candycoatedwaterdrops

Good album by Plumb : I really like Stranded and Here With Me. It's Christian Rock, aurally interesting with haunting lyrics. It was interesting to discover that Jennifer Paige performed Stranded as a cover song on her own album, Positively Somewhere. I think Jennifer's rendition is the better one, for that theme, pop suits better than rock =p.

Some musings on sound quality : at the moment I have an aging Altec Lansing speaker setup, some Panasonic earbuds, a Sony Digital Reference headset, and a new Ovann headset. The speakers lack "punch" and the earbuds are just plain bad, distorting on the lower ranges at higher volumes. Only good one seems to be the Sony : gives me the higher fidelity than the Ovanns, but perhaps overly so, making some songs sound slightly hollow. Nothing that can't be fixed with postprocess effects, but you can't work in the opposite direction I guess.

Trying to cobble together a decent sound reproduction is interesting. Identifying the bottlenecks : the original sound quality (original CD or compressed format?) the digital / analog converter (crappy soundcard unable to keep up the voltage output to unpowered headset? power leakage from nearby electronics causing distortion?) and the sound output device (what gives best fidelity? full aural range without distortion, and what what power output?). Even then : last year mixing sound outputs for a performance for example is quite subjective, personal bias and what you're accustomed to as to "how it should sound" is inevitable. There's always a benchmark of sorts, it should always be compared to the "live" version. But even the "live" version is affected by what the singers sound engineers decide it to be. I guess then you can only really judge off "unmodified" sounds like, if you've played the drums a lot, you know what a really good smack on a tom or rimshot sounds like. The ultimate test in sound reproduction really is playback of famous orchestral pieces = ) Once you hear a good live rendition of the Vivaldi Four Seasons no speaker system ever comes close, but it's a good benchmark =p