Rants

Audiophiles are on a quest; we're always lusting after the perfect fill-in-the-blank (speaker, amplifier, turntable, CD player, etc).

Catch is, perfect gear wouldn't automatically make every recording sound life-like. At that point the gear wouldn't have a sound per-se; the recordings' sound would be laid bare.

I wrote "How high do you want your fi?" for the April 2009 issue of Stereophile magazine, and I'm still getting a wide range of feedback about that piece from readers and friends.

I'm defining a "perfect" hi-fi as one that's indistinguishable from the sound of live instruments. No hi-fi has ever fully recreated the sound of a symphony orchestra, jazz group, or rock 'n' roll band. Solo instruments fare better, i.e. guitars, flutes, and vocals; you can almost get a glimpse of their sounds over the best high-end systems. But a drum kit? Piano? No way!

Audio components are far from perfect, so it's no surprise their sounds aren't 100 percent convincing. As imperfect as the gear is, the recordings themselves are even further away from documenting the sound of vocals and instruments.

The age-old analog/digital divide is the least of it. The musicians do their thing, and then the microphones, their positions relative to the instruments, the skill and imagination of the engineer/producer/mastering team's use of equalization, compression, processing, etc., create the sound we hear.

Pop or rock music is rarely played by the complete band, with vocals, live in the studio. Out-of-tune singers and players are pitch-corrected, drummers' off-kilter rhythms are tweaked, there's not a lot of there there to reproduce. Most recordings are so heavily processed they could never sound real.… Read more

Record stores are fading fast, the big labels--EMI, Sony/BMG, Universal, and Warner--are on their last legs, and commercial radio stations rarely play new music. The big music retail chains: Tower, Virgin, and HMV are all gone.

People still listen to music, it's how they hear it and find it that's changed. Oh, and they don't want to pay for it.

The Beatles didn't get a big, fat advance when they signed a record contract. They hooked up with EMI to make records; the band couldn't do it by themselves. Luckily for the Beatles, they had a terrific producer, George Martin, who encouraged John, Paul, George, and Ringo to keep growing. Without Martin the Beatles might have been just a minor footnote. He set the scene and created the right environment for the Beatles to bloom.

The artist/producer relationship is crucial, and back in the day, the great labels--Motown, Stax, Electra, Atlantic, Columbia, Blue Note, and Warner Brothers--had the best producers. The labels promoted the music and got it on the radio.

Nowadays, any 12-year-old could make a record in his or her bedroom, put it up on a site,and sell it. Up-and-coming local bands do the same--but without the input and direction from the right producer, the band won't tap its full potential. … Read more

Iffy sound quality isn't a new problem. Bad sound can't directly be blamed on digital, analog, vinyl, CD, or even MP3. Those are release formats; the quality of the recording itself is what I'm talking about.

Granted, personal taste plays a big part in defining good or bad sound. For every person who says the sound is clear and detailed, there's another who thinks it's ragged and harsh.

That said, the trend of late is toward spitty distortion, the kind that obscures the sound of the vocals and instruments, and buries them in grunge. I'm not opposed to grit that adds an edge to music, but I can't stand recordings made by people who either don't know what they're doing or are too deaf to notice the error of their ways.

Bob Dylan, of all people, agrees with me.

"You listen to these modern records--they're atrocious, they have sound all over them. There's no definition of nothing, no vocal, no nothing, just like--static," Dylan said in a Rolling Stone interview with Jonathan Lethem in September 2006.

He's not just referring to other people's records; he included his own record, "Modern Times," in his rant: "Even these songs probably sounded 10 times better in the studio when we recorded 'em." I believe Dylan. That album was a blurry wall of sound. You can hardly hear individual instruments.

The worst recording of 2009 so far--it's still early--is the Heartless Bastards' "The Mountain" CD. It's too bad because I really like the music. It rocks hard, and I love Erika Wennerstrom's strange voice, but there's severe distortion whenever she sings loud.

The distortion was so incredibly annoying that my speakers' tweeters sounded broken. If the distortion just appeared on the hard-edged, bluesier numbers, I might have thought that it was intentional, but the sound was just as ragged on "So Quiet," in which Wennerstrom is accompanied by violin. … Read more

Betamax was one of Sony's biggest blunders.

The videocassette format was introduced in 1975, and initially sold well. But when JVC's VHS tape cartridge was introduced in 1978, Betamax quickly lost its lead. The media loved Beta for its superior picture quality, but Standard Betamax tapes were only 60 minutes, and VHS 3-hour tapes could record more TV shows.

VHS was more popular, but Betamax refused to die. Production in the U.S. ended in 1993, and the last Betamax machine in the world was produced in Japan in 2002.

Ah, but the Compact Disc was a hit from the get-go. On August 31, 1982, an announcement was made in Tokyo that four companies, Sony, CBS/Sony, Philips, and Polygram had jointly developed the world's first CD system. Talk of the CD's demise are premature, sales are still in the hundreds of millions of discs a year.

The MiniDisc was introduced January 12, 1992. The recordable music format was originally based exclusively on ATRAC audio data compression, but the format never caught on in the U.S. MiniDiscs were popular in Japan and Asia as a digital upgrade from cassette tapes.

Which reminds me, Sony's ill-fated Elcaset came out in 1976. Like Betamax, Sony was trying to make a higher quality tape format, in this case better than the Philips Compact Cassette. Elcaset was better, but it was too large and cumbersome. Elcaset was a flop. … Read more

I'm not sure why, but there's a never-ending stream of articles cheering on vinyl's comeback. I guess if it's a slow news day, editors can't resist plugging in yet another story about booming LP sales, and they always claim something along the lines of "Kids are digging the grooves, they've seen the light, and now crave analog sound!"

Puh-leeze!

Don't get me wrong; I wish it were true. Maybe in some alternative universe, vinyl is flying off the shelves, and kids are ditching their iPods and buying turntables.

Back here on the Earth we know and love, 2008 sales of LPs were up 89 percent, from 990,000 in '07 to 1.88 million in '08. That's hardly a boom, now that CD sales are in the hundreds of millions. The best-selling LP of 2008 was Radiohead's "In Rainbows," which sold a piddling 28,800 platters. Second-place honors went to another British band, The Beatles, which sold 16,500 "Abbey Road" LPs. If those numbers are accurate, and Radiohead's Thom Yorke and company were trying to live off LP sales, they'd have to get day jobs.

So sure, there's more and more new and reissue vinyl, and that's great, but only a teensy-weensy number of people buy new vinyl. Most of my vinyl-loving buddies regularly score free records on the street, or pay a buck or two for used vinyl to play on their megabucks high-end turntables. Again, no problem there, but it's not the same as a true vinyl resurgence. That's just media hype.

I love vinyl because it looks cool and sounds great. I own around 4,000 LPs. And I'm hoping that the vinyl revival keeps growing. But the market for physical media--CDs and LPs--has nowhere to go but down. More than anything else, people want cheap or free music, playable anywhere they want. … Read more

We're getting close to the day when a major artist or group releases a download-only album. Maybe it'll be the next Rolling Stones or Sufjan Stevens album. That'll be a dark day.

Just last week, I went to my local record store to pick up "Hemispheres," the new release of Bill Frisell and Jim Hall, a jazz guitar duo. I left the store empty-handed.

Next, I checked on Amazon.com. It stocked the album in MP3 format only. Great, but I refuse to pay $17.98 for a crappy-sounding MP3.

Next, I checked the record … Read more

Our economy is in a shambles. We all know there's a lot of blame to go around, but the fact is that most of the products we buy are made offshore. It's going to take some time to see if the stimulus plan's billions of dollars are going to turn the economy around, but each of us can do our part by buying American right now.

Our troubled domestic auto industry is at least still building cars here, which is more than you can say about electronics, computer, video, and camera vendors. Even clothing and shoes are mostly made elsewhere. It's not just the loss of blue-collar manufacturing gigs; design and engineering jobs are increasingly outsourced.

When shopping, do you look at the label or box to see where the product you're about to buy is made? If you had a choice of an American-made product and an imported one, would the country of origin play a part in your buying decision? If the American product was 10 percent pricier, would you buy it, even if you judged quality of the two to be about the same?

I just bought a new couch (for a great price), and it was made in North Carolina. That's my personal stimulus plan.

Sure, quality matters, but if we go on exporting jobs, how will we maintain our standard of living? I could make the same case for buying online versus shopping in your city or town. Those local shops employ your family, friends, and neighbors; would you pay extra to keep the dollars in your community?… Read more

Songwriters get paid every time one of their songs is played on the radio; the Performance Rights Act (H.R. 4789) would do the same for the musicians who played on the recording. With income from CDs and download sales on the wane, they could use the money.

Under current law, musicians get a big fat zero when their music is played on AM and FM radio (they do get royalties from satellite radio, cable radio services, and other nonterrestrial broadcasters).

According to Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), the United States is one of the few industrialized countries (with the exception … Read more

No matter how you look at it, Sirius XM Satellite Radio is in sad shape. The stock has been stuck around 11 cents for months, and now there's talk about bankruptcy.

I don't get it, the satellite company claims 19 million subscribers, and if they were paying the same rate as I do, $12.95 a month, that works out to close to $3 billion a year in income. They also have ads on all the nonmusic channels, which have to be generating income as well. Oh, wouldn't you think the ads on Howard Stern's show … Read more