This video is about a bunch of stuff you probably didn't know about CDs.
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Own your music, because you never know when you can't access "your" music online any more. 📀 Exactly. I still listen to CDs and watch DVDs. (I also read paper books.) 📀 Digital files are still the easier way to keep music alive unfortunately. CDs are excellent for sound quality but terrible for density and will eventually go bad from disc rot. I'd recommend FLAC or another unlocked lossless format to keep your music. 📀 Exactly, as long as I have electricity, I can play my 300+ CD collection. I can load up my Sony Walkmans(6) with mp3 from my CD’s. I have an aux plug in my car, 📀 For me the biggest fail was the removal of the CD players in modern cars. I have multiple CDs at home and I can’t listen to them. 📀
ONE MORE THING you probably didn't know: if you one day discover "pin-hole" rot in your favorite disk and it no longer plays through - that is, a spot that you can see daylight through when holding the disk up to a light source - you can restore it and still play it if you use a dab of acrylic paint to cover the hole on the top/label side. Once you block that hole, or even several holes, the laser is again able to read what's imprinted on the disk.
Happy Record Store Day! There are plenty of business-relatedgrievances to be filed against the annual vinyl celebration, but it’s hard to argue with the spirit of a day encouraging people to explore and buy new music. Moreover, vinyl’s just more fun as a format than MP3s or CDs; there’s something viscerally satisfying about dropping the needle, and physically spinning the record back to rewind. And in a world where people feel all too welcome to hijack the playlist at parties they attend, it’s nice to have a
harder-to-commandeer format on offer.
Let’s not fool ourselves, though. Vinyl is great, but the idea that its sound quality is superior to that of uncompressed digital recordings is preposterous. They sound different, and that’s exactly the point.
What Vinyl Can’t Do
Mastering for Vinyl
An introduction, in plain non technical language, on preparing your tunes for vinyl record cutting and pressing
A nice explanation of some of the challenges of mastering vinyl.
On a theoretical level, there’s just no reason it should be the case that vinyl sounds better. There are built-in problems with
using vinyl as a data encoding mechanisms that have no CD equivalent. Vinyl is physically limited by the fact that records have to be capable of being played without skipping or causing distortion. That both limits the dynamic range — the difference between the loudest and softest note — and the range of pitches (or “frequencies”) you can hear.
If notes get too low in pitch, that means less audio can fit in a given amount of vinyl. If notes are too high, the stylus has difficulty tracking them, causing distortion. So engineers mastering for vinyl often cut back on extreme high or low ends, using a variety of methods, all of which alter the music.
For example, one common cause of high pitches in recordings is “sibilance,” or the hiss-y sound produced by pronouncing certain consonants, notably “s” or “z"s, in a quick, sharp way (ex.: "zip,” “shack,” “sap”). This creates enough problems for engineers working in vinyl that they often have to “de-ess” recordings, either by making the pronunciation less sibilant through editing or by straight-up asking vocalists to pronounce lyrics differently.
De-essing is a common technique outside vinyl too, but then it’s an artistic choice; vinyl forces de-essing upon you. If you want to keep aggressive sibilance in for
aesthetic reasons, and want to press to vinyl, you’re out of luck. And when de-essing is achieved through re-recording vocals, it can alter the music in subtler ways, making vocalists deliver lyrics less intensely and lose a degree of artistic expression in the process.
What CDs Can Do
Since CDs rely on sampling an original analog signal being recorded, they do have some frequency limitations. While vinyl records, in theory, directly encode a smooth audio wave, CDs sample that audio wave at various points and then collate those samples. “No matter how high a sampling rate is,” Wired’s Eliot Van Buskirk once wrote, “it can never contain all of the data present in an analog groove.”
That’s true. CDs work by taking a bunch of samples from a source audio wave and stringing them together. But this criticism is misleading on two counts. For one thing, vinyl pressing is not error-free, and the analog groove of a given record is not a precise replication of the audio wave recorded in the master, not least due to extreme high and low frequency limitations. It’s true that CDs can’t exactly replicate the whole audio wave in a master, in every case (update: in many cases, the Nyquist-Shannon theorem means it can) — but neither can vinyl records.
More importantly, the volume of sampling that CDs do should be enough to get a replica of the original recording that sounds identical to the human ear. The sampling rate for CDs is 44.1kHz, meaning that CD recordings sample the master recording 44,100 times a second, and can capture frequencies as high as 20 kHz. That is about the limit of what humans can hear; at least one experiment has confirmed that listeners in blind tests can’t tell the difference between recordings that include frequencies above 21k and ones that don’t. You may think you can hear more than CDs are giving you. But you probably can’t.
And over time, engineers have come to make better use of those 44.1kHz. Scott Metcalfe, director of recording arts and sciences at Johns Hopkins’s Peabody Institute, explains that engineers have taken to “oversampling,” making digital files that use a much higher rate than 44.1kHz, and then compressing that back down to 44.1kHz for the actual CD. “It captures the signal at a much much higher sample rate and then mathematically takes it down to 44.1kHz,” Metcalfe says. “It does a really good job of preserving information.”
Metcalfe brings up another problem with this line of CD criticism. Even if an actual recording method can hold frequencies above 20kHz, that doesn’t matter if there isn’t a microphone capable of capturing them in the first place, or a speaker capable of playing them back. And most studios don’t have microphones that record above 20kHz, and it’s very rare for speakers to play frequencies above that. Indeed, most playback systems feature low-pass filters, which specifically cut off anything above that marker.
The fact of the matter is that CDs can create closer facsimiles than vinyl can.
What do People Actually Prefer?
Simply as a matter revealed preferences, the fact that Americans buy digital copies of songs at a much greater rate than alternatives suggests that they’d rather listen to digital music or CDs than vinyl. Taking both actual albums and track sales into account, the equivalent of 243.5 million digital albums were sold last year, compared to 165.4 million CDs and 6.1 million vinyl records. Given that compressed digital audio is considerably lower in quality than either CDs or vinyl, consumer certainly seem to care a lot less about audio quality than convenience.
But that’s kind of an unfair comparison, given exactly that convenience differential. You can’t fit thousands of tracks’ worth of vinyl in your pocket and listen to it while jogging. So what happens if you set all else equal, and have people compare digital and analog audio in a controlled setting?
Unfortunately, no one appears to have done a double blind listener test comparing vinyl to CDs, but there is a good study from Florida State’s John Geringer and Patrick Dunnigan doing that with CDs and high-quality cassette recordings. While cassettes sold to consumers often featured lower audio quality than vinyl records, there’s nothing inherent to magnetic tape requiring that, and the format doesn’t suffer from the frequency limits imposed by the risk of vinyl skipping. It’s not a perfect test for our purposes, but knowing how people feel about high-quality analog stacked up to high-quality digital should tell us something about comparing vinyl to CDs.
Geringer and Dunnigan used identical microphone and mixing board setups to record four different concerts, each time using both a digital record
and a high-quality analog cassette recorder (the MR-3 from audiophile favorite brand Nakamichi). They then had 40 music majors listen to the recordings, either with loudspeakers or headphones, while letting them switch between each recording at will. The test subjects were not aware of which was the digital recording, and which was the analog one. They were then asked to record their preferences.
It turns out that the music majors had a significant preferences for digital. “Participants gave significantly higher ratings to the digital presentations in bass, treble, and overall quality,” Geringer and
Dunnigan write. The results were weaker on some points than others (recordings of string orchestras were a particularly close call) but in no case was the average rating of the analog version higher than the average rating of the digital one. The most analog-generous thing to be taken away from the study is that there are some types of music for which people have no preference. But there were several where people had a real, noticeable preference for digital.
Dylan Matthewsis a senior correspondent and head writer for Vox’s Future Perfect section and has worked at Vox since 2014. He is particularly interested in global health and pandemic prevention, anti-poverty efforts, economic policy and theory, and conflicts about the right way to do philanthropy.
So Why do People Love Vinyl?
Perhaps the best audio-based case for vinyl is actually precisely the fact that it does mess up the original recording. A lot of vinyl fans talk about the “warmth” of records, particularly of the low-end. But, as Pitchfork’s Mark Richardson puts it, “the ‘warmth’ that many people associate with LPs can generally be described as a bass sound that is less accurate.” The difficulty of accurately translating bass lines to vinyl without making grooves too big means that engineers have to do a lot of processing to get it to work, which changes the tone of the bass in a way that, apparently, many people find aesthetically pleasing.
“Warmth” also comes from flaws in record players. As the University of Waterloo’s Stanley Lipshitz once explained to Popular Science, speaker sound and the needle’s height fluctuations can cause the record to vibrate, which the needle in turn picks up and
translates into a “warmer” seeming sound.
Is it wrong to prefer that “warmer” sound? Of course not! It would be as preposterous to rule that out as a legitimate source of aesthetic appreciation as it would be to discount distorted guitar lines for being “less faithful” to the original guitar sound. Audio distortion can be beautiful and there’s nothing wrong with liking it. But there’s also something to be said for listening to music as its creators meant it to be heard, and precisely because of their “warmth” vinyl recordings sound rather different from what artists hear in the studio.
“As a recording engineer, when I go to a digital recording, what I did is exactly what I get back,” Metcalfe explains. “When you record in the analog domain, what you’re hearing there is different from what you sent in.”
Should I Stop Listening to Vinyl?
No! For heaven’s sake, no. Each format has its charms, and their overall differences in quality are often overwhelmed by differences in the quality of initial recording equipment, in mastering approaches, and in playback setup. But if you’re a vinyl collector, you also shouldn’t go around telling your friends how much purer your audio is. First off, that’s generally dickish behavior, but more to the point it’s false. Digital recording just is more accurate. That’s not the only thing worth considering by any means, but it does make the puritanism of some vinyl true believers look rather ridiculous.
Thanks to Paul Gold of Salt Mastering for help in researching this piece
I'm just speechless by this cover. You have to have the voice, the experience of heart, soul and pain to pull this off. As a retired police officer in the most dangerous precinct in America, I always felt sad for the voices never heard nor understood. No better sentence than "The words of the prophets are written on subway walls and tenement halls". That's real life.If you all only saw the art from the hood. Just amazing. Silent voices lost in a country of haves vs have nots.
😔 Martha S179:
My son was also a police officer and I was a correctional nurse between jails and prisons here in Memphis Tennessee and I agree this is the most beautiful version I've ever heard of this song which is one of the best songs in my opinion ever released and recorded and written. It's actually very painful to listen to in my state of life right now... I've lost all my siblings and a sister after 9 days of diagnosis of leukemia last month. Thank you officer you and everyone everywhere and every first responder... Yes you saw it on the streets and I saw it in from the inside, such pain and suffering in the correctional world
Can’t win: The song “Sound of Silence” means to go into your mind and think (hello darkness my old friend, I’ve come to talk with you again). To ponder about one’s life. And that people don’t do that as much now a days.(and no one dare disturb the sound of silence) people just look at the TV for entertainment purposes (the neon light), but really, they are not searching for what they really want in life, or, to find their true happiness. the singer of the song just literally sees tons of people (ten thousand people maybe more) just looking at the TV, their phones, (iPads), etc. and wants those people to see what they want in life, (hear my words that I might teach you) and the part where, “and the people bowed and prayed to the neon god they made” means that people will still just go on with their electronic lives, while the “neon god” just laughs! and in the final part, “and whispered in the sound of silence” means that, millions of people listen, but only few can interpret and follow the “SIGN” “SIGN”
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Me Lynn:
to can't win - a song can have a different meaning to every individual, it' s art...
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Christopher L
Couldn't agree more, - to me it's more about the time when it first came out, and now every time I hear it I am reminded of all those years ago, - alas not the happiest of memories.
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Stfu Gfy
it's point and message stay the same! Back then it was the TV and other escapism of that time, tomorrow it will be something else, but the meaning of the song - which the author of the original comment explained nicely - will remain the same. And no, it's not always about your own personal interpretations, some songs really do have their own meanings and messages which the creators wanted to convey.
Hiplet (pronounced HIP-LAY) started as "The Rap Ballet" in the 1990s, developed by Homer Hans Bryant. Soon after its development, the Rap Ballet was featured at several schools in the Chicago area while working with Urban Gateways. In 2005, at the UniverSoul Circus, the African American circus, Homer Bryant was approached and asked to have one of his dancers do rap ballet type movement for the circus, and they would teach her aerial. They had a black girl playing Eminem’s violent piece, “Lose Yourself”, on the violin. Homer thought, "I can’t call this rap anymore. What are we going to call this"? His answer...."ballet and hip-hop - Hiplet"! In 2009, Homer obtained the trademark on the word “hiplet.”
Today the Hiplet Ballerinas are "WOWING" audiences all over the globe with their fiery performances and amazing skill. In the words of Founder and Artistic Director, Homer Bryant, "Hiplet is important. It is Afro-centric. So we are pulling from your urban communities, and we put in the Jazz, Latin and African, but we stick to the classical Ballet discipline. We have been to Germany, Seoul, South Korea, France, Spain, and the Virgin Islands, New York and California a dozen times. It’s just amazing what has happened. A lot of normal people have been deterred from dancing because they were a little too big, a little too busty. Hiplet ballerinas look like normal people".
Hiplet Ballerinas is the professional company of The Chicago Multicultural Dance School, a 501(c)3, Non Profit Organization
The Hiplet Ballerinas Company is a division of the Chicago Multi-Cultural Dance Center (CMDC). CMDC is supported in part by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council Agency, Art Works Fund, City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs & Special Events, The Chicago Community Trust, The University of Chicago Community Programs Accelerator, The Joseph and Bessie Feinberg Foundation, Mielle Organics and countless individual donors. CMDC is a member of the Black Legacy Project, made possible with support from The Joyce Foundation, The Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts, The University of Chicago Community Programs Accelerator, and the Doris Duke Charitable Fund. https://www.hipletballerinas.com/tour-dates
It’s
not hip-hop. It’s not ballet. It’s “Hiplet,” and it’s coming to the
Myrtle Woldson Performing Arts Center at Gonzaga on Tuesday. In 2016,
the Hiplet Ballerinas went viral after posting a practice room video of
their signature strut en pointe.
A stylistic marriage of ballet
with African, Latin, hip-hop and urban dance styles, the new discipline
has been praised as more welcoming to dancers of color than classical
ballet. Hiplet founder Homer Hans Bryant was still developing the
style when it went viral. Bryant founded the Chicago Multicultural Dance
Center, which Sasha and Malia Obama attended, in 1992 where he remains
the artistic director to this day.
In addition to CMDC’s respected ballet program, the center offers modern, contemporary, lyrical, jazz, Latin, tap, African, belly dance, hip-hop and Hiplet courses. “When people ask me about Hiplet, I always say, ‘Hiplet – evolution or revolution? You decide,’ ” Bryant told the Naperville Sun in January. “Hiplet is sassy, hypnotic and exciting. It is entertaining and educational. It is mind-blowing and fabulous.” However, as in any nascent art form, some initial critiques were discouraging. After a morning show circuit tour, the group sparked controversy in the dance community. Perceived risk of injury and departures from classical technique caused many to question the wisdom of encouraging young men and women to learn the style and the stylistic integrity of Hiplet overall. To some, Hiplet just doesn’t take it far enough as the two styles, each venerable in their own right, seemed to clash within the attempted combination. Citing attempts to fuse the styles that were met with “less vitriol” in a 2017 article for Dance Magazine, Theresa Ruth Howard, a former dancer and dance educator of color herself, said she and her colleagues believed the new discipline was “something of an embarrassment” to them because of the “crude” manner in which Hiplet goes about melding the two disciplines. “(It makes) a mockery of our honest efforts to excel (in ballet) while not honoring the brilliance of (hip-hop),” she said. Forceful detractors aside, dancers are still signing up for classes, and the group is going strong as they continue to chassé through their national tour. They are currently booked into 2022. https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2020/feb/13/hiplet-is-a-hip-hop-take-on-ballet/
Dancer Spotlight Why Some Dancers Are Giving “Hiplet”
Serious Side Eye Theresa Ruth Howard April 27, 2017
Hiplet is sweeping the nation. Between TedX, Refinery29, Desigual campaigns, Anna Wintour’s #madeforher fundraiser and the plethora of morning show spots, the hybrid dance craze—known for its sassy runway-style walks on pointe and crab-like bent-knee jazzy chassés - has gone viral. Hiplet is the brain child of Homer Hans Bryant, a former Dance Theatre of Harlem principal who, in 1981, founded Chicago Multi-Cultural Dance Center (then called Bryant Ballet), aka the studio where young Sasha and Malia Obama studied before moving to the White House. Bryant started putting hip hop movement on pointe in 1994 with a piece he choreographed for his students, called The Rap Ballet. That evolved into what became hiplet (a portmanteau of hip hop and ballet), which is now a regular class at his school. But his curious blend of hip hop sur la pointe has proven to be quite provocative. Some see the blending of the urban and European dance vernaculars as a positive by-product of the black ballerina movement. For me and many others, it sets our teeth on edge.
Why such strong reactions?
As a former ballet dancer, and current ballet educator, I’ve attempted to break down why it evokes such icky feelings.
🩰 1. The Lack of Ballet Technique Unlike hiplet, Robert Garland’s Return blends ballet with social dance in a way that shows off the dancers’ virtuosic technique. Most troublesome for me is the fact that the hiplet ladies have so little ballet technique. To be fair, the three older dancers who are typically featured in the group numbers have beautiful feet and show flashes of solid ballet training. But many of the rest are unable to fully get on their box. It’s cringe-worthy and dangerous. Perhaps if the hiplet dancers exhibited the duality of striking beautiful first arabesque lines in addition to being able to “break it down,” there might be less vitriol. For example, Robert Garland’s Return set to music by Aretha Franklin and James Brown melds ballet and social dance quite well by highlighting the adroit ballet technique and versatility of Dance Theatre of Harlem’s dancers. But most of the hiplet dancers can’t hit those ballet lines, and as a result, the technique is more akin to a toe tapping in a vaudevillian sideshow. Which is weird, because Bryant is a fantastic ballet teacher, known for his bootcamp-like approach to ballet training. He’s famous for employing tactics like non-stop “aerobic” barres, from pliés to battements with no breaks; as you turn from the left side to the right he’ll bark out the next combination. I know because I was his student at a DTH summer intensive at age 13. He was inspiring and effective, well-versed in technique, and was a stickler for strength, stamina and precision. So for people who have danced and trained (in the traditional capacity) with Bryant, hiplet leaves many of us asking the question, “What happened?” Bryant is finally getting some of the recognition that he is due. It’s unfortunate is it not for what he is truly gifted at: training technically proficient ballet dancers.
2. It’s Neither Hip(Hop) nor (Bal)Let Is Memphis Jookin more balletic than hiplet? Lil Buck uses elements of pointe work in his movement. Hiplet purports to be a blend of hip hop and ballet, but the lack of authentic representation of either genre is another reason some of us are giving it a hard side-eye. The only aspects of ballet would be the use of pointe shoes and some questionably-executed basic ballet vocabulary. And the technique doesn’t draw from real hip hop roots, either. The foundational techniques of hip hop are popping, locking and breaking, although Jookin, a Memphis-born derivative (also known as the “Gangsta walk”), sometimes resembles ballet with its elements of gliding and toe work. But hiplet is more of a mash-up of many styles of West African, Horton, jazz, dance hall and social dance.
3. It Undercuts Legit Advances for Black Dancers Just when black ballerinas like Michaela DePrince are climbing the ranks in major companies, hiplet presents a caricature of “blacks doing ballet.” For ballet dancers of color, hiplet is something of an embarrassment. Just when artistic directors are finally taking the need for diversity seriously, and a few black ballerinas are climbing the ranks in major companies, there is hiplet. Just when we can proudly and enthusiastically hashtag #blackballerinas, #blackelegance #browngirlsdoballet and mean it, when we feel like we are the Jeffersons, movin’ on up, hiplet is the ghettoization of blacks doing “ballet.” Not because it blends African American urban social dance and a European court social dance, but because it does it crudely, without sophistication and hence becomes a mockery of our honest efforts to excel at the latter while not honoring the brilliance of the former. It is not coincidental that just as we have numerous examples of black ballet excellence, a caricaturized image of “blacks doing ballet” becomes the rage. There has always been a cultural counterbalance that happens when African Americans start to make progress. When movies or televisions shows featuring positive black characters and stories are finally produced, there is always what feels like a backlash, where we are presented with versions of ourselves that are laughable or belittling. It feels like tiny weights have been tethered to our wings just as we think we are about to soar.
4. It Feels Immature and Opportunistic If a 20-something dance student snapping footage of friends fooling around in a studio complete with the “YASSSSSES” and “WERKS” in the background was responsible for hiplet, people could better understand it, because it feels immature, impromptu, faddish. When you learn that it is the product of a 67-year-old man, it seems…odd. It feels opportunistic, a phenomenon that is riding the wave of conversations about blacks in ballet straight to the bank. There is nothing inherently wrong with that, but you have to ask, “At what cost?” More than ever, images create our reality. Does hiplet help or hurt?
🩰 Who knows how long hiplet will be on our radar. I am sure that these young ladies are having wonderful experiences and seeing aspects of the world that they never thought possible. That in and of itself is a positive. But it is hard to imagine these students growing up become hiplet teachers, or mothers being willing to spend upwards of $80 a pop for pointe shoes for daughters to learn to Dougie on in the long-term. But stranger things have happened. For now, in old-school fashion, I’ll give a nod to Naughty by Nature and say, “Hip hop hiplet, hey, no.”
https://www.dancemagazine.com/why-are-so-many-people-cringing-over-hiplet/
WELCOME TO THE OFFICIAL SITE OF THE HIPLET BALLERINAS
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