Quality Hiding In Plain Site

Why the hatred of quality music and sound right now? Is it really the machines taking over?

Consumer audio suffers this weird delusion. It seems to be a digital blindness.

It started in the 80’s but was a small segment of the listening population. Simple nerds.

In the 90’s it was distracted by the creation of the internet. They built the infrastructure while the arts flourished (money helps), and the digital babies sprung up everywhere.

[note – I’m one of the early ones. By 1991 I was pretty convinced computers were going to run just about everything by Y2K so I learned them, made a career of them, and continue to this day to be a technology worker, user, and lover.]

Then the iPod hit. “Good enough” took over for a nice ride that I figured would have run it’s course by now. Of course they would get better at playing music! (ok once). Of course digital would figure out how to sound better than a 2001 mp3 on a 2002 iPod (it has).

Apple_historic_iPod — Even Steve Frickin’ Jobs didn’t think people would stand for the quality of mp3’s.

I don’t know, did 9/11 knock everyone into everything is a matter of life and death, and if my iPod gets better sounding, well that is shallow thinking?

Change_of_Authority_Ceremony_at_Joint_Service_Station_War_Eagle,_Baghdad,_Iraq_DVIDS159745 — Sound quality is not life and death, it’s about life only.

It’s been 15 years of this downward turn in quality. Even the best artists working now release things that are so loud, so pumped, so faked (in some cases) that no one really even trusts them anymore.

The gods of music are long gone and there are no new ones that aren’t vintage re-do’s. OK very few. I blame the digital machines and our willingness to accept their flaws in quality.

1980 Curtis Mathes TV 1-13-12 002 — I’m a 1980 TV. I should be good enough quality forever, right? Oh no, I’m not a stereo, haha!

Meanwhile, TV has been upgraded at least 4 times in the USA since the CD shipped.

PIONEER_SX_1980 — I sound way better than a phone you downgraded suckers!

Now Jay Z, pushing his Tidal service, is forced to talk sound quality. That’s the only thing Tidal has over competitors – BITRATE. They stream the same stuff, they just stream it at 5x the data rate. CD quality.

If he cracks the code and gets mainstream person to understand that 1400k > 256k EVEN IN AUDIO, and you guessed it, 5800k > 1400k too. See how easy?