And at a gig I did on black Friday I noticed with one DJ (who was playing off two usb sticks) that on every other track the bass would disappear, I went up to have a look at the mixer thinking that he'd turned the bass down on one channel but no, everything was fine, it must have been crap quality on one of the usb sticks. I questioned him about and he said it sounded ok on his headphones....

I think I got carried away tho, as my scoop heavy sound system is too big to play in normal sized venues..d'oh

 

Did I read somewhere that young people are now used to hearing heavily compressed music, their brains interpret the rest and so they don't need to listen to high fidelity reproductions, with good quality frequencies across the spectrum, as their brain makes up for it? Maybe that is a regression similar to only having black and white pictures in the past...with the brain colouring it in (err don't think that actually happens)

Pretty sure YouTube cuts audio at about 15khz to save bandwidth so youtube rips miss a lot of frequencies anyway!

S'why I don't like streaming services taking over...people get too used to having music on instant demand, and at a low quality...I'd rather cue up and run a piece of wax any day. You don't know what good sound sounds like though until you hear and notice it...most punters don't seem to know the difference, at least not under the influence...

Hey at least it makes proper sounds with pre amps and record boxes sound amazing in comparison!

At the NYE gig the disco had SX300's and a laptop with WAV's, and we all agreed it was the best setup we'd seen all year.

And a mixer that sends a small electric shock to the DJ whenever he/she redlines

I kind of agree and disagree with your original post .

I totally agree that there are some awful DJs out there playing some awfully produced material over crappy cheap kit.

I don't think it's useful to blame digital / USB per-se though, as has been said before the quality can be very high when done right.

I think the problem is more due to the way the barrier to entry for music production (and dj-ing) has come down so much. When I started djing I used to travel to London from the Midlands to buy vinyl, so once you factor in the train fare there was a real incentive to really listen to what you were buying and be selective.

The cost (in terms of effort and actual money) of a new track now is so low it's easy to be less picky, which results in DJ's playing crappy productions. Add in the fact that to get a vinyl release in the first place the tracks would need to be half decent and mastered properly.

A large proportion of new releases these days are mastered really badly, smashed into a brick wall limiter and downright painful to listen to at high volumes. The loudness wars are a big problem. I'd like to see the big online music sellers put a dynamic range rating next to tracks to help educate todays buyers. Perhaps a dynamic range rating on CDJ screens too, with a big "Poor quality track" warning that flashes on the screen when you load something that's been maximised to within an inch of it's life! Traktor / Serato could easily add that feature too, everyone's ears would thank them.

As far as MP3 goes... again it's not really the problem, a well produced track will sound great even at 128kbps. 256kbps has been shown to be indistinguishable from WAV in proper blind tests. Having said that, DJs should use uncompressed formats whenever possible in my view - these days there is simply no reason not to. If you record your sets then even more reason to use uncompressed tracks, since the likelyhood is you will end up re-compressing the recording to MP3 or similar when you distribute it.