New Adventures in Hi-Fi

I decided recently to take the plunge and upgrade my stereo system.  Now, this doesn't sound like a big deal at all except that my stereo system is literally 30+ years old and has been with me for most of my life.  I mean, it's become literally "family".  My CD player alone is the oldest piece of actual electronic gear in my home and is literally only the second CD player I've ever purchased.  I got my original JVC CD player for Christmas in 1986, and that one promptly broke within 2-3 years.  I then got a replacement JVC CD player somewhere between 1988 - 1989 and that one, folks, is the one I'm STILL using to this very day.  I mean, the amount of hours on this machine is unfathomable!  They clearly don't make gear like this anymore.

In any event, it's not on my agenda to replace the CD Player since it's still working perfectly.  Instead, I wanted to finally buy some decent speakers and a good quality receiver since mine is from around 1990 - 1994 and does indeed make a bit of noise.  After a bit of research and such, I decided on Polk R500's and a Denon DRA800H.  I was quite excited about this purchase, and I painstakingly removed the old gear last weekend and setup the new stuff.  And, when I plugged it all in for the first time and played a CD, I...well...didn't hear a damn bit of difference.  Hmph.

This brought me to referencing the manuals, playing around with EQ (I have an old school outboard EQ unit that I play through), and trying a few different things.  It improved the sound a bit but then a fairly new CD with some major sub bass frequencies made the tweeter start rattling.  Ugh.  More tweaks, about 10 more random CD's and songs, and I pretty much decided that the new gear really wasn't that different from what I had so I might as well return it.

It was then that something bizarre happened.  First, I listened to the entire "...Miss You Most..." album since I'm finalizing the masters before submitting the CD order.  I'm actually down to the very last bit, where I'm having Track 5 raised in volume just a tad in order to even it out, and after that we should be done (finally).  The "...Miss You Most..." album really didn't sound much different from my old system so again I kind of dismissed the whole thing.  And then, I threw in a "working" or bad mix and oh my goodness...  It was like the stereo system was literally telling me in big bold letters what was wrong the mix!  I'm still not sure what to think of this but it was terribly obvious that the mix was horrid and it even seemed to point to where the issues lie.

I started flipping through all kinds of mixes, most of which I know pretty well which ones are decent and which need serious work.  This new stereo never lied and always showed me very obviously exactly what sounded horrid.  I've never experienced this before.  Could it be that my old system all these years has masked such blatantly obvious issues in my mixes?  I'm now thinking so, and perhaps this has only added to my mixing woes all along.  Hmm.

I need to play around with this system a bit more but I must say, if this really WILL help my mix process, I guess I may not be returning it after all.  Who freakin' knew?

And People Supposedly Love Apple Products...

I got my "...Miss You Most..." masters back today and again the tunnel of madness quickly surrounded me.  I think I described in a previous post how I have this 2 second noise in Track #2 that was showing up in the left ear, even though it's panned to be in the right ear.  The whole thing was driving me nuts and I've wasted literally hours on this issue, at least 20 mixes on it, and not to mention having to bug the mastering lab as well in order to redo the song, even though the error has nothing to do with them.  I simply couldn't get my head around how or what exactly was happening but I tried simply moving forward, thinking maybe I'd figure it out later on.

Upon downloading my new master file, of course the very first thing I did was to play it on my Mac.  I mean, I know that the placement of that sound was in the right ear because I literally listened to the track multiple days in a row and at least 20 times before sending it off, and every time the sound was in the right ear.  Still, being the paranoid sort that I am and now also being overly protective, I immediately listened to the mastered track for this very purpose...and low and behold, the noise was in the left ear.

Wtf......????!!!!!

I mean, that's not even possible!  Again, I've spent the last 2 weeks listening to this track over and over, on different days, etc., just to make sure that I'm not crazy.  And yet still, undeniably, the mastered version played with the sound in the left ear.  For at least 30 minutes, I sat completely bewildered and stunned, nearly speechless but too angry and confused to keep from muttering obscenities under my breath.  And then, I shifted into diagnostic mode.

I spent 2 hours on this ultimately and it wasn't until I literally copied the very same file over to my laptop and listened to it there that I started to piece it together.  Why?  Because when listening to the exact same song file on my laptop, the sound was in the RIGHT ear.  Yes, chew on that a minute...

It was then that I realized I had been duped.  All along, Pro Tools wasn't the issue (even though I was bad mouthing it), my Mac itself hadn't grown a ghost in the machine or gone insane, and I hadn't completely lost my mind and started imagining things.  It was the beyond belief stupid new version of iTunes called "Music" on a Mac that's the problem!  After doing a bit of experimentation and some searching, yes indeed, it's this idiotic music program from which my Mac defaults to playing audio files AND burning them to CD.  To put it as simply as possible, since I had been making different mixes of the same song over and over, it saved one of the earlier copies into memory and every time I literally clicked on the specific file that I wanted to actually play, it instead was "thinking for me" and played the old version that it already had available.  Now, I know this sounds completely insane but I found other people online with pretty much the same complaint, although it wasn't their own music that they were having the issue with.

Even MORE bizarre, I deleted all of my playlists, created a brand new one, manually moved each track over to the new playlist, burned the playlist to a CD, and then played the CD...and still it somehow copied the old version of the song onto the disc.  I mean, complete INSANITY.  What the freakin' logic is behind this "feature" is beyond me, and this is probably the stupidest computer related app issue I have ever encountered in my entire life...and that's saying quite a lot!  It's also wasted at least 20 hours of my time and other people's time, and nearly given me a heart attack in the process.

So, there you have it, folks.  I'm not completely nuts.  For those who defend Apple products as being far superior, in the words of Monty Python, I simply blow my nose at you.  I won't throw my Mac out the window, per se, but I'll certainly never be using Apple "Music" again...ever.  Simply put, be forewarned for you don't want to go through what I just went through with this.  Ugh.