Lady GaGa apparently wants to tell you how to listen

Artists who understand their audience maximise their recordings to fit the technology that audience will use.

So, the best artists of the 1960s tailored their mixes to sound good on transistors. By the 1990s, engineers strove to make the best of the CD format.

Some people, though, just stick out recordings and expect you to conform. That group includes your GaGa:

The singer teased the LP in a series of tweets this morning, emphasizing both the lush quality of her material and her hatred for poor fidelity. "oh, & just a suggestion... use HEADPHONES when listening to the new music, ARTPOP is ELECTRONIC CANDY & DELISH ON THE EARS," she wrote. "THE SPEAKERS ON YOUR COMPUTER are NOT ACCEPTABLE, unless you like hearing music underwater. I do not."

Yeah, you. You organise your life round Lady GaGa's demands.

(I can't even begin to run after the stick that is calling your album Artpop, and then insisting it's electronic candy. I don't think any of us have the energy.)

Frankly, GaGa, if you're making music right now and don't expect it to be consumed - at best - on tiny little earbuds after having been compressed onto a phone or over a sub-perfect broadband system - you're not making pop at all.

Darkness at 3AM: Noel buys a radiogram

Apparently convinced he's ninety years old, Noel Gallagher has tried to make a purchase. The Mirror has the details:

“I went to Selfridges and asked for a ghetto blaster. The guy looked at me like I was asking for an obsolete part of a spaceship.

“I was going, ‘You know? Handle, two speakers, put a CD in and you get music?’ Eventually, the guy said: ‘CD? We’ve got iPod docks.’ What’s going on?”

Actually, if you were looking for obsolete parts of spaceships, wouldn't that be futuristic rather than retro?

You've got to love that plaintive 'what's going on?', as if iPods were somehow newfangled devices and hadn't been around for ten years. I wonder how Noel is getting on with digital switchover? Has he lost BBC Two?

This just in: Selfridges have released CCTV footage of Gallagher attempting to make his purchase:

The end of the Linn: CD players dumped

Linn have announced that they're ceasing production of CD players:

Gilad Tiefenbrun, managing director of Linn Products, said: "Our customers have fast recognised the limitations of CD players and in the age of home networking, people now want better control of their music and the ability to enjoy it in any room of their home.

"CD players no longer belong in the specialist domain."

To be honest, I suspect hi-fi heads have been looking for an excuse to drop the format ever since you started to be able to buy CD players for less than a couple of hundred quid - the joy of owning them for early adopters was more in pretending that they were worth all the extra bunce you had to drop and the sense of exclusivity. Now, they're to be left to the sort of people who shop in Argos, once and for all.

[via @emalyse]

Hooky unhappy with lossy New Order

Unlike Metallica, who somehow are trying to tell fans that their dissatisfaction with the poor sound quality on the new record is wrong, New Order are actually leading the attacks on the Warners re-release series. Or at least, Peter Hook is - although his name has fallen off ContactMusic's report:

He claimed that the record industry has changed over the years, saying: "They don't have half the staff they used to have so everything becomes quite a trial, and I know from doing the Hacienda compilation tape, you get a lot of masters of old songs - they are mastered from the record because nobody can find the tape."

The bassist also said it was "intensely annoying" that Warners had chosen to distribute the re-issues to the shops before sending them to the band, deeming it "a masterful piece of planning".

I know Hook is being sarcastic, but he's probably hit the needle on the playhead: if you know the records are a bit ropey and the artist is going to kick up a fuss, you probably would plan to release them before seeking feedback. Not only does it stop costs spiralling out of control as you try to placate a famously grumpy bassist, but it opens the doors to yet another bloody edition of the same records five year's hence, with promises of Hook-pleasing fidelity.

Metallica: It sounds alright to us

The grinding complaints and counter-complaints about the quality of the sound of the Metallica album continues. Now Lars Ulrich has waded in, telling people who've complained they should ignore the evidence of their own ears and accept that they're wrong:

Rick Rubin's whole thing is to try and get it to sound lively, to get it (to) sound loud, to get it to sound exciting, to get it to jump out of the speakers. Of course, I've heard that there are a few people complaining. But I've been listening to it the last couple of days in my car, and it sounds fuckin' smokin.

Isn't the heart of the complaints that it doesn't sound exciting?

Still, Lars can't ignore the complaints from the fans. There has to be a reason for them, right? Hey... you don't suppose it's your old nemesis The Internet, do you, Lars?

"The difference between back then and now is the internet. The internet gives everybody a voice, and the Internet has a tendency to give the complainers a louder voice."

How much happier we all were when people who had complaints had no voice and had to just shut up and swallow it down, eh, Ulrich?

Metallica: Fortunately, most of our fans are almost deaf

Metallica's management have rejected the complaints about the pisspoor sound on the new album, using the time-honoured excuse of providers of poor service that "nobody else has complained":

Metallica and the album's producer, Rick Rubin, declined to comment. Cliff Burnstein, Metallica's co-manager, says the complainers are a tiny minority. He says 98% of listeners are "overwhelmingly positive," adding: "There's something exciting about the sound of this record that people are responding to."

See? It's not shitty or botched, people. It's "exciting". They're going to try this down my local taco stand the next time someone finds a finger in their chili - "that's not unhygienic, that's exciting, that is."

Still, 98% of people are "overwhelmingly positive", are they? Let's not jump all over the guy and assume that he's using "overwhelmingly positive" in the sense of "they haven't complained" here - and that his figure isn't just made up off the top of his head. That still means, on an album that's sold over a million copies, that's still twenty thousand people having a slightly negative experience - and we're using "slightly negative" in the same incorrect sense.

Metallica: New album sounds bloody awful

Not the songs themselves - that's a matter of taste (they do sound bloody awful, though) - but the audio quality on the record. Indeed, analysis of Death Magnetic by Chris Vinnecombe suggests the fidelity on the CD is so poor, you'd be better off buying the USD18 download of the tracks for Guitar Hero and recording that.

As is often the way, there's an online petition appeared calling for the album to be given a fresh mix but a cynic might wonder if the release of a fairly duff version of the record is part of a policy allowing for a "fully remastered" album in a couple of years?

Radiohead: hear before you buy

There's a lot of coverage about XFM's plans to play the Radiohead album in full from mid-day tomorrow, but they're actually being scooped by the NME which is going to publish an audio-dribble of the whole thing from 10 am tomorrow morning.

Meanwhile, as Simon points out in the comments down there, there's a squall blowing around the Radiohead downloads, with complaints that 160 kbps bitrates aren't exactly the highest of hi-fi rates. Although, to be honest, we're mentally filing this alongside those people who complain about the sound quality on DAB, as a problem which exists solely in the ears of people who actually spend more time perfecting the diamond of sound in between their speakers rather than browsing in record shops.

One thing remains perfectly clear/ it's the buzz buzz buzz in the drum of the ear

Music engineers are starting a campaign against peak limiting, the practice where music is mastered so that the quiet bits are effectively pumped out, resulting in tracks sounding either "punchy" or "flat, loud, distorted and rubbish", depending on your point of view.

I say "launching a campaign", it seems to be more grumbling about it to The Times, but every campaign starts somewhere.

Peter Mew, senior mastering engineer at Abbey Road studios, said: “Record companies are competing in an arms race to make their album sound the ‘loudest’. The quieter parts are becoming louder and the loudest parts are just becoming a buzz.”
[...]
“The brain is not geared to accept buzzing. The CDs induce a sense of fatigue in the listeners. It becomes psychologically tiring and almost impossible to listen to. This could be the reason why CD sales are in a slump.”

The record companies? Surprisingly, they don't see a problem, some cheerfully admitting they release records with sound mangled so that it that it can be heard above background chatter in pubs or above car engines:

Domino, Arctic Monkeys’ record company, defended its band’s use of compression on their chart-topping albums, as a way of making their music sound “impactful”.

Because Alex's word play and the band's skills as musicians, presumably, fall short?

Bob Dylan has also said something about this - or "joined the campaign", apparently:

Bob Dylan has joined the campaign for a return to musical dynamics. He told Rolling Stone magazine: “You listen to these modern records, they’re atrocious, they have sound all over them. There’s no definition of nothing, no vocal, no nothing, just like – static.”

Although with the way his voice sounds these days, you'd think he'd welcome this development.