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.
Tom Hannaher of ZVOX Audio and I were chewing the fat about the state of the consumer electronics business when the subject veered over to flat-screen TV manufacturers. They're all under incredible pressure to slash prices while they load on more and more features, and it's getting kinda scary.
I've had folks in the TV biz tell me not to wait any longer to buy a flat display because the manufacturers are starting to substitute lower-quality parts to keep lowering retail prices. But long before they do anything drastic that would affect picture quality or reliability, they cut audio quality. Where five years ago they might have invested $4 of the budget on speakers, they now might spend a buck.
The ZVOX 325 powered speaker will beef up the sound of your TV.
(Credit: ZVOX Audio)It's the same sorry story with power amplifiers; the accountants are pinching pennies everywhere they can. Hey, it makes sense. TV buyers obsess about image quality and maybe read the reviews, but sound--it's an afterthought. On the dealer's showroom floor they never have the sound turned on, and there's a good reason for that. It sucks.
And since most flat-display buyers wind up using the sorry speakers built into their awesome looking TVs, they're missing out. Now sure, the sound may not be all that awful to the average person, but that's mostly because they so easily get used to hearing no treble, no bass, no dynamic range, and as Tom put it, "Flat TVs have flat sound." Most, something estimates range as high as 80 percent, of folks just settle and never upgrade to better speakers. That doesn't make any sense.
Tom's company is here to help. It makes great-sounding, highly affordable speakers designed to work with just about any TV. I wrote a rave review of the ZVOX 325 here at CNET. If you have high def video, why settle for lo-fi sound? Sleek and skinny new ZVOX models are coming soon.
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