Lisarocket
In bed with me dinner
citydreams said:fankyoo
If you decide to go, PM me and i'll give you some directions. Hat on Wall is a bugger to find...
laptop deejays - the future?
- Thread starter onemonkey
- Start date
If you decide to go, PM me and i'll give you some directions. Hat on Wall is a bugger to find...
Ten years since I was anything like a regular clubber - I assumed most DJs were using lappies these days.
SQ wise you can tell the difference on a really good hifi but in a busy club there's no way you'd know a good MP3 from vinyl. I would think that the big advantage (apart from the obvious one about physical damage to vinyl impairing SQ) is the number of tunes you can cart around and therefore how responsive you can be to the crowd's mood and requests.
SQ wise you can tell the difference on a really good hifi but in a busy club there's no way you'd know a good MP3 from vinyl. I would think that the big advantage (apart from the obvious one about physical damage to vinyl impairing SQ) is the number of tunes you can cart around and therefore how responsive you can be to the crowd's mood and requests.
editor
hiraethified
Sure. But in my case I'm talking about Offline where most DJs play between 30-45 minutes. I don't think you need a laptop stuffed full of 10,000 tunes for that.ICB said:
If, however, I was putting on an all night party with long sets - or an event in the middle of nowhere - I would have no problem with their chosen medium.
I'd just be glad that they turned up!
citydreams
on the road again
Magneze said:
I'm suprised you can't just take a memory-stick to a record shop and get the latest tunes transferred over.
Brainaddict
slight system overdrive
Tis only a matter of time, surely? I would guess they're not doing it now because it makes it too easy to copy the track, but they'll have to give in eventually.citydreams said:
Mooncat
Hug me - I'm vaccinated
Theres a night down in Brighton called Litmus (www.litmus.org) thats been putting on laptop jams - I'm not talking someone just using Traktor to mix their own tunes but using Reason or whatever and MIDI keyboards to properly mix it up. Its a fucking banging night and definetly marks the begining of end of the DJ playing somone elses tunes.
I'm sorry but whoever said they can tell the diffrence between MP3's and viny on a propper rig is just wrong - if anything its easer to get a good sound from a digital output
I'm sorry but whoever said they can tell the diffrence between MP3's and viny on a propper rig is just wrong - if anything its easer to get a good sound from a digital output
Mooncat said:
how can we be wrong if we can fucking hear it? i regularly play both out on both big rigs and club rigs, and i can tell.
as for getting a better sound from a digital output - that's so vague as to be meaningless. if you mean you're playing mp3s, myself and others on this thread would categorically disagree.
) and you can still get a warm overdrive sound whatever the output
pinkychukkles
Feed Your Head
What about all those frequencies that we can't hear but feel on big rigs, are these replicated in digital form? Anyway, before this turns into a analogue vs digital debate, I was out in Shoreditch (for my sins 
) a few Saturdays ago at that bar called Mother, above the 333 club. The two djs there were playing using Final Scratch they were manipulating their music files on the turntables but crucially they also had <gasp!> some real records - quite sensible if the lappy went tits up.
Seeing that made me realise where the wind is blowing, so much so that I had a panic attack and bought loads of records on juno at the weekend! I've also started to 'back-up' my vinyl into digital format but I love vinyl, the appearance, the smell, the feel the size, the artwork....
) a few Saturdays ago at that bar called Mother, above the 333 club. The two djs there were playing using Final Scratch they were manipulating their music files on the turntables but crucially they also had <gasp!> some real records - quite sensible if the lappy went tits up. Seeing that made me realise where the wind is blowing, so much so that I had a panic attack and bought loads of records on juno at the weekend! I've also started to 'back-up' my vinyl into digital format but I love vinyl, the appearance, the smell, the feel the size, the artwork....
pinkychukkles
Feed Your Head
You knows it! I'm salivating at the prospect of all these shiny new rekkids arriving from Juno... I might even have another shop now... no! I must be strong, but the vinyl industry needs my custom otherwise tomorrow there won't be any new records on sale...anywhere <runs screaming from room>editor said:
Skim
Well-Known Member
Iemanja said:I agree...
It's the future! Who wants to carry 20kg or more worth of records around?
Ok, 20kg is probably an exaggeration, but you know what I mean...
My record bag is about 17kg when it's full, so you're not far wrong
Personally I'd rather have more in my hand than a mouse when I'm DJing – vinyl and CDs are heavy, but worth it. I'm not averse to MP3 technology, but it hasn't inspired me yet.
Properly encoded 92kHz FLAC files run throug a decent converter will blow vinyl into next week under any circumstances - vinyl sounds warm live because you get very musical-sounding feedback through the cart like an electric guitar, but you lose loads of detail. Vinyl can just about keep up with CD in absolutely perfect conditions (near-cleanroom, £50,000 turntable mounted on a concrete slab, ultrasonically cleaned vinyl, perfect stylus) but in DJing conditions it's going to sound musical but technically nasty when compared to even average digital playback. Lots of laptops sound dog-rough because they're using the shitty onboard sound or a really cheap USB interface, but that's not an inherent fault of digital. Laptops offer a lot of options to DJs creative enough to do something meaningful with them.
Bearing that all in mind, I hate most laptop-based 'musicians'. My problem with laptops is that they tend to breed a very quick fix, cut and paste attitude to things. Modern software has made it very easy indeed to get credible results with very little creative input. I am utterly sick of listening to a record and hearing not one but several reason presets - never a good sign, methinks. I'm not saying that you can't make good music on a laptop, but I am saying it makes the creative process harder and makes it a hell of a lot easier for the utterly talentless to blag it. Working with a DX7 and a battered portastudio might have been limiting, but it made people think about what they were doing. I don't want to go to a gig to listen to someone playing back sequences, I want to hear a performance, not over-quantised, soulless boops and beeps.
Bearing that all in mind, I hate most laptop-based 'musicians'. My problem with laptops is that they tend to breed a very quick fix, cut and paste attitude to things. Modern software has made it very easy indeed to get credible results with very little creative input. I am utterly sick of listening to a record and hearing not one but several reason presets - never a good sign, methinks. I'm not saying that you can't make good music on a laptop, but I am saying it makes the creative process harder and makes it a hell of a lot easier for the utterly talentless to blag it. Working with a DX7 and a battered portastudio might have been limiting, but it made people think about what they were doing. I don't want to go to a gig to listen to someone playing back sequences, I want to hear a performance, not over-quantised, soulless boops and beeps.
tangerinedream
Density of Sound
poet said:
poet - what does this mean? genuine question
tangerinedream said:poet - what does this mean? genuine question
This explanation is piss-poor, so bear with me.
In any musically pitched sound you have a series of harmonics, a whole set of frequencies that make up the sound, all mathematically related to the fundamental, the lowest frequency in the sound. Rich sounds like an overdriven electric guitar have lots more harmonics than a thinner sound like a clean electric guitar. We (for a variety of poorly-understood reasons) find these rich sounds with lots of even-order harmonics pleasing. They fill out the spectrum and make simple sounds (like a lead guitar line) sound bigger. Things like valve amplifiers, analog synths and vinyl are techincally poorer than their modern equivalents in that they reproduce the sound less precisely, but these flaws tend to generate lots of pleasing harmonics - these additional harmonics are what people mean when they talk about 'fattening' a sound. For musically simple things like rock and dance music this is usually good - compare a clean electric guitar lead line and a heavily overdriven line, there is something inherently pleasing and more interesting in the overdriven sound. The problem is that this desirable fattening can make more complex sounds turn into mush - try playing an open minor chord on an overdriven electric guitar and it'll just be a mess. Detail is lost and traded off for 'fatness'.
tangerinedream
Density of Sound
poet said:
cheers poet - it makes sense I think
Boogie Boy
Rockin' on the 1210s
poet said:Properly encoded 92kHz FLAC files run throug a decent converter will blow vinyl into next week under any circumstances - vinyl sounds warm live because you get very musical-sounding feedback through the cart like an electric guitar, but you lose loads of detail. Vinyl can just about keep up with CD in absolutely perfect conditions (near-cleanroom, £50,000 turntable mounted on a concrete slab, ultrasonically cleaned vinyl, perfect stylus) but in DJing conditions it's going to sound musical but technically nasty when compared to even average digital playback. Lots of laptops sound dog-rough because they're using the shitty onboard sound or a really cheap USB interface, but that's not an inherent fault of digital. Laptops offer a lot of options to DJs creative enough to do something meaningful with them.
I quite disagree Poet, I really do. I would argue that vinyl begins to take the lead against any CD player at around the £700 to £1000 mark - at which point the serious limitations of cd's can be heard - particularly with respect to dynamics and spatial depth. It is for this reason that quality turntables still sell, once people have actually sat down and listened to an audiophile deck there is no competition. Thus we still see the GyroDeck and LP12's of the world still selling (admittedly at a premium).
Unfortunately, for very many people, their experience of vinyl is restricted to a Technics turntable, a veritable work horse, but not designed to extract the greatest amount of information from a vinyl record. However, it is a testament to a generally good design that under club conditions they still sound as good as they do - even with the generally poor audio quality of the cartridges and styli used.
BB
n
I've seen people use laptops well onstage before. It's something the european jazz contingent are very good at. (Bugge Wusseltoft etc.) Using them to simply crossfade a few tunes together is a complete waste of time, it's far more interesting to actually be mixing the set from different components in the way ableton makes brilliantly easy.
As for the sound quality argument 90% of the issue on a digital versus analogue thing for this application will rely on the quality and nature of the time stretching algorithms in use on the digital equipment. Very variable things. Some mechanisms work best for percussive, others for pads etc.
The other thing is the tactility of mixing vinyl. You can see and feel where the different sections of the tune are by the shininess etc. CD decks have improved their interfaces, but still aren't there, and I've not seen any mp3 peripherals that are close. It's like trying to do synth programming with buttons and a mouse instead of an array of physical knobs. Nothing like as fun, and less likely to find the magical sweet spot.
As for the sound quality argument 90% of the issue on a digital versus analogue thing for this application will rely on the quality and nature of the time stretching algorithms in use on the digital equipment. Very variable things. Some mechanisms work best for percussive, others for pads etc.
The other thing is the tactility of mixing vinyl. You can see and feel where the different sections of the tune are by the shininess etc. CD decks have improved their interfaces, but still aren't there, and I've not seen any mp3 peripherals that are close. It's like trying to do synth programming with buttons and a mouse instead of an array of physical knobs. Nothing like as fun, and less likely to find the magical sweet spot.
Boogie Boy said:
The sale of high-end turntables can be attributed to something else - audiophile hype. High end turntables are thousands of pounds worth of effort into removing the reason people like vinyl in the first place - the distortion. Yes, theoretically they're better, but you can't hear what theyre better at and you can hear what they're worse at. CDs can record up to 22,500Hz, 16 bit words have a dynamic range of about 96dB. On paper that's rubbish, but very few people over 30 have enough hearing left to notice - once your top end starts to go and you lose a little hearing anything that CD could be hiding that would be there on vinyl will be hidden from you by your own ears. 96dB is a huge dynamic range for moderate listening levels and I defy anyone out of their teens to hear all the 23kHz detail that CDs are apparently so brutishly obliterating. Anyone who's mastered for vinyl knows you have to do a lot more to get something to work on it - all you've got to do is keep things under 0db and they'll work OK on CD, vinyl's got so many frailties that you've got to manhandle your source to get it to fit. You can get all of the supposed technical advantages by stepping up to DVD-A or SACD and get all sorts of other benefits as well.
I have seen 'a very popular hi-fi magazine' do a group test of spdif cables and describe one as having less bass - clearly utter bollocks, as it's a physical impossibility. There's hoge amounts of voodoo involved in the hi-fi industry because it sells. £120 power leads, £4000 hifi stands, £300 a metre speaker cable, £1500 interconnects and so much else are total, total cock - the placebo effect is a marvellous thing. You run out of actual physical improvements to be made and run into hardcore pseudoscience, especially in the cables industry - it's simply impossible for a £130 IEC lead to provide meaningfully better power than a simple £15 solid-core cable in good nick. In reality once you go past the grand mark for a cd/vinyl-amp-speakers combo, 99% of so called audiophiles won't be able to tell the difference with any degree of accuracy in a properly conducted blind test. I can count on one hand the number of people (out of hundreds of audio pros) who could honestly tell the difference between a £2,000 pair of Genelecs and a £40,000 set of custom nearfield monitors once they've both been precisely gain, geometry and EQ matched. The Hifi mags don't do proper blind trials for a bloody good reason - they'd have very little to write about if they did.
Boogie Boy
Rockin' on the 1210s
poet said:
Again I have to disagree - the reason why audiophile turntables are still being sold is simple - they sound better!! The reason for their expense is due to the engineering involved to allow the maximum of information to be extracted from the groove (and to get rid - as you say -of the potential nastiesuch as distortion). And £1000 for a CD/Amp/Speakers combination is not going to actually buy you very much (especially once you have included the cost of cables), once you move beyond that price range things start to get interesting - and the differences between the various manufacturers become more stark.
BB
poet said:
I've used a 192 khz 24bit ProTools HD Rig running with Apogee D/A convertors and although the quality of sound reproduction is amazing I still prefer the sound of Vinyl.
There was a thread on Francois K's forum where he was talking about the merits of playing out with 24 bit Audio files through a sound system in a club enviroment.
I asked where did he source the 24 bit Audio files from and he said he just records his records in through an audiophile turntable and very nice valve head amp straight into his soundcard, captures it at 192khz, so the recording is alot truer representation of the vinyl sound than a 16bit 44.1khz audio file would be.
Find it quite ironic that despite all this high end audio technology the source is still vinyl.
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