Acido Domingo

Subwoofer, eh? Audio quality. Yup.

It wouldn't hurt to learn the difference between Hz and kHz before arguing with anyone about sound quality. You must be using incredibly bad MP3 decoders. Have you ever tested the spectrum flatness of a typical party sound system?

Weird strange sick twisted eerie godless EVIL STUFF!!!!eleven

Sure. Taking a pocket-size HD to a party is one thing, doesn't mean you'd have to fill it with stuff you don't own though. That's like saying painting is an art and computer graphics isn't because your grandma can use MS Paint. That's true, but you can create art in different ways, there's lots of other software that lets you create art in a variety of ways---mathematically like with POVRay, simulating traditional painting like with Corel Painter (basically the same as MS Paint yet totally different in the level of skill you need and the things you can do), or different from both like with Maya. Using a computer doesn't keep you from listening five times to each track and understanding it perfectly, does it? Now if you try to run two WinAmp instances and create a good mix with it, it will probably sound crap, but you don't have to. Though it can be an art in its own right, like writing 4K intros where you deliberately make things difficult for yourself to show your 5k1llZ0r are 1337 enough to do it anyway.

You make that sound like a bad thing...?

Looks like it.... I stand corrected! But then...that's pretty low bitrates, and probably a sample read directly from CD, not postprocessed through the filters that are there in any CD player. In a 320 kbps file, more bits will be assigned to the lower frequencies as well, so it wouldn't just double the frequency range as compared to 160 kbps, but I still wonder if it couldn't be pushed close enough to 20 kHz that the difference is hard to tell. Well, Reger and Colin still have a point, if people just used a spectrum analyzer it would make telling at least the low-bitrate compressed files trivial.

Maybe Pavel could tell the difference... There was this contest on a phoneticists' site where the admin posted some spectrogram of a word, and people had to guess what was said. That was hard enough for trained pros who had seen and analyzed thousands such spectrograms.

Yes, but that doesn't make the difference to CDs because that's what a CD player does as well. Stuff below 20 Hz is usually lost in the rumble filter and since 22.05 kHz is the absolute upper limit for a CD sampler anyway you have to cut it off a little below that both to smoothen the sound a little at high frequencies (a 22 kHz sine wave digitized on a CD becomes a square wave!) and to keep aliasing artifacts out. If you sample with frequency f (44.1 kHz for CDs), all frequencies in the sound appear "mirrored" at f/2, so if an instrument produces a 25 kHz sound that we can't hear, a "mirror image" of this would appear at |25-44.1|=19.1 kHz which we can hear. Because you can't physically build a filter that filters nothing below 22.05 kHz and everything above it, it has to start a bit earlier, like at 20. It's interesting but probably more technical than you'd think, doesn't have much to do with psychology, more mechanics of the ear and nerve impulses. Uhm...what's your nick there again?

It's a lot more complicated; what gets left out depends on the entire spectrum of sound at the moment and even before. Like a loud hihat won't let you hear much of the high-frequency spectrum even a few dozen milliseconds after. This "psychoacousic model" is the one thing besides speed that makes encoders different, and most had years of research put into them. Cool, let's do it like this: someone could send me a couple of WAV snippets from various CDs, say a minute each. I'll encode them with a few different codecs and bitrates (I can do LAME and OGG, maybe someone else do Fraunhofer's, XING or whatever is teh shit in the closed-source world) and convert them back to WAV, the same way they'd be decoded when played live. Then people can download them and listen to them as often as they like and on the best equipment everyone can get their hands on, and finally everyone has to rank them in order of sound quality and identify the original (might be someone recognizes a compressed version but actually finds the sound more pleasant).

Can't take credit for them, unfortunately. They're just from the original article! Gay Israeli Offbeat faction, seenitall variety. Left: techology freaks. Right: shaggy goat. Oh, here's another list with some important categories (Drug Nerd, Vigilante, Armchair Trancehead, Cheerleader...) the other one doesn't have.

Styles Psytrance is divided into a lot of different styles:* Oldskool - the original Goa sound, still created using tractors. Only a few tracks use high-tech like a Roland 303. (e.g. AFK Psychlogists Disco, The Inflations Project) * Dark-Psy - RattatatatatatatataKrcchcchhRatatatatataKrazPutzBumratatatatatatatatatatatata (e.g. Kinderhassa (German: child hater), Vomit, Petra) * Offbeat Trance - goes like this: kick-base-kick-base. Usually very minimal. Particularly popular with German gays (e.g. Spitmonks, Natives Radio, Arthus) * Full-On - A mix of Dark-Psy and Oldskool. Layered upon the ratatatata there are usually several ripped-off melodies from random children's songs (e.g. Infected Livingroom, 12.000 Mices, Planet P.e.n.n., Sirius Buisness) * Israeli Trance - almost the same as Full-On, but using the same children's songs over and over (e.g. YaHell, Anal Protection, Horny Man) * Hamburg-Style - basically like Offbeat Trance but influened even stronger by the gay scene (e.g.Shiva-Sandra, Homodrolium) * Suomi - Produced by Finnish punks, consists exclusively of noisy noises (e.g. Texas Fuckschrott, Cubemeet, Mandalarammelerz) * Minimal - Tracks that have 3 or less different sounds (e.g.DJ KillYa, Loopiss) The Scene The psytrance scene can be compared best with the Hippie movement of the 60s. The biggest difference is that the psytrance scene can be described as far more aimless and unsystematic. Members of this scene often like to call themselves Fragles or Freaks, while actually the often just have problems to get along with themselves and the real world and therefore like to call themselves "different". Thereby, the fraggle glosses over his inability to live and turns into someone who is like he is out of conviction. Something like this is generally accepted in the scene and therefore common practice. Adherents are easily recognized by various traits:* They look like hippies. * They talk like hippies. * They smell like hippies. Society The society of the of Psytrance community can best be compared to a modern Native American's camp. The biggest difference here is that Native Americans used to have an understanding of art. What's more, for meeting of Goa fraggles, also called open-airs or festivals, a sound system as loud as possible is indispensable. This is primarily used to limit the fraggles' communication which is of great value especially regarding the abovementioned limited vocabulary. The rank of a shaman, as it used to exists in every Native American camp, is alternatingly taken over by the DJ and the drug dealer. Sometimes, people with the ability to confuse words in an especially nifty way are regarded replacement shamans. Even today the head of the chosen ones is the original founder of the scene: Goa Gil.

I'll jut add the pics, they go well with the text

Haha, great, thanks for the translation, Kazuku! I laughed tears when I first came across the German version and thought about translating it but then I was too laz...uhh, busy. Perhaps I'll do the rest of the article Ouch! :lol: You should know better than to drink milk while browsing pienews

"Forever After" was one of my first psy CDs and I still love it. But The Great Unknown is so totally not my style...perhaps it's one of those pieces you have to listen a couple of times to get into but so far I find it far too synthetic, bleepy and flat

Nobody mentioned Psynina yet?

Tristan - Dawn Raider Kundalini - Rasa Unconscious Collective - Synchronity Converger (no, that's not supposed to be brownnosing ) Not exactly beat-driven but I find the melodies very energizing: Taika Kim - Just before Sundown

Nice. Reminds me, one sister of my mom's is still a bit of a hippie. A settled hippie at 60 but still...she asked me to bring "some of that Goa music" to her 60th birthday party. And she liked it, though it wasn't very popular with the other guests and later she said she'd thought "it would be more psychedelic"

But that's because nobody cares about bullshit like that, there's just too much of it and it's not worth suing all of them. OTOH, I don't think you can slander a nick. If I said Full_Omm is a wanker you couldn't sue me unless your name is Full_Omm or it's some publicly known alias such as Madonna. Well, IANAL...

Wuzzat? Like Cult of the Dead Cow? Good taste I listened to that one half an hour ago! Yup, found it surprising too. My mum likes classical music and can't really appreciate anything electronic. For a few years she's been into meditation, even "meditative dancing" and stuff like that, so I thought some Shpongle, Carbon Based Lifeforms or so would do it for her but she just doesn't connect. Gets this polite but distanced look like a tourist being explained the different methods of preparing locusts by some African tribesman...

Strobes rule. Essential for any 90s acidhouse party, and I still like them for indoor psy. This club I went to in Prague had just blacklights, lots of blacklight paintings, and a single strobe---phat. Outdoor is a different story, I'm usually not in the right mood there. On psychedelics, they're far too irritating. BTW, I'm Lunkwill on Goabase

Same here. Add: The Mars Volta. These I find just cheesy

I liek it. It should have appeared on Psynews Records and have more Eskimo on it.