Tom’s Essay (2008) | Hacker News Reader

Tom’s Essay (2008)

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com

50 pointsTomte14 comments

For context Suzanne Vega is a famous independent musician from decades prior: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suzanne_Vega

One of her more well known songs is titled Tom’s Diner.

Tom's Diner was picked by Karlheinz Brandenburg as the reference song to develop the MP3 format. The team developing the audio compression algorithms listened to it over and over until it sounded "good".

http://www.internethistorypodcast.com/2015/07/on-the-20th-bi...

The a cappella one or the 'other' one?

Edit: it's in TFA, the a cappella one.

In the hobby hi-fi dabbling circles I frequented way back it was widely used as a reference recording.

The other one being the remix by an electronica duo called "DNA", which propelled it to the top of the charts...

Here’s the commodore 64 demo that riffs off that tale: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=artEQkifGG0

Haha. I immediately wanted to know if this had anything to do with Tom's Diner

That's also mentioned in the 10th paragraph of the linked post, and most of the post is about Tom's Diner from there on.

Although it's covered in the article, I wanted to add a little more context for folks who aren't familiar with the song:

* The song Tom's Diner was a notorious earworm that seemed to get stuck in the head of society at large for a few months in the early 90's. For a short while it felt like some version of it was playing on every radio everywhere

* The original track was minimal – just her voice – so lent itself to a wide variety of covers and remixes that crossed a lot of genres

* Suzanne Vega was an advocate for those covers and remixes at a time when the record industry was not, and eventually put together a full album of remixes called Tom's Album

Past comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22838995

Tom's Album has a lot of interesting tracks on it, including one refocused around the television series I Dream of Jeannie, called "Jeannie's Diner," by the man who would eventually be Richard Cheese, parodyist extraordinaire.

paywall

this link (dot added) is accessible https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com./2008/09/23/toms-essay...

https://archive.ph/Y5r4u

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