How much do the general public actually care about music production quality?

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You all are arguing one of the deepest and philosophical questions of all time, good vs bad.

There is never going to be an answer to this question because it will always be relative to the situation.

I will sum it up in one word: "cocaine"... good or bad?

100% pure cocaine is good, 10% cut cocaine bad.

We all agree that ingesting cocaine every minute of every hour of every day is bad.

But a bump here and there with a drink? Good?

If you had two choices the 100% vs 10% which would you pick?

If the choice was 50% vs 10%?

If all that was left was 10% is it better than none?

When a dealer cuts higher then normal and the word gets out everyone knows where to go. Better shit right? What happens when people shoot up 100% when they are used to less... They die. Everyone goes back to less.

We can go on and on.

Music is the same.

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emtear wrote:You all are arguing one of the deepest and philosophical questions of all time, good vs bad.

There is never going to be an answer to this question because it will always be relative to the situation.

I will sum it up in one word: "cocaine"... good or bad?

100% pure cocaine is good, 10% cut cocaine bad.

We all agree that ingesting cocaine every minute of every hour of every day is bad.

But a bump here and there with a drink? Good?

If you had two choices the 100% vs 10% which would you pick?

If the choice was 50% vs 10%?

If all that was left was 10% is it better than none?

When a dealer cuts higher then normal and the word gets out everyone knows where to go. Better shit right? What happens when people shoot up 100% when they are used to less... They die. Everyone goes back to less.

We can go on and on.

Music is the same.
Now, if only I could convince people that my music is the same as cocaine, I could totally charge more.

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ghettosynth wrote: Now, if only I could convince people that my music is the same as cocaine, I could totally charge more.
Isn't that the point?

The essence of being an artist, convincing everyone your art is better so you can charge more.

Does anyone really need art or cocaine for that matter? No. But they all want it!

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Far too often people confuse "clean and hi-fi" with "good".
I think good is what gets your point across, what your vision is, what your music is about.
There are also those that think that a painting is better the more it looks like an actual object.

A guitar sound isn't good or bad depending on whether it's clean and chimey or distorted and muddy, it depends on the song. This doesn't mean that it doesn't matter what your guitar sound is, it just matters if it's right for what you're trying to get across.

People can't tell what they are listening to. But they respond to the presentation, you can't just give them anything. If it didn't matter what it sounded like you could just sing it to them and they'd like it just as much.

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To answer the original question:

Surely the general public can tell instantly good from bad sound / production quality.

They might however not be able to articulate what exactly makes it good or bad. Because that requires a trained ear, some knowledge about how it is produced and the tools involved, and the technical jargon we use to communicate about these things.

Whether they care: who knows :shrug:

Oh, and better first define "quality". It's subjective and depends on taste...
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emtear wrote:You all are arguing one of the deepest and philosophical questions of all time, good vs bad.

There is never going to be an answer to this question because it will always be relative to the situation.

I will sum it up in one word: "cocaine"... good or bad?

100% pure cocaine is good, 10% cut cocaine bad.
I'm absolutely not arguing 'good vs bad'. Your argumentation is idiotic, frankly (eg., the uncut music will kill you. Ahh, no.). Cocaine bad, this much is clear. Stop it. :lol:

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It's like saying, what is a good car? If you were Mister Bean, a three wheeler would do. But Michael Schumacher would prefer something with four wheels.
Anyone who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.

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BertKoor wrote:To answer the original question:

Surely the general public can tell instantly good from bad sound / production quality.
Oh no. They can tell gross differences, but not subtle differences "instantly." Surely you have enough experiences with your untrained friends and/or significant other to recognize the folly in this perspective?

That said, this is what I was getting at, I think that they do tune out over a longer term when something is fatiguing about what they're listening to.
Oh, and better first define "quality". It's subjective and depends on taste...
Well, I think that even being specific about what attributes we're talking about at all is going to shape the conversation. The problem is that you're quickly going to reduce the experiment to something less useful. This is the challenge with these types of studies.

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jancivil wrote:
emtear wrote:You all are arguing one of the deepest and philosophical questions of all time, good vs bad.

There is never going to be an answer to this question because it will always be relative to the situation.

I will sum it up in one word: "cocaine"... good or bad?

100% pure cocaine is good, 10% cut cocaine bad.
I'm absolutely not arguing 'good vs bad'. Your argumentation is idiotic, frankly (eg., the uncut music will kill you. Ahh, no.). Cocaine bad, this much is clear. Stop it. :lol:

i like to think that one day, my art will be used to kill alien invaders :)
or communicate with cool aliens.

cocaine is bad, from my experience. listening to some prick go on about how great his night has been!
dude you spent it sniffing a toilet cistern, ill stick with the acid thanks...

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The general public has always heard excellent sound engineering and/or production. All of the hits and mass produced tunes on radio are well recorded and mixed. Rarely does your average music listener venture outside the mainstream - which could have been recorded in local studios and not the greatest rooms/equipment/engineers. The general public also experience good sound engineering/production in the movies and TV shows that they watch.

So there is some kind of a standard to aspire to - although the general public may not exactly know why. People like their bass - all the portable music players I have seen all had the Bass Enhance button switched on. People play their tunes, press the Bass button, and it sounds better to them. So they leave it engaged.

I think that as long as you are in the ballpark volume wise, and frequency wise, for the genre you are producing, you are good. It doesn't have to be perfect, but balanced. No piercing frequencies that kill your ears on listening - which means buttery smooth vocals above all and a controlled midrange. And it should sound equally good on several sound systems.
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I think they don't care, but if someone listens to mixes than don't sound good again and again, they begin to notice and this spoils listening experience, after all.

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a point is being lost here, we have the music cafe at KvR and face it that is going to influence how much we care about how the quality of the production is. I like Jan write music for myself, I simply love to play guitar. I'm not in love with performing for others and really have little interest in doing so, if I were to join another band it wold be for the sake of more input and perhaps fresher perspectives. But when you post a song here in the cafe or on other sites I think it's common to expect people to listen more critically here.

John Q Public says things like "this sounds like something I would hear on the radio" to me, but you know what? I have heard that from recordings of bands I have been in when we stuck a boombox in the back of the room/auditorium to 4-track cassette songs to songs done on a state of the art DAW. That would suggest to me that the production quality doesn't mean jack to many of them. In fact this is kind of backed up by people of my generation listened to music on LP's that were *gulp* played on BSR turntables which is akin to playing an lp with pickax in my opinion. We stacked the albums up and as one completed the next one dropped down on top of the other an continued to play. A dozen plays like this and you were getting pops, clicks, hiss, fizz, gurgles and skips but we still came home put on Dark Side of the Moon and was amazed by it. Think about that for a moment, we now hear DSOTM in pristine conditions compared when it took the world by storm. Did we say "imagine how this will sound when technology comes up with a a media form that stays consistent"? I still remember where I was when I first heard Dark Side on a CD on my jaw dropped. A friend had a Pioneer CD player, Pioneer receiver and Klipsch speakers (with rear facing passive radiators) placed in the corners of his tiny bedroom.
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festeringheap wrote:All of the hits and mass produced tunes on radio are well recorded and mixed.
They aren't.


I recall not that long ago a brouhaha here about some Adele record. I believe it was called Hello. I may be wrong. It sounded like ass. Not good ass, I'm sorry to report but foul flatulence of old stumblebum ass. There was horrible distortion and the drums were deliberately THUD-LIKE. Not Captain Beefheart good thud-like, where John French was made to put corrugated cardboard circles on drums so they wound up doing 'bumpf, doof', no. Just taking all the life, obliterating the very drumness itself from a (probably shite) recording of some form of drums by EQ or some tactic. I tend to imagine they did more than one thing to it, they were so f**king clever here.

It is one of the grossest musical experiences of my life. I wouldn't know about it except for exactly this sub-forum here, but I was morbidly curious so I checked it out. Over one billion views at that time. A just MASSIVE hit. So the ad populum fallacy was demonstrated brightly here.

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I did not grow up in money. I had some very bleak Radio Shack turntable and I think there was a receiver, FM radio receiver for an amplifier and some equally bleak little speakers. There was something a bit better in the living room when my parents were still married, a Magnavox deal, again the radio receiver was the amplifier and it was all housed in the one piece of wood. So that could go quite a bit louder than what I ended up getting with Green Stamps or something when I was like 13. That's all I ever had, in fact.

So, I didn't hear anything really hi fidelity until I'd recorded this song the son of this guy used to work for my father in Civil's Drugs wrote. That's right. Beatlesy thing, the outchorus did C G A over and over like it's supposed to. And I did a pretty happenin' guitar solo if I must say so. So Chris Terman and I got high one day and took it into a very highend sort of deal on East Blvd, audiophile store with all the big deal equipment you would read about, and I acted like a big shot and so they let us play the tape over and over. It was more or less pro-sounding because he had ambitions for it because of Ron Hart, WIST jock who was from LA, who worked for UA at this time & was everybody's pal at Freedom Park when we were kids, who took a shine to my singer-songwriter friend. His actual job was more to score blow for Ike Turner and procure whores for Wet Willie, like that.

True story.

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Hink wrote:a point is being lost here, we have the music cafe at KvR and face it that is going to influence how much we care about how the quality of the production is. I like Jan write music for myself, I simply love to play guitar. I'm not in love with performing for others and really have little interest in doing so, if I were to join another band it wold be for the sake of more input and perhaps fresher perspectives. But when you post a song here in the cafe or on other sites I think it's common to expect people to listen more critically here.

John Q Public says things like "this sounds like something I would hear on the radio" to me, but you know what? I have heard that from recordings of bands I have been in when we stuck a boombox in the back of the room/auditorium to 4-track cassette songs to songs done on a state of the art DAW. That would suggest to me that the production quality doesn't mean jack to many of them. In fact this is kind of backed up by people of my generation listened to music on LP's that were *gulp* played on BSR turntables which is akin to playing an lp with pickax in my opinion. We stacked the albums up and as one completed the next one dropped down on top of the other an continued to play. A dozen plays like this and you were getting pops, clicks, hiss, fizz, gurgles and skips but we still came home put on Dark Side of the Moon and was amazed by it. Think about that for a moment, we now hear DSOTM in pristine conditions compared when it took the world by storm. Did we say "imagine how this will sound when technology comes up with a a media form that stays consistent"? I still remember where I was when I first heard Dark Side on a CD on my jaw dropped. A friend had a Pioneer CD player, Pioneer receiver and Klipsch speakers (with rear facing passive radiators) placed in the corners of his tiny bedroom.
There is a difference in playing a very expensive and great produced production on different mediums and something that is still good produced but can not reach this standard.
Pink Floyd will sound good on anything.

It seems widely suggested that today standards are superior to the old standards.Yes Recording is much cleaner and the benefit to work using a computer is imo superior but to translate that and to produce a great sound/record is very difficult and i think it will be like that in the not foreseeable future because that's what separate the industry and the consumer.

What happens often today is that home productions are mastered by professionals for commercial use.That's why there are sometimes odd sounding productions that sound quite well.

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