When you stick a song on a tape, you set it free.
You can't just stick someone's name on a headphone that doesn't know anything about sound.
As Eric Dolphy said 'Once you play the music, it's in the air. It's gone'. And that's true. But when you record it, it comes back to haunt you sometimes.
Young people have decided they like to listen to music in a certain way, through ear buds, and that's fine with me as long as it doesn't bother them that they're not hearing 90 percent of the music that way.
All of audio as we know it is an attempt to be more and more perfectly linear. Linearity means higher quality sound. Hypersonic sound is exactly the opposite: it's 100 percent based on non-linearity.
When you hear a large symphony orchestra. for instance, in a concert hall, there's a big, sweeping sound that just doesn't get on to a record.
If all the elements are in place, you should get 80 percent of what a song has to offer no matter how you hear it, whether on headphones or on the radio.
I think that if people realize that with an mp3, you're only getting five percent of the sound that's there. But when you hear the entire thing... I think it would save the music business. It's such a drastic change.
The only way a ventriloquist speaks differently is that he forgoes using his or her lips, and learns to reproduce sounds using the tongue, upper palate, and teeth only. Those 'difficult' letters are B, F, M, P, V, W, and Y.
At the end of the day, you're just phonograph records.
PHONOGRAPH, n. An irritating toy that restores life to dead noises.
I told [Kruesi] I was going to record talking, and then have the machine talk back. He thought it absurd. However, it was finished, the foil was put on; I then shouted "Mary had a little lamb," etc. I adjusted the reproducer, and the machine reproduced it perfectly. On first words spoken on a phonograph.
When you hear a great two-track of a performance in Carnegie Hall, let's say, it sounds like you're right there at that moment. It's true to reality. And the closer it gets, once it gets too technical, it becomes very tinny to hear notes. It doesn't sound right. It has to be natural.
Onstage I like to play with a an 18-inch speaker, which very few bass players do. I need that fat, underneath sound, which I've always had. It suits me admirably to do it like that, and I can imitate that sound by plugging directly into the board in the studio.
I loved music, and in my ninth year at MIT, I decided to buy a hi-fi set. I figured that all I needed to do was look at the specifications. So I bought what looked like the best one, turned it on, and turned it off in five minutes, the sound was so poor.
You can find the greatest sound of all time, and someone's going to squash it down to a tiny little earphone anyway or play it through the computer, and that is a big thing people have to think about now.
It's all about sound. It's that simple. Wireless is wireless, and it's digital. Hopefully somewhere along the line somebody will add more ones to the zeros. When digital first started, I swear I could hear the gap between the ones and the zeros.
When I was younger, I just liked the sound of different accents, and I used to just play around to see if I could do things. I hear accents like music, so that's what helps me to learn them.
When you're listening to a recording, you're supposedly listening to some aspect of the past in the present as you travel slowly into the future, but you also know there's a very strong likelihood that the future of that recording, whether you made it or whether you're listening to a Led Zeppelin record, is going to continue probably far beyond where you are.
Well, I happen to have a love of vocal reproduction devices.
People are making a lot of music and higher and higher quality. I can't say the same thing for how people are listening to music. People are hearing music through terrible speakers, little computer speakers, there's a lot to get back to in terms of hi-fi and people listening to better quality, technically better quality music.
I want my music to sound good on whatever people are listening - laptop speakers, those crappy little white ones you get with your PC.
Well, I'm a tape-recording nut. I like to play my tapes.
Zeppelin vinyl is quite revered in audiophile circles.
The sound is very much always in my head, I have to get the sound out of my head onto the recording.
