Sound
I’m not sure the problem is the rip rate…
I just set up these new computer speakers, you can check them out at:
I’ve been using the same $150 Cambridge SoundWorks system since the heyday of Napster, back in 2000, and this guy offered this $1000 system up.
The very first thing I noticed upon connection was how shitty MP3s sounded.
But then, I inserted a brand new CD and it sounded even worse than the 128 kbps rips I’d downloaded of classic tracks.
The new music was all compressed, all tinny, essentially unlistenable. Whereas the classics, in comparison, were positively warm.
One of my favorite tracks of all time, in my iTunes Top Fifty most played, is Stories’ "Love Is In Motion". Which someone sent me back in 2004, after I futilely looked for it online for five years, both illegally and legally.
I didn’t buy Stories’ "About Us" because of "Brother Louie", hell, I was stunned when that track ultimately hit, but because the band contained Michael Brown…you’ve always got to give a chance to the dude who wrote "Walk Away Renee" and "Pretty Ballerina".
Shortly after buying "About Us", I drove cross-country. With twenty six cassette tapes. One of them contained this Stories album. I can sing every lick. And two of the songs are personal favorites, the aforementioned "Love Is In Motion" and "What Comes After".
The rips I’m listening to are 160 kbps, but stunningly, they sound better than seemingly all of the new music. Which is killed in mastering, if not the recording process.
Funny if you think about it, they used to have to EQ with the lathe in mind, LPs couldn’t contain all of the music. And then we got the CD, and you didn’t have to artificially roll off the sound, you could put more than forty minutes of music on a disc, and now, twenty five years later, CDs sound completely like shit.
Oh, the digital standard we have is crap. But what we’re doing with it is even worse.
Now some new acoustic music sounded good on these speakers. But James McMurtry cut the acoustic version of "We Can’t Make It Here" at home, in a breeze, it was not squashed for radio, not homogenized for public consumption. This take of "We Can’t Make It Here" is the best thing I’ve heard since it came out, as good a protest song as anything cut in the sixties, but do I love it so much because of the way it sounds? On these speakers, it sounds like James is in the speakers, sitting right behind my computer monitor.
The Eagles’ "My Man" doesn’t quite sound as delicious, but there’s a richness in the bottom, a depth of field that was absent from the new CD I just played.
Or how about Gordon Lightfoot’s "Song For A Winter’s Night". Not quite as good as the McMurtry number, still, it penetrates.
Or a true winner… Stephen Stills’ "Do For The Others". I heard this on my iPod the other night in the mountains, and it stopped me in my tracks. I had to play it again, to see if the song was really that meaningful. And I realized, it wasn’t the lyrics so much as the sound. On these speakers, I’m brought right back to my freshman year at Middlebury.
New music doesn’t have to sound shitty.
But if there’s any chance it’s going to be played on the radio, it probably does. The loudness wars apply. That rich experience of sitting in front of the stereo, the music being enough, that’s gone. No wonder people listen to this crap in the background, if it’s foreground, your ears bleed, you want to take it off.
So it’s not only rip rates. Music when done right is warm, it penetrates. Unfortunately, too much of what’s purveyed today has the feel of broken glass. It’s edgy and sharp, it cuts you.
I didn’t care that Michael Brown left Stories when it had its hit. I didn’t care that I’d purchased "About Us" as a cut-out and it became almost immediately unavailable after "Brother Louie" had its run. I was such a big fan that I purchased the lead singer’s solo album. That’s what came after.
What comes after now is no loyalty to the act. If the business doesn’t respect the music, why should the fans? Treat music like shit, and that’s how people will perceive it. Sure, first it’s about the song, but recording, transfer, those make a difference.
This is a fucked up business. There’s too much music. Most of which is shitty. And that which is good is almost impossible to locate. It makes one hard to be a believer. It’s probably impossible for today’s youth to know that music was once the number one art form, that it drove the culture. But for one who’s been there, when you listen to the old music, lovingly restored, your life works. Every bit as much as it did back in 1969.
Forty years have gone by, and we may be able to carry our collections around with us, but they sound worse than ever before. Tweeter shuts stores all over the country and a kid thinks a stereo is a computer.
Then again, I’ve got a 500 gig hard drive. I can own CD quality digital music. Hard drives in iPods are constantly increasing in size, and getting cheaper. Music doesn’t have to sound like shit. But it does.
