On audio fidelity

I’m flying between Winnipeg and Ottawa, listening to a favourite Coltrane recording. I thought I’d get down a few musings (laments?) on digital music and audio fidelity prompted by the EMI/Apple announcement.

Dynamic range, warmth and depth have all but disappeared it seems in today’s music recordings. Music is compressed in recording, in mastering, in broadcast; often at all three stages. The loudness effect is ubiquitous. Broadcast audio is so pumped that it never seems to vary more than a few db. What results is music that is shallow, cold, harsh and without any kind of imaging or space.

Our new formats don’t help things. We have gone from vinyl (with its many short-comings, granted), to cassette tape, to Compact Disc, to MP3. Even though CDs have potentially more bandwidth than vinyl, it’s not used.

For most people MP3 and AAC files compressed at 128k have become the way they listen to music. Add to the mix iTunes EQ settings (which usually counter, or undo, any ‘psycho-acoustic’ EQ inherent in the MP3 and AAC file compression) and the result is unlistenable.

Do our ears not know any better anymore?

Has the convenience of iPods, iTunes Music libraries and huge hard drives won out over sound fidelity?

Has the requirement to sell music on the radio, in movies, in video games and on the web over crappy computer speakers made the dumbing down of recordings necessary?

Has the focus on computer rigs done away with the concept of home audio systems?

Maybe the music that’s being consumed as 128k MP3 files doesn’t need — or deserve — better engineering or more bandwidth.

Is anything likely to reverse this trend, or will high quality audio become even more of a niche interest?

ps. It’s often said that we are now more discerning with video than we are with audio, what with the prevalence of gigantic plasma and LCD displays and “surround sound” in home theatre systems.

I don’t think so. Check out a TV retailer, where the colour on the display models is so saturated and overblown the reds almost make your eyes bleed. Or what about the stretching of a 4:3 aspect ratio image to cover a wide panel display? Every bar’s got’em. And what about the compression artifacts in a digital cable or satellite-to-home? A fast-moving image sequence is horribly chunky. People don’t seem to mind watching the ridiculously distorted images, over-saturated colours, and overly compressed video. I can’t bare it.

As with music, it probably doesn’t help that most of the broadcast “content” is shite.