07.25.13
The ‘sharing economy’ and posh audio fidelity
Wonderful story in the NYT on the “New Audio Geeks”!
They spent years stealing MP3 music, helping make recorded music not pay, and now hate the sound quality. Now they prefer old record players with high end speakers and amps, on which to play used vinyl which pays zero in royalties, or stream Spotify, which pays half a penny a tune to artists. I’m dumbfounded by how cool this is! Now that we’ve used digital tech to destroy the economic model of pop music for the sharing economy we can go back to record players and enjoy the piles of remains in true audio fidelity!
For a while, Mr. Svizeny, a guitarist and avid music consumer, engaged in the MP3 arms race, ripping songs from Napster and other file-sharing sites and importing them to his iTunes account. “The sound quality didn’t matter at all,??? he said. “Just the music.???
But Mr. Svizeny’s attitude has since changed. He no longer owns an iPod and rarely, if ever, downloads music, he said. At work, he listens to Spotify, the music-streaming service. At home, he plays LPs, inspired, he said, by his father’s collection of Black Sabbath and Frank Zappa records. “I could buy a terabyte hard drive and store countless MP3s, but it’s lost value to me,??? Mr. Svizeny said. “I’d rather hold a physical thing.???
With vinyl, he added, “You’re experiencing music in a different way.???
Mr. Damski went through a similar evolution, from having more than 50,000 songs on his hard drive to “abandoning??? iTunes, he said, in favor of Spotify and the scratchy joys of vinyl. He likes the physicality of LPs, and the way they make it hard for him to skip songs. He also enjoys what he called the “Easter egg hunt??? of used-record shopping, otherwise known as sifting through bins of Olivia Newton-John and Al Martino releases, hoping to find a rare gem from the Beach Boys’ bearded phase.
In true audiophile fashion, it now pains Mr. Damski to listen to low-resolution music played through the microspeakers of a smartphone or a computer. “I wanted to hear a Kinks song the other day that wasn’t on Spotify, so a friend looked it up on YouTube,??? he said. “It sounded so bad.???
“You have a whole generation getting music over the Internet, from streaming, tablets, iPhones,??? a maker of high fidelity equipment told the Times. “It’s introduced many more people to music,??? all of them “potential audiophiles.”
I listen to CDs through the DVD player going into my old Samsung analog television. I am so not where it’s at.
Dave Latchaw said,
July 26, 2013 at 7:34 am
I hate this stuff. My friends are always shocked (cuz I’m supposed to know about this stuff) when I tell them I think CDs sound great and vinyl sounds like s**t. If digital sound is terrible, why is everybody digitizing their LPs?
And don’t get me started on all that bogus mega-expensive “audiophile” garbage.
George Smith said,
July 26, 2013 at 4:21 pm
I digitized favorite LPs almost a decade ago now. Very glad I did. CDs can sound just fine. Early mastering, when you’d still see the AAD boxes on the inserts, were sometimes not the best available job because they didn’t always fit cuts to the available dynamic space. Which was kinda solved by just turning them up louder at the stereo. But once they didn’t have to make guesses about how much headroom they had before digital clipping that was pretty much solved.
mikey said,
July 27, 2013 at 8:11 am
My tribe, starting in the late ’60s and early ’70s, developed the habit of playing the LP through once for the scratch and pop free listening experience, and then transferred it to reel to reel tape for continuous use. Sometimes the LP would seldom or never be played again, but the idea was to store it nearly pristine. In case the tape wore out.
Personally, I have no issues with the .aiff versions of LPs I have digitized, having 10x the data of a typical .mp3 file. I still hear crisp highs, cymbals still sound like they should, etc. But I understand that this is something of a holy war to many…
George Smith said,
July 27, 2013 at 8:17 am
I had a college roommate my junior year who did that! He had a shelf of tapes and every weekend, if there was a party, some would go on the reel to reel for hours. Listening is psycho-acoustic, not really clinical. So most everyone, including myself, doesn’t distinguish much between varying qualities or EQ characteristics in recordings separated by more than a few minutes, unless one is really bad. In the Sixties all the stuff was mixed for transistor radio and mono phonographs with the old steel needles held in by a small screw. And I had one of those too.