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June 22, 2007  I wrote a paper last semester about science-fiction films and legal frameworks that I thought, upon second reading, made a few cogent, non-obvious points that were interesting. So I am posting it here for posterity and for your (potential) enjoyment. I'm mostly proud of the fact that I received credit for a paper that mentions Baby: Secret of the Lost Legend. June 18, 2007  Why do bad movies like Crash, Gladiator, The Departed, and Shakespeare in Love seem to win the Best Picture Oscar all the time? Maybe it's because the people voting are not even a decent sampling of people in the industry... Amazingly, according to this article, Christopher Plummer and Eddie Murphy are not yet voting members of the Academy. June 14, 2007  "Boy band mogul" Lou Pearlman, the well-fed businessman whose high-flying music acts *Nsync and the Backstreet Boys made him the toast of the late 90s music industry, is in custody. Your children are now safe. Pearlman had been on the run from U.S. authorities for several months after an indictment stemming from a Ponzi scheme he had been running. Amazing stuff... June 07, 2007  I have been heartily enjoying the newly released Twin Peaks second season DVDs; the image quality is so good that it looks better than when originally broadcast. Having bitterly experienced the hard fall of the show in 1991, it's amazing to me how little my appreciation for the show and the feelings that it evokes has changed. I still believe the second season has some incredibly strong moments, even if the growing pains of trying to expand the Peaks universe were too much for even the faithful to bear. On that note, the Peaks wikipedia page includes some info that strikes me as revisionism, describing lots of internal strife about the show's direction as well as charges that David Lynch "abandoned" Peaks before swooping in to change the show's direction for the last six episodes and direct the finale. (Also there's a questionably unsourced story about how a romance between Agent Cooper and Audrey Horne was nixed by Kyle MacLachlan's girlfriend and co-star Lara Flynn Boyle, leaving the writers in search of material to cover a major subplot.) Of course, the simple problem was that the show was simply not designed for the long haul. Lynch wasn't a television guy; I don't think anyone had a vision of where to take the show over 30 hours and I'm not sure the best TV writer on the planet could have made any difference. Furthermore, Lynch directed the second season's best episodes, which were good even when the material wasn't. I think the only conclusion is that if ABC had been smarter, and ordered another season of a limited amount of episodes, the show may have survived. Recent developments for show enthusiasts are encouraging: Apparently a new CD of Angelo Badalamenti's magnificent music from the show's second season is imminent, and there is still hope that hours of cut footage from Fire Walk With Me will eventually see the light of day. June 01, 2007
I was re-listening to some albums from the late 80s recently, for example Pet Shop Boys Actually and Elton John Sleeping with the Past. Although I could write an entire post about how Sleeping with the Past is probably the best album Elton John did in the entirety of the 80s and 90s, I will instead focus on technical issues involved in these mid- to late 80s major label all-digital recordings. They have a unique sound--sort of clipped, tinny, with a pretty bad frequency curve. As many of the elements were digital themselves (DX7s and drum machines) there was a perfect storm of digitality that has led to these early CDs making a bad name for the format up until this very day, even though now CDs sound fine. Most of the problem came from early analog-to-digital conversion, which was notoriously inaccurate especially in high frequencies.
So I got to thinking about how exactly these CDs were made, and how they have been recently remastered. There were not a whole lot of choices for multi-track digital recordings in the mid 80s, probably the Sony 3324 (which recorded at 44.1 or 48 kHz at 16 bits) was the most ubiquitous. CDs were delivered to the pressing plant on a Sony 1610 or 1630, which were devices that put digital stereo audio onto Betamax tapes. Digital stereo recordings could be delivered on Sony DASH machines or Mitsubishi ProDigi tapes; DAT and ADAT were still a few years off. The question I really have is, what is the advantage of remastering this material, considering that it was recorded in 16-bit with bad converters in the first place? That is, if these albums were recorded with old technology, don't the quiet, tinny CDs represent the original intent a bit better? And if they were unable to play back or locate the original, unmastered digital stereo tapes from the studio, what are they using to remaster anyway? I posted a topic on hydrogenaudio forums but haven't gotten any real answers yet. One possibility is that the remastering is being done from analog tape copies made at the time of the recordings, which is possibly a better-sounding source than the original CD under the theory that the CD would have gone through another round of old, inadequate analog-to-digital conversion, when that stereo master was put on CD at the mastering house. |