However, the thing of ProgArchives is that it included such a variety of musical forms that there are actually some new "prog" music still worth listening, although you (and I) may not consider it actually prog.

I've been listening to a lot of jazz lately, as well as many indie bands, so yeah, I'm not listening to much Prog and not really keen in the "New Wave of Prog" much anymore.

I still come here to talk to prog fans, because once you go prog there is no turning back completely. 

Likewise.

For me, it's an infinite cycle of musical preferences. 

I respect the classic prog bands, but when it comes to modern prog, I like it when there is a right balance between melodies and technicality (Enchant, Mind's Eye, A.CT., Loch Vostok, IONA or Seventh Wonder for example).

 

I find a lot to like in the "alternative" scene and electronic music, and the "weird" bands that push the boundaries of eclectism like Mr. Bungle, Vladimir Bozar n' ze sheraf orkestar, Igorrr or Hipospadia.

 

I am very eclectic in my tastes (jazz, blues, classical, folk, country, traditional, ska, reggae, soul, funk, chanson française, pop, metal, indus, gothic...), but when it comes to pick an album of modern prog, I would be more careful than with any other genre !

Once a hard headed prog fan, now I take the music for it's value, and have a heck of a great time, way more that before.

 

I don't care too much if bands don't reinvent the wheel so long as i like what they do. Clearly many new bands aren't to my taste, but nor in the 70s were King Crimson or Van de Graaf Generator (or Gentle Giant for that matter, though I underwent an epiphany as far as they were concerned).

 

There has been an awful lot of excellent prog produced since 2000; Mostly Autumn have done some superb ones including The Last Bright Light (the best album since Moonmadness in 1976); IQ have done Dark Matter and Frequency; Second Life Syndrome came from Riverside; there have been several great efforts by Phideaux, Transatlantic, Wobbler, Porcupine Tree. I could think up more, I'm sure.

 

No - I love prog and I aways will, though I listen to other genres.

When it comes to production, I agree a lot of stuff is a bit overproduced. But that´s not the case with absolutly everything. 

I think the main issue here is that, if you want good new music, you don´t have to look in the same genre from the ´70. Personally I think the best new stuff is the one that has little to do with the older stuff.

The problem doesn´t seem to be that you are tired of prog, but that you can´t get into new music

 

I can see your points, but I generally don't get tired or bored of a genre, more so an artist or group of artists. So I then just move on to something different.

I can't get into classical music to the point where I feel I need to spend the next 5yrs trying to understand it...call me lame I guess, but I don't care for it that much.

 

Jazz is different, always has been for me, it will always be a work in progress, positive progress for sure. As far as music production and it sounding sterile...welcome to the age of digital files and the dreaded CD! I do expect in the next 5 yrs the CD will get better and so will digital music.

Since I am a vinyl aficionado, I don't suffer from your hearing dilema......and jazz should only be listened to on a turntable. It should be a crime to listen to A Love Supreme on a CD......

 

I would not take your issue as a bad thing, at least you are still exploring new music, the problem will be if you get tired of music in general!

 

Well that is very true......my ears are connected to my head where my mind lives and it tells me its awesome!!

 

So you are complaining of some "wild noise" but yet you prefer live music (which we all do), and have no problem with people screaming or talking during a live show?.......or say at a classical concert recital hearing someone coughing the whole time? That to me is "wild noises".........

 

Anyhow........Happy New Year!

 

Metal is my other passion as well Jonas and i'm about due for a few months of head banging.

 

It's been a while Karl but i've got five reviews lined up then i'll take another break.I can't keep up with you young guys anymore.

 

With bands like the NICE and others from the early prog days....the idea was to experiment with rock music by combining elements from Jazz and Classical music. It was a way to progress with a new sound and style....but years later (even in the 70's) , some bands took the easy way out. There was too much emulation of what others had done and they stood on the shoulders of these people who first created the ideas like copy cats. They didn't need to! Obviously they were schooled musicians who were diverse. Sometimes it was un-intentional.....for example...hearing the style of ELP for a whole of 2 minutes on Curved Air's "Piece of Mind". I could say the same for Classical composers who emulated Johann Sebastian Bach....(and there are many of them)....and you can also sum my little issue up by stating that everything in music has been tried or written before and that it is only a natural and common occurance for one writer to emulate another blah, blah.....but then what happened to prog? Why did that aspect seem more extreme in prog than other serious styles of music? Is it because guitarists like Bob Fripp and Steve Howe laid a foundation and everyone else got lazy and copied it? Back in the 70's Rare Bird's "As Your Mind Flies By" sounded way too much like Emerson. Beggar's Opera and Trace were too much like Emerson. Graham Field was just as outstanding on keyboards as Francis Monkman and so why did Monkman choose to not sound exactly like Emerson? For me that is a mystery. Was it ABC DUNHILL records or Warner Brothers asking Greenslade and Field to attempt the ELP sound or did they simply feel more comfortable emulating him instead of trying something new. Fripp tried something new with LIZARD and obviously others like Pulsar, Harmonium, and Ange had originality with their ideas. So somewhere along the line players in prog decided to emulate more and neglect original creativity.   

 

Its not an issue....u know that. If your a normal vinyl collector of our age you should have about 300-500 albums, I doubt you play all those albums so much that you actually "wear" them down. I have a friend that has 1500 albums......There are albums he has not played in 2-3 yrs. I have about 400 albums and certainly many I have not played in several years. Even my most played I will spin them 4-5x per month, and I have zero problem in buying a replacement album every 6-7 yrs.

 

I just listened to Grace For Drowning on vinyl, my friend got it for Christmas, bloody AMAZING!!! Its no secret that SW is doing an amazing job with his vinyl releases with PT and his work with other artists.

 

I for one am 100% sold.......but I know that digital will soon become much better than it is now, it needs to, as Dean states, we the consumer are demanding it......and it is a main reason why so many music lovers are going back to vinyl or discovering it again.

I am glad I enjoy it......music is suppse to be fun and vinyl is just that.

 

Happy New Year!

Excellent point!  I agree completely, I was doing studio work in the mid 1970's when compression became very popular.

Highly compressed MP3 files download faster, screw the music quality.  

I steer clear of i-tunes for any serious music, and rely upon CDs.  Some of my favorites are the earliest ones vs. digitally re-mastered.  When the first CDs were cut from the studio masters, you got all the tape hiss & dynamics that the producers had to work with. 

Good enough for Eddie Offord, good enough for me.  

 

Agreed.  I think there's a number of people on this fourm who have mentioned taking a "holiday" from prog at one time or another and then coming back even more excited about it.  Also, there's plently of original music nowadays; I'm not going to give a list of bands, as I think it's best to investigate personally, but try looking at the subgenres you haven't really explored yet.  Prog is an incredibly diverse type of music; it can't really be considered a genre because many of it's various types have almost nothing in common with each other.  I'm sure that there are certain sections of progarchives (and prog in general) that you haven't yet explored and that contain something that will peak your musical curiosity.  If that doesn't do it for you, then I'd say to follow Warthur's advice.  There's lots of other good music out there.  And you're right about Bach, btw.  I don't know a prog artist who can consistently match him for prolificity, intricacy, and sheer beauty.

Those are two completely different forms of compression - one you can hear and one you can't.

 

The audio compression of the 1970 is the one that reduces dynamics and makes everything a constant loudness - in the 70s it was used to squeeze more music onto one side of a vinyl disc because it made the grooves a standard width - on CD and mp3 audio compression does not affect how much music you cand squeeze onto a disc or into a file so it is used simply to make everything seem louder and "in your face" all the time.

 

Data compression used on mp3 does not affect the dynamics of the music and files have to be uncompressed back to normal for the sound to be heard - with mp3 playback this uncompression is done "in real time". If you say you can hear the effects of compression on an mp3 then I will have to take your word for it because I can't unless it is taken to really stupid extremes (which no one ever does because it sounds so bad - bad mp3 compression sounds like the worse distortion you've ever heard).

 

I have lost interest in many things over the years but never music as such. I listen to more than prog cos otherwise it gets too much. How many time sig changes can your brain take anyway?  I listen to Suzi Quatro, Gary Numan, The Sweet, 60s music or 70s, and even Abba (ducks the wine glass) - I am more into nostalgia really; the classics. However, this year (2011) has been a strong year for dynamic prog albums and my interest is certainly not disintegrating. 

Hey i used to be into pro wrestling big time! And then suddenly stopped watching as it got fake and dull and now I wouldnt know which wrestler was on top or which story arc is being fed to the masses to get turnstyles turning.

We all know that's not true 

You got me.

You never will because you don't expect too.

When I read your initial post I suspected you may have confused the two uses of the word "compression" but could not be 100% sure, however cstack certainly did. I will repeat - mp3 data compression does not affect the dynamics of the sound - a rip from CD converted to mp3 will have the same dynamics as the original. There are three possible explanations as to why you believe you can hear a difference.

 

1. They are different - the original uncompressed source used to make the mp3 version is not the same as the CD version - here data compression has no effect - you would be able to tell the difference before any mp3 data compression is applied.

 

2. As Ian suggests, that you can hear a flatter sound is possibly because you expect to hear a flatter sound - a psychological affect of knowing that audio compression does reduce dynamics then your mind "hears" less dynamics in data compression because of the word association with the word "compression". 

 

3. A hitherto unknown effect of the psychoacoustic model used in mp3 data compression is detectable and manifests itself in a flatter sound. I've studied the volume envelopes of several wave files before and after mp3 data compression and have yet to see any variation in volume that would be detectable to the human ear

 

A real test is to conduct a double blind (ABX) listening test where you don't know which source you are listening to - if you can identify the mp3 version every time (I would allow a couple of mistakes in 100 goes perhaps) then you can be sure you are not affected by any expectation bias.

 

Personally I suspect option 1 is in effect here - the mp3 files you've heard from iTunes are from different masters to the CD versions you have compared them to

I expect you are right if the difference is really so obvious

And to "BaldJean"- If you only listen to the prog that sounds like the 70s prog- then no wonder that you're bored. But you know, prog or not, doesn't matter, just enjoy what you enjoy and maybe we should all pay a bit less attention to the tag prog or progressive- as it can apply to too many things today.

 
Albums like Supertramp's Crisis? what Crisis?, The Original Soundtrack by 10CC, Zappa's One Size Fits All, and Gentle Giant..Octopus were all outstanding in production. If you built your own speaker cabinets out of wood and installed Pizo tweeters, mid-range, and woofers...you could upgrade the sound of the "album" Then using an EQ to balance flaws in the mix or to balance the tone and volume level of the instruments in the mix. In some cases your album would sound like a cd released in the 80's. But really you could only accomplish this with a handful of albums. Back in that time period there was this "Cardboard Box" sound in the production of prog rock albums that dominated the scene and the people who produced the 4 albums I mentioned above, ....were trying to open up the sound or...re-construct what had already been done which was a nightmare.  .  

Ah, not quite. That's another confusion/misunderstanding of similar sounding terminology, namely bit-rate and sampling-rate.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sampling_rate" rel="nofollow - Sampling rate is the number of times the analogue signal is sampled in every second - standard Audio CD this is 44.1KHz - higher "quality" formats sample at 96KHz, 192KHz and 352.8KHz. If you are ripping from CD you cannot get better than 16-bits @ 44.1KHz - there are mathematical techniques to "up-scale" both the number of bits and the sampling rate, but they are simply interpolation between two digital points that are no different to applying analogue filters to the reconstituted [email protected] data.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bit_rate" rel="nofollow - Bit-rate is how many bits of information are in each second of music - which is essentially file-size in bits (not bytes) divided by playing time in seconds. Bit-rate is generally used to signify how much compression is used, but this can be misleading. Bit-rate alone does not tell you anything about the quality or quantity of the compression - a piece of music sampled at 192Khz using a 24 bit ADC can have exactly the same bit-rate as the same piece of music sampled at 44.1KHz using a 16 bit ADC if the former is heavily compressed. [a loose analogy here would be power output of an engine - knowing that you have a 100HP engine does not tell you how fast the vehicle can go - in a motorcycle you can surmise it will be fast and in a saloon car it would be acceptable, but the same engine in a truck would be slow and in an ocean liner it probably wouldn't move at all].

 

 

 

 

Lossless audio formats are a response to people who have a psychological block against lossy formats - in ABX blind tests people cannot tell FLAC from average quality mp3 from direct CD sources. I would not be surprised if the people who only use FLAC formats also spend $300 on an "audio" USB cable.

 

I suspect a lot of the negative feeling towards MPEG lies in JPEG image compression where the effect is readily noticable by the compression artifacts we all can see in heavily compressed jpg images. Because we can see the effects in images it is a natural assumption to hear them in sound files. The problem there is the audio compression artifacts are not loss of clarity, dynamic range or harmonic content, but in noise and distortion - neither of which are ever mentioned by people who say they can hear a difference betweeen mp3 and raw CD.

There is a lot of spineless prog from the seventies....camel to name one....Gryphon too

I want to personally thank you for making a comment on an entire era of music with an adjective which means absolutely nothing about... anything, really just any modern music, not just prog.

True. After I got frustrated about the direction Marillion and Dream Theater took around 1993, and fed up with 80's metal, I didn't listen to anything but commercial radio for maybe 6 years. When I 'came back', everything was different, and find ProgArchives made me discover a whole lot more. 

Then again, why would you force yourself to listen only to prog, or only to pop radio, or metal or whatever... Just a random few things I played/listened to in the past three weeks:

Janis Joplin

Geddy Lee

John Mayer

Paul Simon

Don Airey

Feedforward

Green Day

Iron Maiden

and a couple of Dutch bands you won't recognise so which I won't mention.

No reason to get bored there... and I think that if you get bored by a certain type of music, it's time to move on. More useful than making into a problem, which is not what music is about, and we have enough real problems to deal with already on this frikkin' blue marble.

 

But now, with the Internet making all forms of music more viable, I find this to be the most exciting time since the early seventies as a listener.

Excellent point & thanks!  I've been out of touch with music lately, so when I need to sample a band's product, I can usually find a free listen via YouTube, the band's website, or a variety of places that play at least a snippet.  Even Amazon offers this, and it is helpful to me in deciding whether to invest in the product or not.  

The Internet also allows small, intelligent mobile units (individual artists per Fripp's philosophy) to generate some really interesting music and posting this online & selling via I-Tunes etc.  Mychael Pollard for one is very active in this endeavor, and the quality of his work is very impressive. 

YouTube and other hosting sites give us very nice glimpses of the bands in live performances, for which I'm very grateful.  

Finally, the back & forth discourse and reviews on sites like PA (well, especially PA) give a very good indication of the relatively quality of the music.  

Happy New Year and may 2012 see even more new music hit the net!  

 

http://www.youtube.com/embed/B99Dh0kLHjM" rel="nofollow - http://www.youtube.com/embed/B99Dh0kLHjM

http://www.youtube.com/embed/z8IO6h3gMlI" rel="nofollow - http://www.youtube.com/embed/z8IO6h3gMlI

What on earth are you on about? It's not against PA rules to list the bands you don't like, but I will admit you will are very likely to get a kick up the arse by those who do like them - which is also true if you made such lists from any prog era.

 

You said you had "ditched the new prog" and it was "better to stick with what were made earlier" and even if you have listened to a few hundred modern Prog bands that is still a generalisation.

When you go to the point of calling a whole era of music "spineless" it's obvious that you haven't listened to enough artists. What makes you think that composers today are any different than the ones back then? They were boundary pushers back then and trust me there are a lot of boundary pushers today. 

It's not a question of anyone being butthurt it's the fact that are closing yourself to so much good music (if not better music- but yeah just my opinion bladididididibla). You are just discarding a whole bunch of great artists, that if you would've listened to them, you may not have liked them, but "spineless" would be such a stupid way to describe their music. 

It's a shame that by listening to the "enough artists" you have mentioned, you're closing yourself to some of the most mind-blowing, boundary pushing, challenging, thought provoking music ever made. There's bad everywhere, but when you decide to stop before you get to the good then you miss out.

My theory is this:

The "best" (and by best I mean most appreciated by both critic and audience) music tends to come from this initial movement, because it's not forced. It's a natural evolution from what came before. It's not trying to be anything other than the musical expression of the people making it. Often, this music captivates so many people that it creates a genre, and imitators come in. These can be anything from cynics trying to manipulate the genre's success, to musicians wishing they'd gotten in on the ground floor, to artists who genuinely love the sound and just can't get enough of it.

I would say that Prog as we know it is actually a collection of three fundamental movements (though I'm certain that others will dispute this): Classic Progressive Rock (Yes, Genesis, KC, ELP, etc etc), RIO, and Progressive Metal. I realize that this is a rather ethno-centric collection, but imagine that RPI, for example, is a part of the Classic Prog; a sub-movement, if you will.

Regardless of whether you agree with that precise categorization, the point is that progressive rock, just like modal jazz, or Baroque fugues, or hair metal, is the result of certain musicians in a certain time making a certain sound, and a whole bunch of other people liking that sound and running with it.

So the purpose of all this in relation with the OP is that I find it completely understandable to be tired of modern prog - we've essentially taken all the possible directions that were laid out by these movements, and exhausted them. Now we're just sitting around, waiting for the next movement to come. In the meantime, those original pioneers still have all sorts of fantastic output (though I confess that, like others here, my iPod is now almost entirely jazz).

You're right somehow, It's completely a generalized idea.maybe I said that because I lost too much money trusting recent prog products, and their reviews, that have been considered to be a great music on PA.unless Jazz Fusion products that hardly gonna disappoint you.

IMO for not having a boring debate, sometimes it's good to have some generalizations, it's actually may lead to more dynamic discussion.  

John's project really has my appetite whetted, we'll see how this progresses!  New eruptions like these keep my interest up.

 

Maybe I should what?

Been saying for years late 80s, 90s and 00s is crap

Some people just take a while to work it out but I work it out straight away

Old fart syndrome 

Naaaaaaaahhh, you´re way cool Baldie!!!!

If I listen to the same artist for a long time, I will start to get bored, so I switch to something else. And when I come back to it later, it sounds as fresh as when I first heard it.