Fun with WAV files.

[Greg Aubry]

While I was working on the David Reilly Night tribute stuff that I uploaded, I couldn't help but get curious about a couple of things, so I started extracting WAV files from some of the GLU discs.

In particular, I wanted to know exactly what happened to the Up Off The Floor tracks. The short answer of course is that we'll never know for sure. But the three primary symptoms look like this:

1. The tracks are "mastered" to a level of -10 decibels. Typically, CDs are mastered as close the 0-decibel digital threshold as possible to get the songs as loud as they can. Just for the heck of it, I brought up the volume of these tracks and just listened. I shouldn't have, which brings me to the next point.

2. There is weird, glassy-sounding MP3-like artifacting on the tracks. You can particularly hear it in the cymbals and in a lot of the vocals.

3. The tracks are brickwall-limited to $h!+. Limiters can be used smartly to eliminate unwanted transients (unexpected loud notes or drum hits, whatever), but most transients are a natural part of the song (the nice attack of a good snare hit, a punchy guitar chord, what have you) and you want them there for impact. There are barely any transients on UOTF at all. It's a sludge of LOUD with no attack behind it. The songs don't breathe at all this way.

I don't get it.

My other "curiosity project" involved the Life in the So-Called Space Age track "Medicated to the One I Love." I'm sure you guys have all occasionally wondered what the backwards portion of the song was. I was really hoping to hear some cool hidden message that I never bothered to extract all this time.

Not so.

The backwards part is simply the last stanza of the song reversed. There's kind of a neat effect in that it sounds exactly the same when you get through it all and start hearing the backwards part again, but that's about it. Sometimes there's no big secret. Sometimes the butler is just the butler.

Just thought I'd share.

[Lord Nikon]

*holds a pipe* hmmm, quite

[asamorris]

i figured the medicated thing was common knowledge. hmm.

[gthesob]

Me too. They have a specific and easily identifiable sound.

My brother used to sing the backwards lyrics for the hell of it.

[Jawa242]

i figured the medicated thing was common knowledge. hmm.

ditto

[Juno106]

Listening to the "glassy" sound - whoever mastered the CD for duplication F'ed it up nicely. It sounds like ill compression (data, not signal). A nyquest filter filters out the frequencys above a digital recording's dynamic range. CD's are at 44.1 sampling rate, divide that number in half gives you the best possible frequency response = 22kHz - above the human ear and most peoples stereo systems. A nyquist filter is used above the available frequency response to filter out the digital noise that is a artifact of the digital audio sampling process.

If a file's sampling rate is 22.05, digital hash will be heard at 11K and up. 12K is the frequency most treble knobs on an average stereo system is. A nyquist filter will be set to filter everything out above 11K, thus, no hash. It sounds to me like someone monkeyed with the sampling rate as it went to press, and there's no nyquist filter applied.

One example I can think of is BMW Films - remember those? People were calling it the "icicle effect". A lot of low bit rate quicktime videos sound this way too.

Anyway, it sucks. Sorry to get all professor.

[Vertigo]

Love the smears on the micro-attacks do ya? Frequent Hydrogen Audio much?

I hope you grab a hold of the promo, the mp3 releaser group ESC was the one to give credit to for that one. It's in alt preset standard I believe, so it should be trasperant to most ears. I never understood why the official release company retouched an already mastered product...blows my #### mind.