Saturday, October 28, 2006
Lo-Fi
I find it interesting that the pursuit of pre-recorded music seems to be reaching for ever more poorer sound quality. It's interesting that some of the latest "advances" in music actually make the sound poorer. Let me tell you that I can't hear very well, and the average MP3 sounds just as good as a freshly pressed LP over a good audio system.
I would guess that the best sound reproduction would come from either an LP - yep, that old plastic dinosaur, or a good tape recorder. By good, I'm talking about one of the high-speed, reel-to-reel tape recorders, not cassette. I'd also like to mention that I haven't been involved too much lately with high fidelity audio. My idea of a good system still involves a large reel-to-reel feeding a pre and power amp into a large set of high efficiency tuned ported speakers.
The problem with today's reproduced music is that most of it is digital while the source is analog. When CDs first came out, there was arguments about digital sampling. If you don't know, an analog sound wave (like from an instrument) is all (more or less) smooth curves similar to a swinging rope. A digital sound wave looks more like a flight of stairs. Now even though it's usually sampled and reproduced 44,000 times a second which sounds like a lot, it is still a distorted reproduction.
On top of that most sound files are compressed. And most of the compression isn't lossless - which means after compressing and expanding there is something lost - sound information. And then you have speaker systems. I get a kick out of these soon to be deaf idiots with their high-powered auto-audio systems that sound very similar to a 1960s mono transistor radio sitting in a metal pail.
I have heard that there is a small, but growing group of audiophiles who are getting back to LP sources and tube amps with quality speakers. While I think tube amps probably have more measured distortion, it seems the distortion may actually be advantageous to sound reproduction when compared to transistorized amps.
So grab your little MP3 player with teeny ear-plugs and your digitized compressed audio and don't tell me about good sounding music.
