Sinkholes of Sound: Hi, Lo, & No-Fi in the Age of the iPod

I just heard a guy on the radio refer to Fountains of Wayne's "Traffic and Weather" CD as a lo-fi wonder. What's up with that? Most of the lo-fi recordings I've bought from street musicians sound like the band I heard on the street, which is definitely a good thing. Which is more than you can say about most of today's slickly produced pop and rock music CDs. They sound awful--voices never sound remotely human, guitars don't sound like guitars, and drums, forget about it, they bear absolutely no relationship to the actual sound of wood sticks hitting skins or plastic or brass cymbals. Then again, even if a recording started out sounding halfway hi-fi by the time it gets squeezed into a download and played over $3 earbuds, what could possibly be left of the sound? There's no there there, no wonder people don't connect with music like they used to.

It's not a lack of production values I'm knocking in today's music, far from it. Sky high budgets are squandered on sessions that drag on for months, and the engineers apply Pro Tools fixes to correct sloppy players' mistakes and out-of-tune singers. But after all that digital tweaking what's left of the music? Quick and dirty lo-fi recordings put out my major labels can sound great, the Cowboy Junkies' "The Trinity Session" CD, recorded in one day in a church twenty years ago still sounds amazing. The first few White Stripes CDs ain't too shabby either. PJ Harvey's "Rid of Me" is startlingly good. What these recordings all have in common is that they sound like they were made by people playing music in a room. What a concept!

But Bruce Springteen's latest, "Magic," sounds awful--an unmusical, soulless, digitized, dynamically compressed mess. I'm not alone in that opinion, somebody on Amazon said, "The sound quality on your (Springsteen's) earliest recordings was vastly superior to this latest effort. Phil Spector had his "wall of sound." I guess we can call this your "sinkhole of sound." I literally checked all the connections on my CD player, amp, and speakers to see why the sound was so bad."

I threw on Springsteen's "Born To Run," hardly an audiophile classic, to hear the E Street Band charging through the tunes as if their lives depended on it. And in a way, they did. The Boss is still coasting on the fumes from that one.

[acardes]

OK, I get it. iTunes is not audiophile quality. However, I don't know what this has to do with:

"There's no there there, no wonder people don't connect with music like they used to."

Being only 25, I don't know how people used to connect with music. I do know that everywhere I go, everybody with an mp3 player is walking to their own personal soundtrack. You can pull music out of thin air on your phone. "Regular" people can record music with high quality and easily distribute it across the world.

And yes, all you need are $3.00 headphones to enjoy it.

[epitone]

I'm slightly older (29) and I remember very well that during my childhood, tapes were the medium of choice for portable music (often home music as well). Tapes. You want to talk about poor range reproduction, generation loss, and all that... well, a CD ripped digitally and converted to a high-quality MP3 is leaps and bounds ahead of a CD dubbed onto a 90 minute tape and played on a Walkman.

[OStrolphant]

It is true, you can listen to your music anywhere, and that is great. I love my iPod when it works but most people do not listen to music, when they can, also, in a proper set up with good speakers and CD quality sound. And that is the problem. You may think you are connecting (and not to say that you are not because it IS personal) but if you compare your life with music on cheap multi media speakers and then listening to music on something like Martin Logans you just cannot go back to little ear buds and be truly moved by what you are hearing. Maybe ignorance is bliss but once you get informed by a quality system it is life changing.

[my_evil_twin]

It's simple really. Everyone has heard live music. The audiophile?s goal is to achieve the sound quality of live music in during playback of recorded music. Of course the goal is impossible to achieve so it ultimately becomes an ongoing pursuit. The best one can hope for is an approximation of live music. There are many shades of grey between the black of poorly recorded and reproduced music and excellently recorded and reproduced music.

Keeping to the simple concept, imagine your favorite meal cooked to perfection. That meal might be mom?s home cooking or a favorite restaurant?s version of your ideal meal. Regardless of the source, it would be hard to imagine that you could find a mass produced version of your favorite meal in the frozen food section of your local supermarket. However, in the absence of an alternative, that frozen meal would suffice when compared to not eating at all. Outside that context, does the frozen meal still represent a reasonable facsimile of the original? Not likely. It?s essentially the same argument with music.

The concern about the quality of music goes beyond the number of bits, sample rate and compression algorithm to the engineering and production of the original recording. Not all production is the same just as not all engineering is the same. Regardless of the recording format, be it CD or MP3 or analog on vinyl, if the original recording was garbage then you can expect garbage out. In some cases, even though the original recording was good, the transfer to the final media, CD, MP3 or Vinyl, was done poorly and the recording suffers. Bottom line is there are a lot of ways to fail in the process of getting the music to the end user.

The troubling thing to me is that fewer and fewer people notice bad recordings. The lack of reproduction quality of MP3s and iPods cover up a lot of bad recordings, bad engineering and bad production. With fewer and fewer consumers able to recognize the lack of quality, the standards are being lowered for record labels and artists. The result is an audio version of junk food. For anyone that has tasted the real thing, that has heard and appreciates live music, the current state of affairs in recording and playback is distasteful and depressing.