You’re partially right, but at the same time wrong. When I was in college (1978) it seemed like everybody had what would now be classified as a hi-end stereo. Japan was cranking out very good “average consumer” priced equipment and just about every college student had or lusted after a great stereo. Now, if you have a semi-decent bluetooth speaker you’re high end.
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Young is a few months younger than I am, and I can testify that my ears are not what they were even twenty years ago, let alone what they were in my twenties, when I could hear the whine of a CRT flyback oscillator. (And I didn’t spend any time at all in front of ear-destroying banks of amplifiers.) So while I’m willing to buy his complaints about loss of detail and compression artifacts in principle, I wonder how much of the bad stuff he can actually detect, at least in carefully-prepared, high-rate MP3 material. I mean, I wouldn’t trade my collection of LPs and CDs and my Klipsch speakers for earbuds and a player full of 320K MP3s, but I’m not much bothered by what I do hear when I use that kind of portable setup when traveling, any more than I’m bothered by the sound of the car radio as it struggles with ambient noise.
Transistor radios were already “commodity items” by the time I was in high school, 60 years ago. We cared less that they fell short of the quality of our home record players (which were often of the suitcase variety) than that they were portable and gave access to “our” music–which in any case was delivered via AM signals, with their attendant limitations, and eventually were mixed in the studio with that kind of delivery system in mind.
And I have to say that much of the audiophile world is indeed full of it–again, based on a half-century of contact with pros, amateurs, and musicians of all kinds. There’s an ounce of truth for every pound of woo.
(If you want an old-guy rant, ask me about the effect of Auto-Tune on pop music.)
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Audiophile quality is the responsibility of the production team. I say this because of a demonstrable truth: The further you get from the recording studio, the less that formats matter. Music that was properly recorded with attention to dynamics and detail still sounds remarkably good when degraded by MP3 and poor amplification. If a consumer buys a good amplifier and a decent pair of speakers, they have done all that they need do to be a responsible audiophile.
The ideal copy is the same: If we really cared about audiophile quality, we’d listen to music on the formats used by the finest recording studios: Magnetic Tape or WAVE files. Hardly anybody does this because actual audiophile quality is a pain in the ass for the consumer.
I appreciate Neil Young’s crankiness, even if I think his last good album was “Trans.” You see, I, too, am a crank. I also know that the Loudness War is over and Loudness lost. I also know that the vast majority of recordings damaged beyond listenability by the Loudness War were disposable pop records. Countless recordings of musicians that gave a crap during those dark times are still available.
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I’m glad I’m not the first person to identify the inherent inferiority vinyl has compared to digital. Dragging a needle over a plastic disc will never be as faithful to the original recording as high-quality digital reproduction. Now…many people prefer the sound of vinyl, because of its crunchiness, with hiss and pops and such. And they are of course not wrong (different strokes), but they also cannot say that vinyl is objectively better. Because it isn’t. And using vinyl as some sort of untouchable benchmark for quality is…problematic. Same goes for tube amps. You like distortion? Great. But you can’t argue that accurate reproduction from a digital source is “worse” than the “warmth” your monoblock puts out.
But the main thing that annoys me every time Young, or Beato, or whatever dude that’s been making or producing music since forever, speaks up about how “teh interwebs ruined music!”, is that people can still make music the good old way. Just because a lot of modern music is made with a computer, doesn’t mean you can’t scratch your badass swamp rock into a wax cylinder if you want to. Decrying the entire modern delivery system, where you can hear something someone made halfway across the world a few minutes ago, in frighteningly accurate digital quality, is amazing, and these dudes need to stop yelling at MP3-shaped clouds.
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Digital processing and the improvements in affordable computers to store and process audio has lead to the expansion of the number of people who can produce music. Just like the internet did for publishing. And it’s had a similar effect. There’s much more of it available, but the amount of good stuff really hasn’t increased, but the amount of junk sure has. That’s had the effect of making it harder for people to find the good stuff.
As much as the music industry is horrible, it does provide some benefit in curation. Sort of like what sites like BB do for interesting news.
The quality of bluetooth audio is actually very good now. Anything above v. 4 with one of the better codecs (e.g. AptX) and virtually nobody will be able to tell the difference.
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I just don’t see, what with the explosion in bandwidth and storage costs going down to almost zero why we have to still have compression at all. At this point it almost feels like an attempt to upsell what used to be normal.
And yes, AM transistor radios were crap quality… but that’s why FM became popular for music and AM gradually became for talk. When you know better is out there, why put up with lesser quality? I feel like the current moment is analogous to still listening to music on AM radio… in 2000. Unless you lived in the sticks why would you do that?
We have access to more music than ever, and that’s an amazing thing… but it doesn’t mean we have to settle for losing a degree of subtlety in music. It’s not 1999 anymore- ease of discovering something new and audio quality shouldn’t be so linked anymore.
I really don’t think that’s at all true. The ease at which someone can both discover old, and in many cases practically forgotten, music has increased exponentially, as has the ability to discover new music from the rapidly proliferating genres, and subgenres, that never could have even existed outside of the current technological landscape.
When I was growing up musical discovery was limited to what was on the radio (90% of which was the same music repeated ad nauseum), MTV, browsing your local record store, and recommendations from friends; today someone could give themselves a crash course in 80s Japanese New Age Environmental Ambient in a couple of hours with some googling and youtube, something like that simply wasn’t possible before.
This talk is a few years old now, but is just as relevant today:
There is such a thing as “super-tasters” who physiologically are able to to taste a greater range and intensity of tastes. I wonder if there could be such a thing as a “super-hearer”?
I could imagine that super-hearers would have an innate ability that predisposes them towards a career as a musician and that they can hear things regular hearers would not. Personally, I hear/perceive no difference between vinyl, CD or high-bit-rate streaming or audio files.
All speculation of course, although apparently there are some people with “golden ears”.
Uncompressed audio isn’t better quality than compressed though. Even web-streaming quality audio at 128kbps or similar would be practically indistinguishable from a WAV file to most people in the world, and virtually everyone over 25 years old. Even the contrived edge cases that exist there could be removed by bumping things up to 320 or similar.
Bandwidth storage and transmission costs are not negligible at all, especially at scale. It would make no sense to take that hit for zero benefit.
When you add to that how most people consume music these days, on headphones while commuting, or out of shitty laptop speakers, it makes even less sense.
The most important factor in quality music reproduction is not the medium, it’s the playback mechanism. So if you’re really concerned about quality get yourself some high quality speakers and an amp. You don’t even have to bother with spending money on fancy DACs any more, as even the cheapest shitty ones in a phone are more than good enough these days.
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We got a BEV Chevy Bolt last year and it came with a few months of free XM radio. Holy crap was the audio terrible. Fine for fuzzy talk radio shows like wait wait don’t tell me or NPR, but music? The. Worst. We decided to not buy into yet another subscription. And my ears are not the greatest what with tinnitus and gettin old n sh!t.
I’m actually hoping that the various plans for tens of thousands of LEO net broadband satellites work out (mb they could all work together, hmmm?) Then you could have fast net access in the boonies and I could finally retire to that cabin in the woods (curse you last mile shenanigans!)
Double blind listening tests would have found some by now. You can train yourself to hear the differences in medium-high bitrate lossy compressed audio and lossless/uncompressed, but if you aren’t interested in testing the encoders I would advise against it.
After a certain point nobody can hear the difference between lossy and uncompressed, listening tests show listeners are only equal to or worse than random selection.
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Please don’t ask me to think of David Lee Roth.
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Of course there have been a few artists whose performance center around using looping pedals to do this live. Not a hundred tracks, and in a way it’s a gimmick, but it’s pretty cool.
I agree about live music not sounding better, though. I feel very confident saying that half the time it sounds pretty bad. Still, the experience of being there to see music live cannot be recorded, and I think for some people that experience is better than any mere sound could ever be.
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About “live music”–are we talking about acoustic, unamplified music or the sort of thing one gets in a bar or stadium concert–electric instruments run through PAs of wildly variable quality, sometimes run by guys with damaged hearing or very narrow notions of what good sound sounds like? Because I’ll take naked acoustic music every time, at least within the limitations imposed by genre and venue–rock and some jazz depends on amplification, and many rooms just don’t handle acoustic music well. (On the other hand, I’ve heard unamplified chamber music in 200-capacity rooms, and long ago heard–really heard–Segovia from the back of a hall that size.)
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“Sure, nothing beats vinyl on a high-end system”
Incorrect. High-res digital on a high end system will sound better, and be capable of materially higher dynamic range.
Vinyl fetishism is fun, because the physical object is neat, and the act of putting a record on is cool, but the audio product produced is miles away from the fidelity you get from high res digital or well-engineered CD. It’s not even close.
On the other hand, insane levels of fidelity are available today for anyone with $150 or so. I mean, it’s earthshaking compared to what you had to do and spend to get truly good sound in 1995 or 1985 or god help you 1975. And as part of the package, you can get access to insanely high quality copies of HUGE amounts of music for very modest fees. By all rights 2019 provides an embarrassment of riches for people who love music.
But the real point here is that there is no fucking way Neil Young, in his capacity as a 73-year-old rock star, can hear the difference between a shitty cassette from the back seat of a '79 Buick and Spotify.
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I got a Spotify account last year, after decades as a music hoarder. Hoarder of CDs and vinyl. Both of which I still love. But I love what Spotify has done for me. I keep discovering things I probably wouldn’t have otherwise. Dennis wilson’s Solo album Pacific Ocean Blue. Joao Gilberto’s music. How did I never listen to The Kinks’ Arthur before last week!? Newer bands like Haim and Cortney Barnett. It’s basically replacing my old record shopping habits. And I suppose there’s a serious argument to be had about how much artists are compensated compared to the good old days. But I think people who argue about quality forget that for most of the 20th century we listened to music on AM radios, crappy record players and cassettes. Lots of mediums that can sound great in perfect conditions with perfect equipment but most people never experience that way.
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“I heard mister Young sing about her.
I heard ole Neil put her down…”
The quality of experience listening to music has more to do with speakers than medium. Yeah the tiny speaker in your iPhone isn’t very good and ear buds don’t have much bass but most people who care are plugging their phone into a car or home stereo or good headphones. I seriously challenge almost anyone to tell the difference between a mp3 compressed at over 160kbps and a CD. Some stuff on the net is compressed poorly, but not that much. This isn’t the dial up era anymore.
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