenue.  This will cost AT&T more money in the short term but they will make it up with the higher average revenue per user (ARPU) which for iPhones has been twice their regular take.
• The "unlimited" data plan is increasing in price from te current $20/month to $30 - $45 for "business" users.

But here are the breakthrough features:

• $199 price.  While high for a generic phone, it's a deal for something with this many features and should give it mass-market appeal.  One pitfall is that the $199 price requires a two year contract, which will result in lots of annoyed users a year from now when Apple is likely to release an even better model.
• mobileme -"Exchange for the rest of us."  Syncs email, photos, contacts, calendars.  Some of this is old hat, but why is it that only the iPhone and the Blackberry have true push email instead of lamely expecting the phone to wake up every so often and pull mail off the server?
• As previously announced, the SDK includes the Cocoa framework from the Mac, which encourages building applications that are much more elegant that what one currently expects from a phone.

And the disappointments:

• VoIP is limited to the WiFi network.  I guess Apple still needs to keep AT&T happy.
• No video streaming from the phone.
• Applications must be distributed through the Apple Store and must be "approved" by Apple.
• No background tasks, although Apple will provide a push notification mechanism.

Vinyl Records on the Way Back?

The Boston Globe recently ran a story about vinyl records are making a comeback among a generation that was raised on CDs and digital downloads.

Part of the attraction is the opportunity to collect something tangible and large enough to display real artwork and part of it is the sound, which is often described as warmer and fuller.

The irony is that sometimes the vinyl is made from the original analog tapes or high resolution digital masters, but according to my sources, these records are often made from the same low-res digital source as the CD, sort of like putting the cheap wine (or perfume) in fancy bottles.  It will be interesting to see how this evolves as customers become more sophisticated.