"I think it's an answer to how pristine everything sounds today," says Jeff Greenberg, chief executive of the Village, one of the busiest recording studios in Los Angeles, and vice president of the Society of Professional Audio Recording Services.
"Everybody's striving for such technical perfection, they're forgetting that some of the greatest records in history were done in scratchy old mono. You could tell that the players put their hearts and souls into their playing. The performances moved you, and it had nothing to do with 96 channels of high-sample-rate digital audio."
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Tuesday December 24, 2002 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 19 inches; 707 words Type of Material: Correction
Beatles song -- A story in Wednesday's Section A about computer-generated sounds meant to simulate the scratches on vinyl records incorrectly cited the Beatles song "Rocky Raccoon" as an early example of the effect. The Beatles' "Honey Pie" included such sound effects.
Perfect Pitch
Two decades ago, the music and consumer electronics industries trumpeted a quantum leap in audio technology.
The birth of digital recording and the invention of the compact disc as a playback medium would forever eliminate the pops and scratches that often came between music and music lovers. And unlike vinyl LPs, CDs would never wear out.
But a funny thing happened on the way to sonic perfection: Some people found they missed the noise.
"If it's your vinyl, all those scratches mean it's your soundtrack," says Pete Howard, publisher of ICE magazine, a monthly publication for music junkies.
Says Greenberg: "It puts a record into a frame of reference that suddenly orients you toward another time as well as a specific sound."
That's what Keith was after in "Good to Go to Mexico."
"When I wrote that song, it had a real old-school sound to the opening chords," says the Oklahoma singer and songwriter. "We wanted it to sound ... like something from the '30s or '40s, and then bring it up to the modern day for the rest of the song, which has a real modern Latin feel to it."
In Keith's song, as with most of the current examples, the simulated noise appears for a few seconds, then gives way to digital purity.
Some say these studio-incubated flaws, far from detracting from the music, actually make it stand out.
With digital recordings, "there's almost too much clarity, so you hear everything separately ... and sometimes that's a little distracting to the music," says Eric Persing, creative director of Spectrasonics, a Burbank software manufacturer. He's the inventor of Stylus, the company's software package that allows vinyl noise effects to be added during editing.
"Some aspects of older recordings make them a more pleasant way to listen to the music," Persing added. "The brain is not trying to focus on all the individual elements, so it can focus on the song."
