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 October 15, 2007 Give Me Just a Little More Time, Part Two A few months ago, I decided to take a small step into the 21st century and sign up for a DSL Internet connection. I wasn’t unhappy with my dial-up Internet service provider (ISP). It was reliable, never kicked me off, the baud rate was pretty good, and the service was cheap. But I couldn’t download any large files in less than two hours, and I couldn’t play any audio or video files without having to put up with them pausing every minute or so to buffer. My son wanted to download games, my daughter wanted to watch stuff on animé sites, and I was tired of waiting for my otherwise dependable ISP to offer DSL at a reasonable rate. So I jumped ship. I’m glad I did. Now I can go to a record-company website and not have to wait 20 minutes for it to load. My kids can download or watch the things they want (with adult supervision, of course), and I can go to the New Republic website and watch the occasional video exchange between Peter Beinart and Jonah Goldberg (um . . . maybe they should post transcripts). It’s great to be able to catch up on Fresh Air interviews from NPR’s online archives. In other words, I’ve seen the future (alright, I’ve seen the present), and I like it. One area of technology that I’d avoided until recently was music downloading. I’d dabbled, but I just wasn’t interested. When I’ve heard MP3s, or CDs burned from MP3s, I’ve always thought they sounded a bit flat -- to put it mildly. Plus, I like buying music in formats I can hold. I love album covers and CD booklets, and I like knowing who produced, engineered, and mixed a recording -- I like the object itself. My brother-in-law posted some of his music at iTunes and asked me to check out one of the tracks, an arrangement of "Amazing Grace." I looked around while I was there and figured it might be nice to put together a CD of songs I liked when I was a kid, stuff by musicians who may have had three minutes of brilliance, but not enough for a whole album. I love the guitar-and-organ riff that begins "Come On Down to My Boat," a hit in 1967 for Every Mother’s Son. I felt pretty certain, though, that a whole disc by them might be a bit much. Same for the Friends of Distinction, John Fred and his Playboy Band, and the Buckinghams. On the other hand, I found out that I need to check out more by LTD, and Chuck Brown and the Soul Searchers. And I did end up buying A Gathering of Promises, by Bubble Puppy, a Texas band on International Records, the same label that brought us the 13th Floor Elevators. (I didn’t download it, though -- I bought the CD.) I made a CD of the 22 tracks I got from iTunes, and I enjoyed listening to the results in my car, on a boombox, or through headphones. But as soon as I played it on one of my stereo setups, even my everyday one in the living room, I could hear the limitations of downloaded music. Cymbals didn’t shimmer, snare drums didn’t really snap, bass sounded puffy -- instruments just didn’t sound they way they should. There was no air, no nuance in the music I downloaded. To confirm my findings, I downloaded The Soft Swing, a Stan Getz recording available only from the Verve Vault. Verve Records now offers some of its catalog only as Web downloads. Apparently, Verve or its corporate owner, Universal Music, doesn’t care enough about the label’s musical heritage to present its product in the best possible sound. Or maybe it thinks we don’t care. At any rate, I’m glad I spent only a few bucks on The Soft Swing. It sounds flat, bland, and uninvolving. I did a little research on the technical specifications of the MP3 and "Red Book" CD formats, but most SoundStage! AV readers already know those numbers, which only serve to illustrate my point: Downloaded music, via MP3, sounds bad. And yet, despite the low quality of MP3s, the one area in the music industry that has seen real growth is downloaded music. Since 1987, the year the compact disc triumphed and pushed the LP off record-store shelves, electronics manufacturers have introduced a slew of new formats: MiniDisc, DAT, DCC, MP3, SACD, and DVD-Audio. Some of these flopped outright, and the last two still haven’t really caught on. The only raging success has been MP3, the format with the worst sound -- sound that is vastly inferior to even the much-maligned cassette tape. When CDs first appeared, people made a lot of noise about their superior sound quality. Never mind that most of those people weren’t audiophiles, didn’t have good gear, and rarely sat down to seriously listen to music. After a while, it was clear that what people liked about CDs was their convenience. You didn’t have to clean them (most people didn’t clean their LPs anyway), you didn’t have to flip them over after each side was done, and, unless you really abused the discs, you didn’t have to endure pops and clicks. And they were portable. It was that portability and ease of use that drew people to CDs, not their sound quality. MP3s take that convenience and portability even further. Most people can store their entire music collections on a computer, and sizable chunks of it on an MP3 player, depending on how much memory the player has. Music, dance, and theater critic Terry Teachout wrote about the changes the download revolution would bring about in an essay he wrote for Commentary in 2002. "How easy is it to do these things?" he asked in "Life Without Records," then described how he’d already stored 190 hours of music on his computer, some of it downloaded, some uploaded from CDs he owned. "Since MP3 files are compressed," he went on to say, "the resulting sound is not of the highest possible quality, but my 46-year-old ears are rarely capable of telling the difference between an MP3 file and the original CD from which it was ripped." I’m the same age as Teachout, and after ten years in rock bands, years of listening to music through headphones, and the natural deterioration of hearing that comes with age, I can still hear the difference between CDs and MP3s. As sharp-eared as Teachout is, I’ll bet he can, too, when he sits down to listen carefully to music. It’s obvious to me that good sound has long been a secondary consideration for most people who buy music. As time goes on, sound quality will matter to only the small number of us who like to hear music reproduced faithfully. Still, even casual listeners must have expressed some dissatisfaction with the current quality of MP3s; iTunes now offers some of its music files, for a slightly higher cost, at 256kbps rather than 128kbps. Time, and downloads, will tell if people can hear and will pay for the difference.
If I’m paying full price for music, I want the whole package -- artwork, a permanent storage medium (more permanent than easily damaged CDRs), and, for reissues, the original liner notes. Perhaps I’ve been treating music as something collectible -- as something to possess -- for too long. Maybe in the future, music servers will store liner notes and technical information that you’ll be able to read on a pad with a small screen. Maybe in another 20 years I’ll be happy that I don’t have to drag myself off the couch and search through my CD or LP shelves to hear music. In the meantime, in today’s mail I received four CDs and a Japanese pressing of The Beatles (aka "the White Album"), and I’m eager to listen to them. …Joseph Taylor
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There’s no denying that
the concept of storing music in one spot for quick access has its appeal. Some companies,
such as Cambridge Audio, are creating products that will meet the demands of audiophiles.
The company’s Azur 640H music server lets you store 3000 uncompressed songs, or
30,000 compressed songs, and can deliver them in better quality than your computer or MP3
player does. As for downloading better-sounding music in a high-resolution format,
MusicGiants (