Apple Logic Pro /LogicExpress Discussion

On Jan 5, 2005, at 12:08 AM, wonko@... wrote:

> On Tue, 4 Jan 2005, Bigg John wrote:
>
>  > u b i k wrote:
>  >
>  > >
>  > > > This was in the mid eighties.
>  > >
>  > >
>  > > Speaking of, can anybody explain what exactly happened in the 
> 80's?
>  > > Does doing coke make you want to hear less bass, or no bass?  Cold
>  > > reverb mixes for a cold drug, I guess.  Then again, the cold war
>  > > peaked, maybe blow isn't to blame...
>
>  FM synthesis, the Aphex Exciter and production by 
> Stock/Aitken/Waterman.
>
>  That's where your bass went.
>
>  Production went a little gadget-crazy around 1984.  A few of those 
> recordings from that era have so much excited high end that it feels 
> like your teeth will explode.  Like the loudness wars now, there 
> seemed to be a high-end war back then.  The rest - like anything mixed 
> by Jon Fryer ca 1985 - really went big into the new digital reverbs, 
> which by modern standards sounded pretty icy.  The retro-warmth crazy 
> didn't hit until around 89 or so.

I have a theory.

In the mid to late 70s there were some very nice sounding pop records 
with a hyped high end by the likes of Gerry Rafferty and Fleetwood Mac. 
They were probably some of the first to use something like the aphex 
exciter or at least if that was not what they used, that was what it 
sounded like they used. It was a nice different, modern sound at the 
time. Until about the early to mid 80's when digital recording started 
catching on, a nice clean dependably crisp high end was a precious 
commodity, you had to be very careful how many times you recorded to a 
given spot on the tape and you had to be careful about deterioration 
when bouncing from tape to tape and the first thing to go was the high 
end, then digital recording came in and all that ceased to be a 
problem.  So two things happened, some engineers just went right on 
hyping the high end like they always had in the past, forgetting that 
it was not going to end up getting lost somewhere down the line, other 
engineers just liked the new ability to dependably get the bright crisp 
high end in the end product and they went kind of nuts.  In other words 
I think it basically just took a few years for the entire industry to 
adjust to the flatter response and lack of generation loss you get with 
digital recording equipment.  For example the aphex exciter itself was 
basically something that was invented in response to the limitations of 
magnetic tape.  When people stopped using magnetic tape, they *should* 
have realized they did not need the exciters anymore either.  But not 
all of them did.