FOR THE last few years I have not had time to listen to my hi-fi. It is a shame because I spent a lot on it a few years ago. Not a huge amount, by hi-fi standards, but more than a couple of grand.
When I changed countries it came with me, although I had to buy some bookshelf speakers to go with it. It was a sign that I had lost interest in hi-fi that I was happy to do this. However, the old floor standing speakers were not worth enough to use as take on luggage and too big to ship economically.
Like many people with a broadband connection I downloaded music files and made them into either MP3 or .Wav CDs. These I mixed in with my old 'real' Cd collection. If you are listening to music at a low level for background music or anything similar I never really noticed much difference.
Then two nights ago, my wife had the stereo up past the 10 o'clock setting beyond which it has not gone for many years. She was playing one of the real CDs and it sounded fantastic.
You could hear the sound of bows being drawn over strings, sounds floated in the air, bass rolled across the floor… great stuff. I had forgotten what it sounded like.
Then I put in a CD which had been created from a 128kps MP3. The difference was noticeable even before I sat down. The sound was flat, muddy and the channel separation was minimal. This was odd as I had selected 128kps as a compression standard that would be pretty good quality versus compression trade off.
Then I stuck in an MP3 into the DVD player. Now the DVD player is a high quality one. In fact I once used to use it instead of the CD player because it sounded better at playing some types of music. But at high levels, the MP3 music was distorted. The midrange sound slightly distorted and there was no top end. The bass grunted like a flatulent pig.
A lot of MP3s come down the internet with even more compression. The sounds these give off sound atrocious even on my computer speaker set up. I was left wondering who managed to convince the universe that MP3s are the way to listen to music?
A few years ago I couldn’t find an MP3 player anywhere. I was assured that after the initial interest in them amongst geeks, people were not interested.
It seems that Apple convinced a generation that the best way to listen to music was through tiny ear plugs and compressed to enable your record collection to fit into a small box. Recently it made matters worse by saying that by sticking your small box into another small box you will get hi-fi.
Expectations are slipping.
Today I popped into the shops and replaced some of my favourite MP3 albums with their CD cousins and got my first couple of new CDs in years. One up for the RIAA and all its cronies one would think (other than the fact that my downloads were all legal).
Alas one of the CDs I bought to be Sarah McLachlan's 'Afterglow' which ships with that wonderful Sony DRM which kills your computer. It appears that we still have them in Bulgaria after they have been outlawed elsewhere.
This is ironic because the same album, recreated in a wave file from a compressed MP3 is available from a market stall for an eighth of the price.
It seems that the music industry has got this piracy thing all wrong. The RIAA has defended its product against an inferior but cheaper rival. It has not tried to make its product better or cheaper to compete, nor has it attempted to market CDs in terms of their own sonic superiority.
Instead of wasting money trying to protect its music with DRM or other things it should be creating packages that your average pirate can't or will not provide.
Boxes that do not spontaneously self destruct the second you leave the shop would be a start, but what about marketing the product on the basis of its sound quality? Why not do more to develop technology that makes the sound even better but which you will lose much of it all by compressing it?
Maybe, they should learn from the software industry where you allow update patches you’re your CD which will provide you with more material, but only if you have a licensed copy. Your average pirate is only going to duplicate the initial run of an album, they are not going to bother with updates.
Then all the music pirates will be doing is distributing tasters of the record label's product, but forcing people who want to hear the music in its full glory to buy the real thing. Just like I did. µ
