03 March 2001
Good Enough Just Isn't
It's a funny thing, this requirement of mine for things always to be "just right." I take pride in this attitude: I'm pleased that my projects, whether personal and professional, never suffer from the shoddy workmanship that often results from an attitude of "it's good enough." It's either good, or it's not. Good enough is not a phrase I ever quite comprehend when I hear it. But sometimes this drive of mine is nearly an obsession, which may or may not be a good thing. *shrug*
Case in point.... I have a long list of things I need to do today, capped off by wanting to get to a friend's tapas party prior to seeing Marcia Ball at the Satellite (something I've been planning for a while). Tops on my list WAS moving a couple of RK bootleg MD shows to my computer, remastering them, then cutting cds. Time is important here, because I'm doing this for someone else (who doesn't even live in town) in exchange for being able to make myself copies of the shows. So I got the things recorded, remastered, and recut when I noticed the hum on one of the three different shows. Feedback. An intermittent problem that I discovered when I hooked everything up to the new Yamaha receiver a few weeks ago, but that I thought I had solved. Nope, on this one recording, it can be heard during the blank spots.
So I spent about an hour plugging and unplugging components and such until I figured out the damn vcr (that I NEVER use) was causing intermittent feedback -- even unplugged, the cheap little bastard was interfering with the sound components. Annoying. But at least now the problem is solved.
Except I started doing these recordings at 11 am, and now it's 5 pm, and I'm not any further along. Now, I *could* just rerecord the only one of the three shows in which the hum is noticeable, because it's only really audible in that one to the "normal" listener (no high end equipment, listening through speakers rather than headphones). That would be "good enough."
But it would not be good. All of it needs to be rerecorded, because that goddamn feedback, though inaudible, muddied the recording ever so slightly. The recording itself was already of far lesser quality than our own, because the people who made the bootleg used what I'm guessing was either a stock microphone or some upgrade that is of lesser quality than Callie's (which has great frequency response). I don't need to add to the degradation. Good enough is not good enough, because it's not good.
Sometimes, this attitude is a curse. :) Back to the recordings now....
[Posted @ 05:05 PM CST]
