Music Reproduction Systems - what are we trying to achieve?

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.... Was pop music better in my youth? 1968 was the year I re-tuned my bakelite valve radio from Radio One to Radio Three. <snip>
Thank you for the seekers clip. Nice recording quality even today, and it's the open reel tape I hear. I remember their song "World of Our Own" which really captured my imagination, that was in the late 60s, imagine what the world has seen since then:
We'll build a world of our own that no one else can share
All our sorrows we'll leave far behind us there
And I know you will find there'll be peace of mind
When we live in a world of our own
I submit that the Hi-Fi experience is about building a world of our own.

My favorite songs are from the 70s. I mentioned the Bee Gees, there is

Elton John
Bread
David Gates
The Eagles
Ambrosia
Bad Company
Leo Sayer

The Beatles were just to jingoistic for me, but some of their deeper classics are just great. I was listening to "Come Together" just yesterday on You Tube. Great stuff even today.

Apart from the vocals, pop music has become...
 
I cannot believe my eyes.
I had the same reaction the first time I saw You Tube video of one of "her" concerts. Not at the technology, but at the fact that adult human beings were this deeply emotionally involved with a "star" who was just a figment of the imagination. It was like finding out that thousands of people were deeply in love with Donald Duck or Minnie Mouse. :eek:

Now that I think about it, that is probably true as well. Certainly a surprising number of men seem to have quite big crushes on Wilma Flintstone. And many of the people who pay through the nose to visit Disney theme parks are adults, and are there without any children in attendance.

Hatsune Miku seems to be the culmination of manufactured "stars" like the Spice Girls or Backstreet Boys or Taylor Swift. Just think of the benefits to management: your "star" has no opinions of her own and will always do what you want, you don't pay her anything, she will never get old or fat, the cosmetic surgery fad of the season can be done with a computer instead of a scalpel, and so on. And audiences will still eat it up, buy actual tickets, and generate actual profits for you. Wow!

So how to reproduce Hatsune Miku? Do they have a dedicated multimedia system do do this?
I imagine fans just watch video clips on their phones when not attending a "live" concert. :)

-Gnobuddy
 
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You raise several points. One is the replacement of human beings by 'automation'. I saw the other day a band called "Compressorhead" on TV. You get the robots and the instruments, and place them in the exact same room and you get true sound reproduction. This is one approach. The saga of losing jobs to robots seems to continue in every sphere, but ironically it is greedy humans who are making the decisions to replace - for now. When machines take over that role, that will be the day.

Have you seen the videos of Roy Orbison's hologram tour? That is another way of reproducing music along with the musician.

What gets me about the Miku thing is that the songs are so tinsel like - no real music in it, just a formula. Would it be better or worse to have them compose something like an Elton John ballad? Maybe not.

Finally, we have the composer who composed music based on the roll of the die.

Maybe what we need is a modern day equivalent of the music box, where the music creating mechanism is reproduced, not just the sounds.
 
To add a more positive note, have the NPR Tiny Desk Concerts been mentioned yet on this thread? They are as real as it gets, musically speaking: one microphone, a few musicians, no Autotune or other fakery.

There is a lot of dross among the Tiny Desk concerts to be sure, but also nuggets of pure gold every now and then: YouTube

Earlier in the thread the remarkable engineering and production on the Eagle's albums came up. Maybe I should mention one other album I thought was extremely well engineered and produced, with the recording have a very natural sound (particularly Bainbridge's vocals), lots of airy ambience, and strong stereo imaging: Merril Bainbridge's 1995 CD, "The Garden".

Here is a version on You Tube, which has surely undergone some damage due to You Tube compression, but which still sounds pretty decent: YouTube

"The Garden" is one of the test tracks I've used many times when evaluating a speaker system. Many speakers - particularly P.A. systems - mangle female vocals badly. If that problem exists, this track will usually immediately reveal it.

-Gnobuddy