The album debuted at #1 in the United States[2] and in 15 other countries around the world.[3] In the U.S. the album had the biggest first week sales of 2007 with 625,000 albums sold, but it was later surpassed by Kanye West's album Graduation. The album was certified Platinum (two million albums sold) in the U.S.[4] and shipped over 3.3 million albums worldwide in its first four weeks of release.posted by beaucoupkevin at 10:08 AM on October 19, 2007
The phono input of most hi-fi amplifiers have this characteristic built-in, though it is omitted in many modern designs due to the gradual obsolescence of vinyl records. A solution in this case is to buy a special preamplifier which will adapt a magnetic cartridge to a standard line-level input, and implement the RIAA equalization curve separately. Some modern turntables feature built-in preamplification to the RIAA standard. Special preamps are also available for the various equalization curves used on pre-1954 records.If you don't use RIAA equalization when you record from a record (heh), your recording will sound like shit. [Note: there are some hyperlinks in the original quoted text that I didn't transfer over, see the linked article if you're interested in them.]
Like its counterpart, avant-garde art, the entertainment industry determines its own language, down to its very syntax and vocabulary, by the use of anathema. The constant pressure to produce new effects (which must conform to the old pattern) serves merely as another rule to increase the power of the conventions when any single effect threatens to slip through the net. Every detail is so firmly stamped with sameness that nothing can appear which is not marked at birth, or does not meet with approval at first sight. And the star performers, whether they produce or reproduce, use this jargon as freely and fluently and with as much gusto as if it were the very language which it silenced long ago. Such is the ideal of what is natural in this field of activity, and its influence becomes all the more powerful, the more technique is perfected and diminishes the tension between the finished product and everyday life. The paradox of this routine, which is essentially travesty, can be detected and is often predominant in everything that the culture industry turns out. A jazz musician who is playing a piece of serious music, one of Beethoven’s simplest minuets, syncopates it involuntarily and will smile superciliously when asked to follow the normal divisions of the beat. This is the “nature” which, complicated by the ever-present and extravagant demands of the specific medium, constitutes the new style and is a “system of non-culture, to which one might even concede a certain ‘unity of style’ if it really made any sense to speak of stylised barbarity.” [Nietzsche]posted by nasreddin at 7:37 PM on October 19, 2007
The universal imposition of this stylised mode can even go beyond what is quasi-officially sanctioned or forbidden; today a hit song is more readily forgiven for not observing the 32 beats or the compass of the ninth than for containing even the most clandestine melodic or harmonic detail which does not conform to the idiom.
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posted by danb at 10:05 AM on October 19, 2007 [10 favorites]