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 March 15, 2008 Stealing Our Souls I took the plunge. Okay, it’s more accurate to say my wife nudged me into the pool. When I unwrapped one of the small packages under the tree on Christmas morning, I was surprised to find an elegant rectangular box. It held an iPod Classic. You have to give the folks at Apple credit -- their stuff always looks great, even down to the packaging. I hadn’t asked for an iPod, and, as I noted in a recent piece here, I’ve been hedging on the whole question of downloads. Still, I like technology as much as the next guy, and an hour later I had registered my new toy and downloaded two videos. It’s fun. I’ve been downloading podcasts so I can listen to the BBC news at the office while I have my morning coffee, and watch NBC news over lunch. Within a week, I had uploaded some of my favorite CDs and was happy to have figured out how to add cover art to the menu screen. I now have a wide choice of music I can listen to at work, in addition to a variety of podcasts and videos. If Linda and I take a long trip, I can have my favorite music close at hand and not have to worry about hauling around a bunch of CD cases. I did a little research and downloaded some software that lets me convert DVDs to a format I can load on the iPod. If I had a long commute to work on mass transit, the iPod would certainly make the trip more enjoyable. I can see the value of having all this entertainment and information in a very small, beautifully designed component. I like the convenience of the iPod. It’s compact and it’s easy to use. If you know your way around a PC, it takes only a few minutes to learn how to program it. I haven’t yet transferred enough music to fill it (it holds 20,000 songs, I’m told), so I don’t know how easy it will be to find a particular song or disc when I get to that point. One thing I know already: My iPod will never take the place of my CD player or turntable. I may plug it into my stereo if I’m cooking or I have visitors over, but the iPod won’t do -- at least not yet -- for close listening. I did some comparisons between the original and uploaded versions of a few CDs, and the originals sounded better -- more spacious, more accurate, more real. Around the time I was acquainting myself with my new iPod, I received the December 27 issue of Rolling Stone. In his "The Death of High Fidelity," Robert Levine described something that audiophiles -- especially vinyl advocates -- have been talking about for years. Digital technology has changed the way music is recorded, mixed, and mastered, and that change has not been good for music or listeners. Most young music fans now get their music via MP3 files, and they often listen through headphones or small computer speakers. Record companies, therefore, have been pressuring record producers and mastering engineers to compress recordings to sound LOUD. The dynamic range in recordings has been squashed, so that even softer portions jump out of the speaker. As mastering engineer Steve Hoffman told me in an e-mail, "Compression has been around in recorded music since 1925. 99.99999% of all records ever made are recorded with compression. Digital compression during mastering is a different, nasty thing that came about to make sure all CDs were as loud as they could be." Early CDs sounded brighter than their LP counterparts, but I began to notice a creeping increase in CD volume in the early 1990s. Louder, more compressed CDs can sound deceptively more revealing than vinyl or early-generation CDs. In a way, they are -- details that would be layered in the mix at different volume levels are instead all pushed forward. But when recordings are too compressed, the senses of space and depth that make well-recorded music such a pleasure to listen to are lost. It’s not unusual for producers and engineers to make recordings conform to a particular standard. Producer Terry Melcher mixed singles by the Byrds and other artists to have maximum impact on AM radio. Melcher went so far as to have radio stations play test pressings so he could drive around and hear how they sounded on his car radio. But the 45rpm singles kids then bought wouldn’t have been mixed at the same levels -- their cartridges and tonearms wouldn’t have been able to track them. Motown mixed its singles, at least in part, using a transistor-radio speaker as a monitor so they could hear the same things kids would be hearing in their bedrooms at home. Yet when you play a Byrds or Motown LP from the mid-’60s on good gear, it sounds terrific. Even the Motown records, as hot as they were mixed, have more room in them than do many current recordings. Producer Phil Spector’s "wall of sound" recordings are crammed with layers of instruments, but you can pick out every one of them. By contrast, Bruce Springsteen’s new CD, Magic, is sonic tar. Wonderful instrumental details are buried so deep in the mix that you strain to hear them. Springsteen has rarely made recordings that would pass muster with audiophiles, but at least you could separate the instruments from each other. Magic and most other current recordings and reissues lack the sense of space made possible by a broad range of loud and soft sounds. As Walter Sear, of Sear Sound, wrote to me, "One of the elements of music is dynamics. When you compress, you eliminate this important area of musical expression. If you want the music to sound louder, turn up the volume control." I wish I could lay the responsibility for the decline in recorded sound solely at the feet of the MP3, but such sonic doctoring began with the rise of the compact disc. First-generation CDs overemphasized the high end of the frequency spectrum, which misled people into thinking they were hearing more. It may even be unfair to blame digital technology for music’s bad state, although I feel certain that the failure of record producers to resist digital’s ability to correct errors has robbed music of its soul. I do believe that CD and MP3 technology have led music listeners to make bad choices about how they acquire and listen to music. CDs gave people the idea that music should be convenient. For all the talk of CD fidelity, it was the medium’s convenience and ease of use that led to its triumph. LPs and even cassettes required some effort. Later, the ability to download MP3s underlined the idea that music was something you should be able to turn on and off like water. When Lars Ulrich of Metallica went before Congress to protest the widespread pirating of music through file sharing, he was widely criticized by fans and music writers, all of whom insisted they had an absolute right to music. Only a lack of technological savvy would account for the fact that many of those people couldn’t tell the difference between one-off taping, in real time, of an LP -- which requires some prepping and monitoring -- and uploading a CD to a site where tens of thousands of people could make their own copies in minutes. We shouldn’t be surprised, then, that fewer and fewer people sit down to listen attentively to music. They don’t think it’s worth their time. When I got my first real job after college, I began assembling a decent stereo system. Most of my friends, too, bought stereos. They were rack systems, to be sure, made by Pioneer and Technics, but they had good belt or direct-drive turntables with magnetic cartridges. My friends weren’t audiophiles -- only one of them seriously shares my interest in hi-fi -- but they did think music was worth their time and money. Most of those folks have since ditched their vinyl and are starting to move their CDs onto their computers or iPods. For them and their kids, music is something that happens in the background, as part of their multitasking. Record companies are going through very tough times now. Sales are down, and people who have been in the business for years are suddenly finding themselves out of a job. There are any number of reasons for the downward spiral. Music doesn’t play the central role in young peoples’ lives that it did for my generation. In addition, record companies take fewer risks as they are merged into ever-huger conglomerates. But I wonder if at least part of the lack of interest in music has something to do with the decrease in the quality of sound. The steady drop in sales seems to coincide with a corresponding decline in recording and mastering standards. Record companies should be offering music that sounds clearly better than what kids can hear via MP3s, and not mastering down to that standard. When Rolling Stone begins to notice something that is usually of concern only to audiophiles, something’s up. As some of you know, the Amazing Randi has been gunning for hi-fi manufacturers who make what he thinks are unsubstantiated claims about their products. I don’t get it. There’s a big difference between, say, a medical quack who is bilking dying cancer patients out of their money, and a cable manufacturer whose products let you and me hear music better. Most audiophiles readily admit that their passion is subjective. I love my tube amp; other audiophiles would scoff at it. And while some audiophilia does indeed seem preposterous, I’ve heard significant improvements from tweaks that Randi and his followers would certainly think are snake oil. Fine. But why doesn’t this clown perform a true service? Challenge a record-company exec or an electronics reporter from a major newspaper to prove there’s no audible difference between an MP3 and a CD, or even a well-mastered CD and what is currently thrust on the market. Sure, part of the challenge is subjective, but there are measurable differences as well -- stuff that can be shown on charts and sinewaves or whatever it is that Randi likes to see. Maybe the decline in fidelity is not on the same moral plane as exploiting the hope of a sick man or woman. On the other hand, maybe it is. The people who rob the world of good-quality recorded sound steal our souls. …Joseph Taylor
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