"2112: The Musical!" ... Anybody? No? I hate you guys.

The cover of Rush's 1976 album 2112

So, during my long commute to work today, I had a thought. The thought was brought about by the fact that for the last two days, I’ve been listening to Rush’s 2112, A Farewell to Kings, and Hemispheres all in sequence on my ipod (It was free! I won it! I can’t just not use it! proceeds went to AIDS!).

Anywho, the thought was this: why hasn’t anyone tried to jump on the “let’s write a poorly scripted musical based on popular music by a band that everyone loves” bandwagon using the music of multi-platinum Canadian prog-rock power-trio Rush?

Well, I saw “We will Rock You,” the poorly scripted musical based on popular music by Queen about a year ago and was struck by how easily a musical can become a hit by coming up with a pointless plot in order to loosely string together popular songs.

I am inspired by the fact that Rush’s epic songs actually have a plot of their own, courtesy of Neil Pert’s lyrics. I realized that it wouldn’t be too hard to connect the 20 minute “2112″ with the approximately 30 minute “Cyngus X-1″ duology. that’s almost an hour of music right there. Throw in some dialogue, and a couple of other songs and you’ve got yourself a decent musical. So, here, for your pretend-enjoyment, is a mock-up plot synopsis of a hypothetical “2112: the Musical.”

Act I:

The not-so-distant future: Man is on the technological verge of intergalactic space-travel, but no life outside of earth has been discovered as yet. The black hole of Cygnus X-1 in the constellation of Cygnus is found to be sending X-rays through the galaxy. One of the scientists who discovers the rays becomes obsessed with the possibilities of a black hole emitting anything at all, and endeavours to travel to the black hole and investigate. When he gets within distance of the black hole, he is sucked inside, and compressed by the gravity of the vaccuum.

Back on earth, the technological advancement of certain countries has  lead to a space-race, spurring international warfare. As the death-toll rises, the world’s artists and visionaries attempt to destroy all advanced technology, fleeing into outerspace in hopes of finding their own private Xanadu (as prophesied by Coleridge?).

Thus ends act one, as the survivors on the planet earth are left without technology, barbarous and chaotic.

Act II:

The year is 2112, and the people of earth have taken what little technology they could salvage and recreated a civilization under the totalitarian rule of the priests of Syrinx, who have built temples everywhere, and eliminated all forms of expression but those they deem acceptable to their plan. One man working in an assembly line escapes his factory and takes refuge in a cave, where he discovers a guitar. Unaware of what it is, he teaches himself to play it, and discovering the power of emotion through music, he realizes that the people of earth (and the solar federation) are missing emotion from their lives. So, he presents his guitar to the Priests, thinking that they will welcome the uniting force of music, but they unexpectedly destroy it, and send him on his way. 

He returns to the cave, and in a dream meets an oracle, who shows him a vision of the past, in which an elder race lived happily after travelling to Xanadu, where they’ve continued to explore open-minded behaviours for generations. The oracle says that one day, they will return to destroy the temples of Syrinx. On awaking, the man is so depressed by the state of affairs, believing his dream to be an illusion, that he kills himself. However, as civil wars break out in the solar federation, the elder race returns from Xanadu, alerted by the sound of the guitar, and assumes control of the Solar federation.

The act ends with the outbreak of a war between the passionate elder race, or the Dionysians, and the logical, emotionless people of the Solar Federation, or the Apollineans.

Act III:

As the Apollineans and Dionysians fight, the spirit of the scientist from Act I is sent through the blackhole and through time, back to earth where the people are warring. Seeing the chaos, he cries out for them to stop, and they suddenly realize that they require balance to co-exist. They christen the spirit Cygnus, god of balance, and he teaches them that a balance of heart and mind will mold a new society that is closer to the heart…

The End.

Yep. It’d kick ass.

You get a full cast recording of “Closer to the Heart” as a finale. 

Tell me that wouldn’t kick ass. 

Yeah, it’d kick ass.

Now, who wants to help me ask the members of Rush to produce?

Where my Au20 gold discs at, fuggah?!

I've come to the conclusion (it was not hard to come to) that I am an audiophile.

Quoth wikipedia: "An audiophile, from Latin audire "to hear" and Greek philos 'loving,' can be generally defined as a person dedicated to achieving high fidelity in the recording and playback of music."

To be clear (for clarity is prized), I have a greater appreciation for music that sounds as close to the original source material as possible.

Human ears are a highly sensitive stereo system.

Quoth some random university's website:"A reasonably standard definition of audible sound is that it is a pressure wave with frequency between 20 Hz and 20,000 Hz and with an intensity above the standard threshold of hearing."

I'm not sure whether that refers to the perceived loudness, or the actual frequency at which the waves wobble (the difference being that higher frequency wobbling means a more "treble" oriented sound, while a lower frequency wobbling means a more "bass" oriented sound... Pretty much anyone who listens to music with more than a passing interest knows this stuff).

The important thing to take from what I'm saying is that an audio recording which has higher or lower frequencies cut out or misrepresented, will sound less like it did when it was actually being played by instruments. This kind of thing can be detected because anything that would normally fall within a certain range of frequencies, normally detectable to the human ear which is heard in a recording with misrepresented frequencies is going to sound thinner, tinnier, muffled, or muddy (these are words that smart people actually use to describe sound).

Now, an audiophile, being concerned with hi-fi recordings is going to want to hear a recording that can represent the entire range of frequencies that were originally being produced by say, a four piece band. This doesn't sound like it should be that hard. If you're like me, you listen to CDs and mp3s all the time thinking "this is pretty darn great." If you're also like me, though, you can certainly tell when someone's sent you a shitty-quality mp3, with a subpar bitrate (128 is considered normal... but is it?), and a lower frequency than your device or file was meant to be heard at.

Here's the problem: CDs as we know them are not normally capable of representing the full range of frequencies, and a vile thing known as "compression" has caused many a recording's range of frequencies to be "compressed" by shaving off the higher and lower frequencies (which admittedly, does not usually result in unsatisfactory listening) with two purposes: to fit audio onto a CD, and to decrease dynamic range to avoid clipping.

Why compress?

Quoth wikipedia (again): "The trade-off of slightly reduced audio quality is clearly outweighed for most practical audio applications where users cannot perceive any difference and space requirements are substantially reduced. For example, on one CD, one can fit an hour of high fidelity music, less than 2 hours of music compressed losslessly, or 7 hours of music compressed in MP3 format."

For the sake of useful redundancy: The standard CD can hold only 800MB (at best). This means that in some cases, a lossless recording of an album won't fit. This doesn't apply to the usual pop-album, which contains between thirty and fifty minutes of material (a rip-off considering the potential 80 minutes of writeable surface). Other albums, though, that take full advantage of the CD space, require compression*. However, the result is something unnatural. The result does not actually sound the way the recording sounded before it was recorded.

Over the years, mastering engineers and producers have figured out how to use compression to reasonable effect without causing noticeable losses to quality, through the use of computer algorithms which encode a lossless recording (typically a .wav format) into a coded lossy format like mp3, or even a lower quality wav.

Now, there's a whole other kind of compression which causes even more trouble. I mentioned that compression is used to modify the frequencies of a sound. Frequently, in remasters of releases that were originally vynil releases, loudness is an issue. We have grown accustomed to a certain level of loudness, which is much louder than what was common during the age of vynil. The process of digitally compressing say, a drum track allows for the drums to seem louder, without having an amplitude that would cause clipping. Clipping is what happens when audio becomes so loud as to be distorted. Compression avoids clipping, but at the cost of dynamic range - which means that the difference in volume between the sounds in a recording is smaller. The result of using too much compression for this purpose is that the brain has more trouble distinguishing between sounds, and some frequencies end up being lost in the mix - so you don't hear everything that was recorded.

So, for audiophiles (who tend not to enjoy pop albums anyway), we encounter problems when we listen to modern CDs that have compression (and for some, all CDs), and when we listen to CDs that were mastered before engineers had quite figured out how to do it best.

The solution? vynil.

The gramaphone or phonograph record is the solution. Somehow, through the miracle of analogue recordingsound wave is etched into the vynil disc. We see this in the form of the groove, which we put the needle into. If we could zoom in super-close, we'd see a wiggly sound wave (they look like this!). The groove, though tiny, can represent the full dynamic range of frequencies in the actual sound to the recording. So, why don't we always listen to vynil? After all, the capacity of vynil is actually limited to the amount of space on the disc. The spiral can only go around so many times before you run out of room. How much room does a record have? About 45 minutes in total. How many minutes is the average pop-album? About 45 minutes. the quality of the original recording is maintained. Here's how: when records are pressed, the actual

Well, vynil is fragile. It can warp, deteriorate and scratch. Worst of all, if anything manages to make the tiniest dent in the groove, then the sound wave at that point is permanently affected by whatever has happened to it. A piece of dust can get in the groove, and you get a pop or a click. Any thing that the needle of your record touches will be picked up by the amplifier. Any abnormal bend in the sound wave is going to be heard, and there's nothing you can do to fix it. Not to mention the fact that flipping the damn thing over is a bit of a chore...

That said, I think we need a bit of an example to show how vynil is/can be superior. In the early days of the CD, audio compression was a new and complicated thing. For one thing, computers were ASS. We're talking early/mid 80s, here. Tech-savvy artists were trying to convert their standard vynil releases to the new and exciting CD medium, which was smaller, didn't scratch as easily (no clicks or pops!) and you didn't even have to flip it over.

One such artist was Frank Zappa. Zappa fans (who are almost exclusively audiophiles for some reason), know that there were several albums that ended up getting mixed very badly for the CD reissue of their vynil favourites. Specifically, Shiek Yerbouti, Tinseltown Rebellion, and You Are What You Is. The masters for these albums were revisited and compressed for the CD releases. The result was horrible. The worst offender was You Are What You Is, which had so many problems that a guitar solo ended up being cut out, there were random volume spikes, and other issues that could cause average listeners headaches.

Later on, the album was re-remastered using the original master tapes, and everything was fine again... but in the end, the real audiophiles all went back and searched out the vinyl.

Unfortunately, audiophiles (and shitty DJs and hipsters) seem to be the only people keeping the vynil industry alive. Very few artists release their albums on vynil these days (more on this later). What alternative is there to vynil for those of us who don't want to send our valuable energy off into the entropic void by flipping the record over?

Solution: Lossless audio codecs.

Like I said before, there are lossless digital formats, like PCM (.wav). For computer users, if they have the capabilities, it is possible to rip lossless recordings from CDs (if those CDs are lossless themselves, otherwise, you're just encoding a lossy file without any further loss). Furthermore, if you don't mind having cables all over your floor, you can run a vynil turntable through your line-in (basically an all-purpose input) port in the back of your soundcard. Using audio programs, you can record the entire album in a lossless format.

But, what do we do about compressed CDs when vynil isn't available? Well, there's a bit of a movement going on that could be of some help.

With the dawn of the digital release, music artists are able to distribute the high-quality media files directly to you. Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails has partially pioneered this method of album release, letting his listeners download 320kbps mp3s (that's better than CDs), FLAC (almost lossless, but not quite), and wav (all lossless).

Not to mention the fact that SACDs, DVD-A, and Blu Rays have the kind of space you'd need to not only present the highest quality stereo version (which is the normal way to hear things with your ears), but also in surround sound! Yes, surround sound! the ridiculously unnecessary audio experience that lets you hear the music from anywhere between 3 and in some cases 10 (but usually 5.1) different locations. If you've got it set up right, it's supposed to sound like you're there with the band. I'm a fan of surround, but the lengths to which I will go to hear the band as if I was there are limited.

Anyway, with the increasing capacity of portable music devices, and the fact that you CAN burn lossless audio to CDs, even if the commercial CD release wasn't released in a lossless format, it seems that there will be (and are) audiophiles wandering around listening to hi-fi recordings on mp3 players.

However, in my view, vynil will always be the best choice.

*this is worded a bit incorrectly. It's not the case that 80 minutes of music is available to be written, but based on standard wav encoding and filesizes, 80 minutes is the standard for a lossless PCM format.