A piece appeared in the Korea Times last week, heralding the emergence of a new music file format called MT9 – which also, predictably and irritatingly, appears to have been labelled "Music 2.0". And in the same way that Web 2.0 is supposedly about us, allowing us to interact with websites and making our own mark on the medium, MT9 also gives us a say in what the music sounds like. Perhaps too much of a say.
The software that plays MT9 files comes with a six-channel mixer, which will allow you to adjust the individual volumes of voice, bass, drums, backing vocals, keyboards and guitars. If you want to sing along to Motorhead, but you're sick of competing with Lemmy's primal growl, well, that's simple. Just turn him down. Or, indeed, off. And if you're keen on examining the stickwork of John Bonham on Led Zep IV, you can just adjust the volumes of Plant, Page and Jones to create your own beat-heavy remix.
While for some this will be a magnificent opportunity to indelibly stamp their own identity on their music collection, history has shown us that, while the listener might think that they know what sounds good, they really don't have a clue.
Take, for example, the abominable hi-fi graphic equalizer. Treble and bass knobs were bad enough (generally people have them both turned up full, because it "sounds better") but the graphic EQ gave everyone the opportunity to erase weeks of hard work in the studio by arbitrarily arranging these spindly little controllers in a vaguely pleasant pattern.
As someone who has spent far too long sat in front of mixing desks and far too much money on professional expertise to get musical recordings sounding just so, I'm always astounded how listeners have the ability to utterly decimate them.
Car stereos don't seem to be accepted as serious pieces of equipment unless the bass end causes your digestive system to react violently. And then there's that utterly laughable button marked "Loudness". Push it in – wow! It sounds amazing! (No it doesn't. It just sounds a bit louder.)
It's no coincidence that the most expensive high-end stereo amplifiers come with an on switch, a volume knob, and nothing else. Because the companies who manufacture them believe, quite rightly, that judgements about the balance of sound ought to be left to the people who created the music.
I'm also a consumer of other people's music, of course. But I've got no idea what's best. So I don't want any kind of stake in the creative process. MT9 will give listeners that desperately want to get involved the opportunity to do so, should the artiste make the misguided decision to make their music available in that format. But to my mind, it's nothing more than a farcical gimmick.
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Perhaps if you bought more independent or old music rather than just popular chart albums and remastered coffee table classics, you might have a use for the graphic equalizer.
Plenty of independent and older music is not, in fact, well-mixed. It might have been produced in someone's bedroom, a cheap studio or simply mastered badly. If you want an example that is relatively popular and easy to find - try And Justice For All by Metallica. This album is notorious for being badly mixed, but with enough fiddling on a graphic equalizer, you can make it sound rather better.
Posted by: Nick | Wednesday, 28 May 2008 at 01:06 PM
You're not going to put "bad mixing" (whatever that might be) right with a graphic equaliser. It's like performing heart surgery with a spatula - and the same goes for this MT9. I've just had an email exchange with David Thomas from the band Pere Ubu about this issue, and he had this to say:
"The bells & whistles of equalization fever reminds me of cake mix. In the 60s when Betty Crocker or whoever it was invented instant cake mix they were perplexed at first why the idea was not selling to women. They ran consumer tests and found that women weren't feeling sufficiently engaged in the "creative" process - so they changed the mix to be dependent on the "cook" adding an egg. Wham-bam - the product took off. The same paradigm lies at the root of any number of product choices - Apple vs IBM, for example. The Morris Minor is the most sophisticated car ever built - it had a GO button and a speedometer (which was placed in such a way as to minimize it's usefulness.) All the computer read-outs of the modern sexy car amount to nothing more than an egg in the mix. The same applies to consumer electronics.
... the bouncing LEDs and five band eq panels of your Japanese home hifi are the product of a fearsome hierarchical methodology that seeks to achieve its aims by brutalizing sonic wave forms. Contrast that with British audio design which emphasizes speaker selection and purity of signal path. On a classic British system you get an on/off switch, a volume control and an input selector. Period. The underlying principle is quite sophisticated— "Who are YOU to screw with the sound? What makes YOU so smart?" Some years ago I remastered one of our old albums for digital reissue. The engineer and I got so frustrated that we were making 15 db cuts & adding 15db peaks at random across the bandwidth. We still couldn't alter the fundamental nature of what we were hearing. We could make the sound hissy or boomy and we could bloat the midrange but its nature would not yield. It was locked into the spatial soundscape of a day and place 20 years ago."
Posted by: Rhodri Marsden | Wednesday, 28 May 2008 at 01:19 PM
Wise words from Mr Thomas there. Of course, the graphic EQ has a very useful role to play in the world of live sound, as it can compensate for acoustic oddities in a performance space. I guess you could say the same to a lesser extent for a home listening environment. But no, those rough EQ units on 80s style home stereos weren't going to help anything sound any better. And don't get me started on "Bass Boost" or "Megabass".
It would be interesting to see if a lossless version of MT9 emerges. It could be a useful, portable multitrack audio format for use in the studio environment. Like a version of .omf that actually, you know, works.
Posted by: Ant | Thursday, 29 May 2008 at 09:31 AM
Let's not forget the cumulative bass effect. A musician (typically a reggae one) goes to a sound system night where the bass is turned up to groundshaking levels. He thinks "Wow, that's the sound I want", and goes into the studio. The engineer mixes his tracks with loads of bass, the muso takes it to the next sound system night where other musos hear it and think "Wow, that's the sound..." etc.
An amplifier should be nothing more that a bit of wire with a gain control. If that doesn't work with your speakers (B**e take note!) there's something wrong with them!
Posted by: Marcus | Thursday, 29 May 2008 at 11:53 AM
Let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater in damning this format. For musicians of all standards, this would be a good thing. We could hear the individual instrumental or vocal parts of a piece of music, allowing us to learn the techniques that make them great (or not so great). And, as a listener who loves good breakdown remixes, e.g. Depeche Mode's numerous versions mainly for the chance to hear clearly the interesting parts that were submerged in the album-version mix, it would be bliss. And of course there's the karaoke application by muting the vocals.
Posted by: Gary Anderson | Wednesday, 18 June 2008 at 08:36 AM
I cant believe what i'm hearing, i have used EQs for years sine i was a kid in the 80's to make things sound better.
1, Mixing and Mastering engineers do put a lot of work into making stuff sound good/ a certain way, but some systems in some envioronments dont reproduce what was intended, so if i want to add a little extra bass or sweep the mids to stop my speakers distorting at high levels cuase they are cheap, how is this wrong.
I have made music sound better for years at parties n stuff cos no matter how well a produciton is excecuted you cannot predict that it will reach its full potential with out some adjustments to suit the room and the system.
Once i set and e.q it stays like that for all the music on that system.
having the abilioty to manipulate actual levels of different track however is a totally different kettle of fish, easy to make your own Karaoke maybe! but what a disaster this will be for the average person.
Posted by: tooth | Friday, 17 October 2008 at 02:52 AM
By the way I now have wharfdale so my main system sounds perfect without adjustment but i still have to set the level and crossover on my subwoofer do i not?
Plus what happens to all that sound when you listen to an MP3, Did you mix to compensate for that???
You are also forgetting the quality of the playback device A lense system in a CD player can add or remove sound/ distortion its a fact! so all you Purists out there who think your shit dont stink....well it does so let us the Listener be the judge of how we enjoy our music, stop destroying the Sound Dynamics with your massive compression/limiting and start to worry about if the song is actually worth producing at all...thats what should be in question.
Posted by: tooth | Friday, 17 October 2008 at 03:03 AM
Mr. Marsden,
The EQ is not the audio bogeyman that you make it out to be. I know that you as an artist want the listener to hear the music as you intended for it to sound. That piece of music may have been recorded and released 30 years old and may have been originally released on an LP. You get the best experience out of a song when you listen to it on its originally recorded media (not a scratched up, worn out LP mind you), and played back on equipment from that period (again, not a worn out piece of equipment). Now, flash foward 30 years, the MP3 version of the song ripped from the LP, "digitally remastered" (or digitally remuddled) and played on an iPod or modern speakers won't sound much like the original artist intended for it to sound. In comes the EQ. While you cannot exactly duplicate the original sound on modern equipment, tweaking the EQ can bring the sound somewhat closer to the original sound. It may not sound absolutely perfect, but at least one is trying to listen to the sound in its original context, if you will.
Posted by: joe | Thursday, 18 December 2008 at 04:36 AM
As has been said above, it's *laughable* to imagine that tweaking a 5-band or 2-band EQ on a hifi system is in any way going to compensate for a song being encoded into MP3 format, or played over certain speakers. Audio companies spend enormous amounts of cash either perfecting a compression codec, or developing speaker and amplifier combinations, and we imagine that we can "correct their mistakes" by lifting a whole shelf of frequencies by 5 or 10 db? Pur-lease.
A knackered old cassette could be vaguely improved by whacking up the treble frequencies a bit, as could the sound in a room at a party when the speakers are stuck behind the sofa, but that's about as sophisticated as consumer EQ gets.
Posted by: Rhodri Marsden | Thursday, 18 December 2008 at 08:24 AM
Don't forget us that have some hearingproblem, due to age, only on certain frequences. Theres a equalizer good. I can now hear my old records as I remember them from 40 odd years ago.
Posted by: Henning | Friday, 27 March 2009 at 06:02 AM