Testing t3h Awesome...

Here is an example of how the Bullshit Detector of your average musician gets defeated by gearlust. I’m as guilty as anyone, of course, and the test is not double-blind, scientific in the least, or verified. I have a gut feeling that it is absolutely true, though. In a nutshell, if you don’t feel like reading it, a self-described “audiophile” (and we all get a case of the giggles when we hear that word) admits in public that he couldn’t tell the difference between Monster M-1000 speaker cable and the same connection made with coat hanger wire.

This brings to mind the recent video that was posted of a Robert Henke lecture in Australia, wherein he goes in to some detail about how 64-bit summing busses in DAWs are simply a marketing ploy, and how it is essentially impossible for the human ear to tell the difference between 32-bit math and 64-bit math, at least as far as summing busses are concerned. (The video is well worth watching in any case, as it goes in to his process and how he designed and uses MonoDeck II. It’s 1.5hrs long, though.)

He points out, in a somewhat different manner, the same thing I’ve been saying for years: the song will out. People tend to obsess on the medium or the means of delivery these days, at the expense of the music itself. Anyone that thinks you can’t have a hit song using Acid and a Presonus Firebox, mixed on Behringer monitors, needs to go have a conversation with Soulja Boy real quick-like. I’ll be the absolute first person to admit that I’m a gear snob of the first order, but I know enough about the math of audio to be absolutely certain of one fact: my nice shit doesn’t help me write better songs.

What it does do is remove the gear itself from any question. I know that if my song sounds like shit, it’s definitely not because of my convertors, monitors, cabling, whatever. It’s my mix or the song itself. I have no illusions whatsoever of that fact.