When you see pictures of musicians at work in the studio on a new album, usually they're surrounded by a plethora of gadgets and guitars, sporting expensive and high quality headphones on their heads as they anti-pose with a microphone in their midst.
It's generally through elite technology that producers and musicians craft their work; therefore, the finished product is tailor-made to sound ideal on these sorts of high-end headphones and speakers. A divide naturally exists, then, between how listeners hear the finished musical product and how it was conceived by the artist, since the vast majority of the public seems to listen to music via cheaper, portable or otherwise less ideal sources.
Plenty of innovations have come along since the heyday of the record album - under optimal circumstances the best format for high quality listening - most notably the industry transformation to digital audio (CDs, DVD, etc.), which maintained sound quality while greatly increasing user-friendly accessibility.
Perplexingly enough, the next stage of innovation substantially reopened that divide between production and consumption, and I am referring, of course, to the modern preponderance of MP3s and the advent of downloading.
This generation of listeners is getting used to hearing compressed audio data files, which are substantially inferior to other media, no matter the bit rate - this is somewhat troubling. When a sound file gets compressed, as the word would suggest, the high and low frequencies get cut out, and you're left with greatly compromised bass and treble delivery.
Non-compressed music takes up about 10 megabytes of hard drive space per minute of sound, so it's no wonder there was once a need to compress to MP3, which takes up a small fraction of that. But now, in the age of the terabyte and cable Internet, can't we afford to re-expand?
Most downloaded music files, including the songs that iTunes sells (128 kbps), and also Radiohead's recent Internet release of In Rainbows (160), are lower than the supposed CD quality"" bit rate of 320, and prove to be a bit of a sonic letdown.
The files available on music exposure mecca MySpace are even compressed all the way down to 96 kbps, which is particularly hard to ignore. In fact, it's easier to find higher bit rates through illegal file sharing, something the record industry and iTunes should probably consider.
The iPod is a wondrous little invention - not to mention the epitome of our ever-accessorizing and entertainment crazed culture - but that's what makes it the biggest culprit in modern sound fidelity degradation.
I would urge anyone who has been relying solely on an iPod for a while to go pull out a CD and make a conscious comparison between the audio delivery of the two media. You may well be astounded and startled at what you find.
I definitely was when I tried it using Brian Eno's Another Green World - to the point where I have decided to take a hiatus from my iPod (it helps that it broke anyway). The sound I heard on the CD was uncannily crisp; I could literally hear the wider range of frequency delivery tickling my eardrums, and everything seemed noticeably clearer.
There's admittedly a catch to this experiment: You won't notice anything unless you've got a good set of headphones or speakers. Earbud headphones are, for all their portability and sleekness, not very ideal. In essence, they physically compress a music signal that has already been figuratively compressed.
In response to their popularity, many record companies have adopted a strange tactic for how their more pop-oriented material is recorded, specifically what's expected to do well on the iTunes store.
Apparently music of this sort is now often being recorded, mixed and mastered to sound ideal specifically on earbuds as opposed to being aimed at more conventional sound systems. In a twisted way, innovation seems to be actually reaching for the lowest common denominator these days.
Are you willing to take the Ben Peterson challenge and ditch your iPod for a week? Report your progress (or lack thereof) to bpeterson1@wisc.edu
