PROBLEMATIZING HI-RES AND THE ALBUM

You might have read that Bullet’s EP would be released in two “versions”. The first is the usual CD-quality 16bit/44.1kHz format. Despite the bad rap it has gotten from some audiophiles, CD audio is still superior to both "lossy" mp3s and various "lossless" formats. However, while we were recording, I noticed that Shinji had recorded the tracks at a higher 24bit/88.2kHz resolution. This is widely practiced in studios because this resolution allows for a finer level of editing and signal processing. But most laypersons never hear recordings in this resolution because they are downsampled into a standard consumer CD-quality format for release. 

I saw this as an opportunity to address two issues that have been bothering me recently. First, there is a festering belief that CD-quality audio is not true “high-fidelity”. Uber-critical listeners have complained that CDs sound too bright and shrill, and lack the smoothness of the “analog” sound. In the early days of digital audio, many engineers had not adapted/updated their techniques, and the results merely exposed their unfamiliarity with the new technology. Later, the abuse of digital technologies resulted in recordings which ended up sounding either brittle, or overwhelmingly loud and devoid of dynamics. Attempts to create new standards for higher-fidelity digital recordings were unfortunately mired in competitive corporate politics, so competing optical/physical consumer high-resolution formats never gained traction. But personal computers changed all that. With the right codec, today’s computer can playback at practically any resolution. Throw in a nice audio interface, amplifiers, speakers, and voila! You can listen to a digital audio file with as high a resolution as your system allows. While a few enthusiasts are set up to play these kinds of files, the majority is unfortunately still in the dark.

The second issue I’d been toying with had to do with the perceived death of the “album”. Digital audio has brought about total random access, meaning you can hop, skip, and jump to any track in an album. Listening to the songs in the sequence of an album has been replaced by shuffle and/or random playback. Then there is the nefarious recording industry practice of putting only a couple of “hit” songs and loading the rest of an album with “throwaway” and “b-side” songs, which has dampened people’s desire to acquire an entire album. Also, producing an album of eight to twelve songs has become such a massive, expensive and time-consuming project that present-day indies lacking in the resources of big record companies have resorted to three to six song “extended play” EPs to save time, money, and effort. Still, there are people out there who mourn the seeming demise of both the album as a physical object, and as a concept.  So in the run up to mixing, I decided to resolve these issues of resolution and the album in one go. 

To address the first issue, we mixed 24bit/88.2kHz .aiff versions with no downsampling/conversion. We did not use any audio program compression, neither did we do any “mastering” or any other form of post-production processing. What you are getting is an exact copy of the file that we worked on in the studio. The hi-res version may not sound that much different from the 16bit/44.1kHz version in casual listening. But in critical listening one will notice that the voice is slightly smoother in the high frequencies (which is important because Bullet’s voice is very rich in that region), and individual guitar strings have more room to breathe (which is also important because his guitar playing is so dense). This will hopefully satisfy the burgeoning demand for high-resolution digital recordings, and people obsessed with authenticity. To address the second issue, I put all three songs continuously in a single 400 megabyte file. Experiencing this file resembles what would happen in a live three-song set or, in a sense, a complete “album”. I’m already anticipating some people branding this as autocratic. But one must understand that I come from a generation in which if you wanted to do something apart from the artist’s/producer’s intentions, you had to work on it. For example, if you wanted to rearrange things in those days, you had to stay up all night creating that perfect cassette mix-tape in which there was a programmatic flow to the selections, and the end of the last song did not run out of tape. But that came only after listening to the albums from which these selections came from in sequence so many times that you understood the artists'/producers' intent well enough to break them up. So while tech-savvy users could easily split this file apart with any audio editor, I suggest taking it for a few “spins” with the original sequence before you break it up. 

This EP is not the holy grail of digital audio, and I do not claim to be the saviour of the album. But the academic in me is always in search of issues, and ways to address them. I hope that my confrontation with these two issues bring them to the attention of musicians, engineers, and producers, and inspires them devise their own unique approaches to resolve them.