blogcutter

... through so many sieves, filters and other intermediaries as to be but a pale imitation of its former self.

Not everyone accepts this state of affairs, of course. When people started moving from records to compact discs, there remained - and remains to this day - a loyal core of vinyl lovers. From the first time I heard music on compact disc, I thought it had a rather "boxed in" sound to it. The sound was "cleaned up", but in cleaning it up and removing little scratches and other imperfections, the CD-makers also removed much of the dynamic range and much of the emotional impact.

Of course, the CDs that appeared in the 80s are not necessarily completely comparable to the ones being made today. In those days, they all had mysterious letters like AAA or ADD or AAD or DDD on them. Unlike in the academic world, D's were considered to be better than A's because they referred to digital rather than analog - a newer, though not necessarily better technology. Nowadays, many if not most of the CDs out there are "burned" on home computers or other in-home devices. It's an open question as to whether this results in better or worse quality than with commercially available CDs. What is certain is that not all playback devices "respect" or are compatible with homegrown CDs.

With the early commercial CDs, I often had problems with them "skipping". This could sometimes be repaired at home. If you didn't want to attempt that, you could usually take the disc back and get a replacement copy - which might or might not suffer from the same defect. It's been a long while since I bought a CD that was problematic in that way.

People are basically lazy. Some of us diehards invested in reel-to-reel tapedecks in the 1970s because the sound was so much better. But eventually it became virtually impossible to get reel-to-reel tapes for home use. Everyone wanted cassettes, which were much more portable and convenient. With cassette decks, you needed Dolby and other processes to clean up the sound, which homogenized it at the same time. People listened to these cassettes on their Walkmans and the like, through miserable scratchy little earphones. And don't even get me started on eight-tracks!

With the advent and ready availability of equally portable CDs (as well as digital dictaphones, answerphones and the like), cassettes began to fade into oblivion too. As did the mass-market popularity of record albums, now widely referred to as "vinyl".

Nowadays, young people typically satisfy their musical interests in piecemeal fashion, downloading a snippet here, a song there. One thing that has suffered as a result is the sound quality. But that's not necessarily an inevitable byproduct of the way music is delivered. For example, Neil Young in his recent bestselling autobiography "Waging Heavy Peace" touts the virtues of a high-resolution studio quality recording technology called PureTone, which he calls "the new gold standard". I've never heard it myself, but it sounds promising.

There are some other reservations I have about the way people these days absorb their music, though I won't comment on them at great length today. For one thing, when LPs gave way to CDs, cover art and liner notes took a nosedive. There simply wasn't as much surface area to catch your eye and do something dramatic with. The other major reservation I have relates to the integrity of the whole. Something like The Who's Tommy is a rock opera - it's designed to be listened to in a sequential way in its entirety, not to be splintered off into hit singles. And that's true to a great extent of other albums too, in all genres of music. Increasingly, we seem to be catering to the shortening attention span of today's youth ... and perhaps today's adults too.

Call me an audio-snob if you will, but I suspect there are some like-minded people out there!