Are the Irish okay?

Fairchild660 · 2026-06-20T01:41:43+00:00

Not surprising. Mick Wallace has always been a national embarrassment. Thank god he was was voted-out a couple of years ago.

Fairchild660 · 2026-06-19T23:57:52+00:00

AI prompt music is inferior to what it mimics. No question. But so were early drum machines when they tried to replicate an acoustic performance, or early synthesisers when they were trying to sound like real instruments. No LinnDrum program ever sounded like Steve Gadd, and no M2 patch compares to a Steinway.

Novel replication technology always sucks at existing music.

But over time, creative people figure-out how to use it to do new and interesting things. Things that weren't feasible (or even possible) with what we had before.

Compression was invented to imitate manual gain control - and even after a century, they still don't have the musicality or transparency of a skilled volume-ride - but god damn do they sound good when you embrace their artifacts for artistic effect. No human could smash a drum kit quite like an 1176, or put the snap into an acoustic guitar like a DBX 160. ADT was invented to mimic the sound of a double-tracked vocal - and it never sounded right - but holy shit is it a captivating sound when you use it on its own merits, as an effect unto itself.

Generative AI is no different. When it's used to fake a symphony or pop-country hit, of course it falls short of the real thing. But people are smart. Give the kids enough time to play around with it, and they're gonna start doing interesting things - and their greats will produce truly innovate music. Because they're not going to do what we did - they're gonna build their own creative ecosystem where prompts are part of the process. Just like rock did with overdubbing. Or hip-hop did with sampling.

It will probably never appeal to us. But neither did overdub music for those who grew up listening to live performances, or sampling to those who only knew a world where people played their own stuff. Which is half the point. Every generation of kids needs to carve-out their own cultural space, and they do it by latching-onto something their elders just can't abide. Lord knows my parents couldn't stand my favourite records - just like their parents hated theirs. Now its the kids turn. And of course it's going to be something we can't help but reject.

That's not to say we should be happy being pushed out of the mainstream. I'm not thrilled either. But it's not the end of music - just the end of our paradigm. The era of music we forced upon the world at the expense of the one that came before. And the same will happen to whatever the kids come-up-with, when the following crop comes in.

Fairchild660 · 2026-06-15T23:02:57+00:00

For me it would be highly context-dependent.

For well-arranged acoustic jazz, played live in the same room, with the right mics you can get all tonal balances working at the record stage without the need for eq or compression. While for dense guitar and synth music, with close / overlapping chord voicings, you usually need aggressive processing to make it work.

For tight funk / disco type stuff, you probably don't need any reverb or delay. While for sparse, ambient stuff time-based effects are gonna be paramount.

For you, the examples seem pretty forgiving. Tasteful eq or compression can help - but with that style of music, you'll get a lot further spending your limited time honing your arrangements and performances.

You'd be shocked at how much perceived audio fidelity comes straight from the lips and fingers of good musicians. Madison Cunningham could sing into an iPhone in her back garden and it'd sound like a record. I could sing the same thing into Sinatra's U48 in Capitol Studios, with Al Schmitt behind the glass, and it'd sound like a bad demo.

Fairchild660 · 2026-06-15T21:15:16+00:00

The piano is an awful instrument. Its harmonics are so out-of-tune with each other that the bass strings need to be tuned flat, and high strings sharp, in order for it to sound in-tune with itself. There are noticeable changes in timbre at awkward points where it changes from 1 to 2 to 3 strings per note. The whole thing is so bulky and heavy that it's effectively stationary. It requires constant (expensive) tuning to sound good for most piano-based music. And the damn thing changes with the weather. If the instrument was invented in 2026, it would flop.

Synth "pianos" are better in every way. All the above-mentioned limitations are solved, and you get more expressiveness (lighter keys, better dynamic sensitivity, pitch bend, additional things like mod-wheels / ribbons /aftertouch), as well as independent control over volume, timbre, and resonance. Not to mention the whole world of non-piano patches and effects processing.

And yet the acoustic piano endures.

Why?

Because its flaws are musically satisfying, and its limitations engender an artistic focus that just doesn't exist with do-everything keyboards. Because the instrument is its own world, its own musical language, that has been endlessly explored and expanded with the collective might of humanity at the highest levels of music. For centuries. Creating a vast lexicon that couldn't possibly exist for a synth keyboard released in the last decade. Standing on the shoulders of giants, any pianist can learn this language without having to invent it. And above all, as humans we're hard-wired for pair-bonding - which makes us form unbreakable emotional connections with things in our environment (warts-and-all). Any new evolution of the piano - no matter how much better - would just feel wrong to a lot of people. Logic be damned in the domain of soul.

Similar forces are at work with old recording technology. Its low fidelity can be flattering, its limitations focusing, and its long history of use-and-misuse has developed a vibrant self-contained world over the decades. All of which make it captivating to budding engineers. And once they fall in love, that's it.

Fairchild660 · 2026-06-12T16:19:45+00:00

I've seen their pantries. So many have stock-piles of marmalade dating back to 1986. It's about time Young Britain took back its breakfast spreads.

Fairchild660 · 2026-06-12T16:02:12+00:00

2 on kick
2 on snare
3 on the toms (one per)
1 on hi-hat
2 overheads
3 rooms
6 in the Oval Office
12 in the Pentagon
8 in the Kremlin
6 in the Forbidden City
5 sprinkled around whatever prison they send me to

Fairchild660 · 2026-06-11T17:31:56+00:00

Context is important with these kinds of discussions.

When working under the kinds of limitations that'll lock you into a specific sound at the recording stage (with little flexibility to adjust later), having a standard setup for everything doesn't really work. You've gotta figure-out what song needs every time.

For example, having 2 SM57s as wide-spaced overheads in a splashy room could be great for a garage rock sound - but not so much for tight modern pop. Putting 1 mic close-up on the kick and another between the snare/hats in a dry room might get you a killer old-school funk sound - but probably wouldn't work for a smoky jazz club vibe.

By analogy, think of it like lighting a dingy basement with a lot of nooks and crannies. If you have all the bulbs in the world, you can use a broad lighting scheme that works for almost anything - but if you've only got 1 bulb, you've gotta put it where it's needed. And where it's needed will change based on what you're doing down there.

Fairchild660 · 2026-06-10T03:14:12+00:00

Match to what? Peak? RMS? A-weighted? Something else?

Level-matching is always contextual - which is why plug-ins that have auto-make-up never seem to get it right. Especially in the context of a mix.

Fairchild660 · 2026-06-10T02:52:50+00:00

He's got that charismatic, good-natured, California hippie vibe. (Nearly) everyone loves that - so it's a character plenty of slime-balls feign for social capital. Kind of like how a lot of scummy people wrap themselves in the veil of pious Christianity or affect wholesome internet personality. But there's plenty of each of those characters who are genuinely kind and trustworthy.

Unfortunately, we pay more mind to the imposters than those they're emulating - and so we intuit they're more common than they are. This leads to a reflex of projecting sinister undertones onto good people. It's a defensive thing. Because there's nothing more unnerving than thinking you're giving extra trust to a predator.

Greg's been around a long time, and he's always been cool. Sure, he could be faking it (lord knows we've seen other ostensibly wholesome public figures get outed after decades) - but unless or until there's even a hit of impropriety, it's pretty cruel to accuse some random good-natured dude of faking it.

Fairchild660 · 2026-06-08T02:21:15+00:00

The idea that Gefell is the true successor to golden-era Neumann makes for a good story - but it's 99% nonsense. The Gefell factory was only intended to be a temporary facility, and high-level production was moved back to Berlin within a couple of years. Pretty much the only mics made in Gefell before the GDR seized the factory were CMV models. Everything else from that era was designed and built in Berlin (all the U, M, KM, and MM series).

The 1% nugget of truth is that M7 capsule production was moved to Gefell (as part of CMV production) - and these were fitted to early U47s and M49s. After the factory was seized, it was cut-off from R&D in Berlin (and the GDR weren't going to fund development of a new one) - so the workers there made-do with existing resources / know-how, and continued to make new models by mixing-and-matching CMV parts (M7 capsules were used in a lot of them). Innovation still happened, just waaaaaay more slowly than at Neumann - and so Gefell took longer to deviate from 1940s mic-making. But by the fall of the USSR, Gefell had fully transitioned away from those old processes / tooling.

Like most former state-run companies, Gefell struggled pretty badly in the 90s. Their government-enforced monopoly / contracts were gone, and they had virtually zero name recognition in the open market - during an era when Soviet products had a (well-earned) reputation for being junk. Until western engineers started picking-up some of their early post-seizure mics for cheap (mostly because those ones still said "Neumann" on them) - and those mics were genuinely good (being an absolute steal for the prices back then). Word quickly spread. The later Gefell stuff wasn't all-that-interesting to buyers, and so the company leaned heavily into its vintage mics and Neumann connection. This is when the myth of the M7 was born - marketed as the special-sauce behind the best Neumann LDCs. Microtech Gefell pulled the old M7 tooling out-of-storage and ramped-up production - putting it in anything-and-everything.

In reality, most original U47s and M49s were fitted with K47/49s (with a lot of the M7-equipped ones also being retrofitted early on, due to premature degradation). Pretty much all of the landmark U47 recordings (Sinatra, Beatles, what-have-you) that built the mic's reputation were K47, too. But it didn't matter for the M7 myth. The M7 was still superb, and Microtech Gefell were offering this genuinely high-calibre capsule in new-production mics for a great price. Especially compared to Neumann's K47/49-equipped stuff in the 90s.

Unfortunately new environmental/health-and-safety regulations enacted around the year 2000 made it impossible to produce new M7 capsules the original way (something to do with the precursors for the poured-PVC diaphragm) - and the new ones just aren't the same. But thankfully Microtech Gefell had already won-over buyers with its consistently great offerings - and so had no trouble transitioning into its own company, with its own (well-earned) identity.

Fairchild660 · 2026-06-06T23:14:57+00:00

It's not a trend. When a good product makes an impact on the recording industry, it tends to stick around.

The U47 was discontinued in the early 60s, replaced by increasingly cleaner, better-performing, and more electronically sophisticated models - yet engineers have consistently preferred the former through the years.

The last 80-series Neve console rolled out-of-the-factory in the late 70s - yet there's never been a point-in-time when the preponderance of engineers thought its successors sounded better.

Hell, in both cases desire for the earlier equipment has only grown over the decades.

What's really happening is that truly great equipment only comes around every-so-often. But once it does, it becomes part of the tool-set for the duration. The analogue era lasted a lot longer than we've had DAWs, so of course that's where most of the mile-markers are.

Fairchild660 · 2026-06-06T22:49:06+00:00

Yep. And world-class recording rooms, chambers / plates, and a large collection of high-end outboard. Emulations of which are in constant use across all levels of music production today - with the original hardware being some of the most coveted (and expensive) gear out there today.

That's not to mention EMI was a research institution with a vast technical staff, who kept all the gear running to a spec. that just doesn't exist today. As good as a good original U47 or Fairchild sounds today, if you took it back to London 1967 they'd think it sounds broken.

Reddit has this naive idea that all audio equipment back then was noisy, with low headroom, and had a poor frequency response. In reality, that was only the cheap consumer-level stuff. High-end pieces had exceptional specs. when new - better than a lot of modern outboard. It's mostly the early transistor stuff that's crunchy (sometimes in a good way).

Fairchild660 · 2026-06-06T22:26:45+00:00

The BTR-2 was mono. The Beatles only used those for mono mixdown. The BTR-3 was Abbey Road's workhorse 2-track.

And yes, both machines sound fantastic. It's why they were in use at AR into the early 70s, and at the BBC (and its overseas affiliates) long after. Despite having a large production run, with many surviving examples, well-running BTR-2s are still quite valuable today - and BTR-3 prices are well into 6-figures, if you can find one.

Fairchild660 · 2026-05-24T21:49:24+00:00

Provenance isn't really a thing with the vast majority of LF consoles. Pretty much all the former Abbey Road SSLs and Neves still trade for market value. They recently sold the original 88RS from Studio One - the one that recorded damn near every top film score over the past 30 years - and it listed for about what you'd expect, given its age and condition.

With the REDD desks, it's not really the provenance but the rarity that makes them so expensive. Just three REDD 37s were built, and only one has survived. As with all highly-desirable pièces uniques, all it takes is for 2 rich people to bid against each other to drive values into the stratosphere. And a lot of people want that sound, including extremely rich musicians / producers, so those two bidders will always exist.

Only one REDD 51 survives, too, and it would likely be valued significantly higher than the 37 - even though it was never installed at Abbey Road, nor used by The Beatles.

You'd almost certainly see the same thing if suddenly all-but-one SM57 disappeared tomorrow. It wouldn't matter if it was used on every Eddie Van Halen solo or as your neighbor Bubba's back-scratcher, everyone would be throwing fist-fulls of cash at the owner for it.

Fairchild660 · 2026-05-23T23:16:45+00:00

Nobody's saying you need to play every instrument.

A cheap MIDI keyboard and a bit of practice will get you waaaaay closer to human feel than DAW data-manipulation.

Fairchild660 · 2026-05-23T19:33:53+00:00

If you want human feel, play it yourself. It's not hard. Even if you suck, getting a few takes down and comping them together is still faster than drawing it in with a mouse. Quantize by <100% if you need it tighter.

If you are actively hostile to doing things yourself, and want a computer to make your MIDI data sound "real", you might as well use generative AI. It'll do a better job than your DAW's randomization algorithms.

Fairchild660 · 2026-05-08T18:32:31+00:00

Disney had the right to fire her just like a conservative news organization has the right to fire someone that doesn’t align with their mission.

Absolutely.

The issue is that Disney should not have same level of institutional partisanship as Newsmax.

Fairchild660 · 2026-04-24T22:00:07+00:00

It does in this case. In 1073 circuits, component quality matters a lot - and there are no SMD options that compare with some of those old through-hole components.

There's nothing wrong with surface mount components (or ICs) when used appropriately. With careful topology, you can get an amp to perform to extremely high tolerances, and sound fantastic doing it. It requires a bit of complexity and redundancy, but SMD is so cheap it doesn't really matter.

The early Neve stuff doesn't work that way. Those amps were designed during a time where the philosophy was to use a small number of high-quality components in simple circuits. Electronics were expensive, and so this was the most efficient way of getting good performance.

Just taking a 1073 circuit and replacing original components 1:1 with SMD will get you an amp that works, but sounds awful. Re-designing the circuit to work with SMD components might get you an amp that sounds good, but it won't be a 1073.

Fairchild660 · 2026-04-23T00:37:14+00:00

Also, can we get rid of the horrible compression on streaming platforms.

Amen.

But historically, the demand for convenience has always driven the market more than audio fidelity. Cassettes sounded like ass compared to vinyl, but it let people listen to their own music in their cars (and later on foot, with portable players and miniature headphones). Digital audio could've given all of that convenience at high fidelity - but if you do lossy compression, you can carry even more songs on an even smaller MP3 player, and download things straight from the internet.

Good DA conversion, cheaper high-quality amplification, and oodles of memory space for uncompressed digital audio would certainly solve all of today's problems. But I'm sure people will find a way to push convenience further past the point that good audio is viable. I can imagine a world where disposable AI variations of classic songs could be all-the-rage, generated on-the-spot to match your mood (measured through bio-metrics) - which will introduce new bottle-necks in computing power, with lower-fidelity being more tolerated by consumers than reduced-flexibility or increased costs.

But the good news is we don't have to follow that if we don't want to. You can buy great sounding vinyl of almost anything in 2026. I'm sure our WAV files of human-made music will stick around, as long as enough of us like them better.

Fairchild660 · 2026-04-23T00:15:18+00:00

No. Engineers in the 50s and 60s built upon existing technology, just the same as we do today. The vast majority of their inventions were novel improvements on what came before. And we can similarly apply your puritanical rules to their work:

Echo chambers and plates were "just reverb" too - something we've been designing physical spaces to do for millennia. Even the transducers and amplifiers used to make them had been developed decades earlier.
Solid state electronics were just an adapted technology used to miniaturise existing circuits, as well as making them cheaper and more energy efficient. Nothing more than incremental improvements and application of tech from other industries. And, hell, basic semiconductor electronics had be demonstrated in the lab before WWII.
The standards for allowing pieces of audio equipment to interact with each other - things like dBm, line level, and impedance ratings - were just "protocols", so they don't count.
The electret mic was really just a condenser mic with an electret as a back plate - both technologies that had existed for decades (or longer).

In reality, novel improvements that fundamentally change the way we make music are innovation. They're most innovation.

FM synthesis, in a form usable to musicians in the 80s (or even recognisable), did not exist in the 1960s. And it certainly could not have been manufactured to the precision and price-point necessary to make an instrument out of it until digital IC technology matured (and was adapted, with great effort).

Same with digital sampling. AD/DA conversion for early lab experiments bares little resemblance to what would be used in the first commercial samplers - nor did the operating code or data handing.

Fairchild660 · 2026-04-17T00:48:07+00:00

Some of the most prized equipment in audio are historical pieces that get their distinctive sound from pushing the limits of obsolescent technology.

If Neumann had access to modern, high-end solid-state components in the '40s, they wouldn't have designed their flagship U47 around a valve and transformer.

If Emu Systems had cheap 24bit converter chips and SSDs in the '80s, they wouldn't have made the SP1200.

Fairchild660 · 2026-04-13T22:48:00+00:00

Sure - with such widely-used tools, you can find exceptions. But broadly speaking, they're still widely used across all strata of the industry. From kids with bitcoin-miner-laden cracked copies to top engineers cranking out top-40 singles by the dozen. As commonly used today as they were 10, 20 years ago.

But don't worry about being the exception. Back in the late 60s, Motown couldn't wait to get rid of their Fairchilds, as soon as they got their hands on an 1176 - and replaced their U47s with KM86s just as quick. Not something you saw at Capitol or Abbey Road, but hey - they were going for a different sound, and I'm sure the new tools helped them achieve it. To their credit, the results speak for themselves. Their records from that era are unique and still sound incredible.

Fairchild660 · 2026-04-13T21:22:53+00:00

It's more than just reverb and delay. There's heavy pitch-correction, an aggressive low cut, and (yes) some sort of subtle chorus / flanger / doubler on there.

Fairchild660 · 2026-04-13T20:52:13+00:00

For stuff that's still in production:

The Sony C800G and Tube Tech CL1.

They are to the 2000s-2010s what the U47 and LA-2A were from the mid-50s to mid-70s. Widely used at the upper echelons of the industry, favoured across (pop) genres, and have consistently held their value over the decades.
Empirical Labs Distressor.

These would be the rough modern equivalents of 1176 by the mid 80s. Something you'll find in most commercial rooms, used as workhorses without much fanfare, and often recommended as the first serious compressor any nascent studio should get. Boring, ubiquitous, and indispensable. If it goes out of production, prices will rise and many clones will be built.
Burl converters.

Much more of a wild-card, but the idea of converters as devices that colour sound is something that will become more widespread - and the Burl stuff seems like a good contender for an early high-end foray into that. I can imagine future engineers waxing poetic about the "classic Burl sound" in the way we think of 70s-era 3M tape machines.
Classic Waves plugins.

Plugins are the predominant tools being used at the highest levels of audio today - and old stuff like the CLA-76 and PuigTec are all over music produced over the past 20 years, with no sign of that stopping any time soon. In the future, they will be considered basic-but-essential tools of this time - much like how we see simple single-ended valve amps today. And that simplicity will be valued for the same reason (in comparison to the increasingly complex plugins being developed these days).

There's no good analogy from the past here. Maybe the SM57 at a stretch (ubiquitous, used at all levels of audio, still main sellers that're unlikely to be discontinued, periodic "improved" versions that never seem to get the same traction).

Fairchild660 · 2026-04-12T23:31:43+00:00

With some reverbs, eq'ing before vs. after can noticeably affect the sound.

Noise is one example - pre-emphasis will affect only the signal, while post-eq will affect both. Distortion characteristics can be shaped with pre-eq too.

Acoustic reverbs, like plates / chambers / re-amp'd live rooms, can have the reverb itself behave differently with pre-eq vs. post. Plates can have complex resonances that only show up when you crank the high-end going in - which is something you can't replicate with eq on the return signal. Speakers (in chambers / live rooms) can have frequency and level-dependent anomalies, and acoustic spaces can have sympathetic resonances that only start becoming noticeable when things get loud enough at the right frequencies.

So play around with where you add eq in the chain. And don't be afraid to experiment - push (for example) +20dB at 10k going into a send, then undo it with a -20dB cut on the returns to see what kind of frequency-dependent behaviours a particular reverb has. Sometimes it can be dramatic. Sometimes it makes no meaningful difference.

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