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Comment by webkike | Hacker News Reader

If you want to understand the true beauty of these machines, I recommend listening to this wonderful mix by the great Kerri Chandler played on four reel-to-reel machines https://youtu.be/YC7Mw8RjlXM

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I think house is might be the one genre I genuinely don't get at all. Playing this mix just cemented this feeling to me. I can hear it's smooth and mellow, but it's also just the most boring thing ever. If I go out to dance and a DJ is playing this I go find a different place. As I'm typing this comment the music only just got interesting, and I'm at 8:15, like why.. And I just know that he's just going to ruin it by making the interesting part boring by stretching it for the next 4 minutes. I've got a few friends in my old crew that still do house dance, and I can get with it for a while, but eventually the boringness just gets to me and I need something to either pop or break.

Don’t really know what to say. Your comment reads like someone telling me that they don’t like a pan seared salmon filet. I don’t think anyone will convince you that this music is exciting but 120/130 bpm is a fine speed to dance to and there’s a reason people enjoy music like this

Well I don't set my metronome to 120 and jam to it tho.. but kidding aside, that's exactly why I made the comment. I feel so weird for it, like I genuinely can tell that it's good fish, and that it's prepared exquisitely, I just can't enjoy it for some reason. For me it's just one snare hit away from something truly danceable like maybe dancehall or electropop.

the repetitiveness is the appeal, is all i can say. i hear similar arguments about ambient music. "it's the same chord for 40 minutes", "it's just white noise".

The idea that it's supposed to promote something of a trance is right in the name of the whole trance genre.

I find that putting on repetitive music in the background while working is helpful.

I don't think it's ever been meant to listen to per se, more to dance to; hence why it used to be called dance music.

Which is funny because I find a lot of edm listenable outside of a dance context, especially hardcore.

This is just some real classic house here and sometimes I just spend weeks listening only that. You may need a history yourself in the scene to get it. Music for minorities, music to heal.

And Kerri here is such an engineer, mixing pitch perfect with a complex system, fixing it if needed.

Such a legend.

absolutely! Second this

house is a feeling

House is house

I don't listen to a lot of house, but this mixmag cd[1] from Dimitri from Paris, Monsieur Dimitri's De-Luxe House of Funk, I just keep coming back to.

A lot more flair than most "plain" house though, guess that's why.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3N4mIoV3U84

I really appreciate the skill of the person operating the machine but it doesn't sound particularly different from any random CD to me. I guess it's an interesting constraint for the DJ though, you can't swap the tape in and out without rewinding it first, you can seek randomly like on a vinyl. It's a cool art performance but the resulting audio on its own is fairly mundane as far as I can tell. It sounds a bit compressed but that's fairly common for that type of music so it's hard to judge if it's a constraint of the hardware or an artistic choice.

It's about the craft, the engineering. He's a legend, but here he just plays around and has fun with his hobby project.

Typically he plays CDJ and before that vinyl with an additional tape reel if needed.

I do a lot of stuff with audio, and I can definitely hear the difference. And while I am absolutely crazy about the sound of analog tape, at the same time, I can think of brutally clean, digital recordings that just completely blow my mind. Horses for courses, I guess.

There is no objective audio quality improvement to using analog equipment (vs correctly engineered digital).

The appeal of analog is in the physicality of it, the constraints, the user interface, and the way it colors (i.e. distorts) the sound. It's art, and it's great, but at the end of the day you can always digitize the result and it'll sound the same, and theoretically you can also emulate almost any analog audio processing digitally (though it might be hard and nobody might have implemented it yet).

The way to enjoy analog is to pay no attention to all those ignorant audiophiles who still claim it has a quality advantage over digital (while having not the slightest idea how the Nyquist-Shanning sampling theorem works), and enjoy it for what it is. Art. A tool. Nostalgia. Imperfection. Constraints. Skill.

It's 2020 and we still enjoy 8-bit games. Analog is the same thing. And it shouldn't go away, just like retro gaming shouldn't go away. Just ignore that dude who says that LPs have better audio quality than CDs.

Now I hope I don't spawn a generation of gameophiles that say that SNES mode7 3D is higher quality than an Nvidia RTX :-)

Thanks, it sounds relaxed, the treble doesn't seem so harsh there? Or maybe it's just psychosomatic.

Part of that will be noise reduction, part of that is also high frequency response (depends on the tape speed).

Man, these old machines. Tape speed, tape formula, the humidity, you name it. Not to mention the skill of the "tape whisperer" that knows how to calibrate the machine properly.

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