i just read an article on some news site talking about the death of the audiophile. wow. welcome to 10 years ago!
when i first got into the idea of the mp3, it occurred to me that we were moving away from the CD and toward the computer as the audio component of the home. with the popular adoption of the ipod, i was proven correct. yet my first concern back in 1996 was that my hard drive was not big enough for me to manipulate many of my recordings, so how much music could i really hold? mp3 (and plummeting storage costs in subsequent years) solved that problem for me nicely.
in some other article i read a couple of months ago (note the lack of links because i am really, really lazy) the author was declaring that the peak of consumer audio was with the CD and we are headed on a downhill slide. i am not sure that i disagree with that at all. i follow a lot of mailing lists and forums that go on and on about “pro audio” this and “pro audio” that and i wonder what that means any more. yes, the more precision we have in the digital domain the better our dithering when it comes out and all that jazz. but if i am taking my high quality master and shrinking it down to a 128 kbps mp3 that will be heard on earbuds on the bus or even worse, routed through a cassette adapter in a car that is traveling at 75 mph down the freeway at rush hour, does it even matter? the subtle nuances of my carfully crafted reverb will be lost forever amidst the tire noise.
tack on to this the number of people producing albums with nothing but garageband and an internet connection and we soon see that the high end is really suffering. and no one cares. except for the high end and the folks who have bought into it (protools/logic studio/cubase users…i’m looking at you).
does this mean anything? probably not. i have an enormous music “collection” and i don’t listen to a lot of it. i am quite glad that i don’t own physical copies of most of it because we would have no place to store it. i get to listen to what i want when i want and that convenience is worth a ding in quality that i honestly don’t notice most of the time due to the circumstances of the world around me (dog, chattering baby, neighbor’s car alarm, traffic, people trying to talk to me in random coffee shops).
none of this means that i will be giving up my sennheiser headphones or my CD recordings of shostakovich’s string quartets. but it does mean that i will continue to be content with my ipod and cassette adapter for the car where the majority of my listening takes place.
oh and i’ll probably be investing more in microphones than in software in the future. after all, paying a ton of money doesn’t make it a professional recording. getting paid or paying for it does. and maybe i’m a composer and not a professional.
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