Why is D unpopular?

[Guillaume Piolat]

On Monday, 2 May 2022 at 11:19:18 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad wrote:
> I guess they find excitement in it, where I think of it as poor 
> mastering. And I guess in some genres it is now considered bad 
> mastering if you don't use excessive compression.

I don't think there is any real reason to trust one own taste, as 
taste is socially constructed (cf. La Distinction from Bourdieu) 
and - simplifying - it reflects too much of your socioeconomic 
background to be significative. Music in particular particularly 
reflects that.


> The french music scene might be different? French "electro" 
> seemed more refined/sophisticated in the sound than many other 
> "similar" genres, but this is only my impression, which could 
> be wrong.

French hiphop was amazing (and is popular) from 2017 to ~2021 but 
I don't think we have something interesting otherwise. French 
electro is much less interesting than the Argentinian progressive 
house scene for example, and that's just my opinion again. A lot 
of good music gets produced in niches, to get completely ignored 
nowadays, so it would be hard to say what scene is interesting ; 
we all get to miss it anyway.


> I didn't understand this one, do you mean that musicians 
> misunderstand what is causing the effect so that they think 
> that it is caused by the main effect, but instead it caused by 
> the internal delay of the unit? Or did you mean something else?

Oversampling typically produces:
A. a phase shift
B. anti-aliasing

but because aliasing is a tiny problem in dynamics processing in 
the first place, people choose to use it while hearing only (A). 
Which can sound good by itself. The by-product becomes more 
desirable than the non-problem it solves. Now everyone wants the 
feature!


> I do hear a difference when listening to my own mix (maybe 
> because I've spent so many hours analysing it).

If a typically polished song is listened as MP3, then MP3 becomes 
the norm.
And then what-everyone-else-is-doing sounds sincerely better to 
our ears. A process you could call "legitimation".

I had a strange conversation about Autotune once with a 20 years 
old:
- an heavily autotuned voice sounded "normal" and not-autotuned 
to her
- but the _talkbox_ in Kavinsky - Nightcall sounded ugly to her 
and "autotuned". She mentionned of course she didn't like the 
Autotune. But was unable to identify it in practice.