Quality In The 21st Century: Relative, As Always.(audio engineering)(Industry Overview)

Tape-Disc Business, January, 2001 by Daley, Dan

Next time you're in the car, flip over to the local oldies station and get your balance control ready. When some of the older records come on -- the Aretha Franklin stuff out of Muscle Shoals from the 1960s, for instance -- crank it up and give it a good listen, checking the stereo hard to either side, which will let you listen more critically to certain parts of the recordings.

What you'll hear may surprise you. Clinically, we might refer to them as artifacts, but any audio engineer will call them by other names, including distortion, pitch problems, hums and assorted accidents, like tambourines falling off music stands in the middle of takes.

The music of the era that defined the Baby Boom generation -- the music from the late 1950s through the...

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