Music is not dead… At least to me
Today I read an interesting article (and Gizmodo’s take on it) detailing an interesting audio study. Apparently, a music professor at Stanford conducted a study with the aim of determining students’ tastes in music compression methods. Long story short, the students preferred the compression of MP3s (particularly rock at 128 kbps) to to higher quality codecs or uncompressed songs. Gizmodo humorously jabs that young people have “utterly destroyed music.”
Maybe it’s a perfect storm of digital audio compression, the loudness war, and the portable music set of generations? Think about it. In under a century’s time (don’t check the dates on this, I’m just thinking mainstream inventions, widespread acceptance, etc.), we’ve gone from music being exclusively live or performed, to being readily and cheaply available, at whatever volume we like at whatever quantity we like. That boils down to badly mastered, badly compressed music being piped into tinnitus wracked ears on crappy iPod earbuds. For hours a day. I guess it’s better than radio quality.
As a race, maybe we’ve become desensitized to music, leaving us wanting it louder, quicker, more convenient… but not caring about the quality?
I hate to think that that’s true.
CMOY Headphone amp, Grado SR-80s, iAudio X5
My setup doesn’t look the prettiest, nor is it the most high end, but I can hear flautists inhale, and I can tell that the clipping on certain NIN tracks is on purpose. I end up listening to Happy Hardcore and Industrial on it most of the time, ironically.
I know a few audiophiles of my generation that indulge in noise-canceling headphones (particularly the Audio-Technica variety), high quality surround sound systems, FLAC encoded albums, mild flirtations with vinyl (I have a couple of my favorite trance tracks), not to mention my whole involvement with non-mainstream MP3 players. I remember a certain back and forth I had with Klipsch over their 4.1 Promedia speaker set, the subsequent upgrading of my pre-amp, and my eventual surrender to getting a set of Logitech Z-540s.
Are we special or elitist? I wouldn’t say so, wanting good quality music is something that’s just a higher priority to us. Or maybe the rest of my friends are just as finnicky as I am about good sound. What I do know is that we clearly aren’t the majority (at least according to the Stanford study), and this is disheartening. I haven’t seen an MP3 player as suited to my needs since the Rio Karma as my current iAudio X5, and that’s almost 3 years old now (two new batteries later… Thanks for soldering that, Chris!). Maybe that’s because the public just doesn’t care about audiophile sound, and the audiophiles will find their own ways to get by. Oh well.
At least I can tell the difference between a 128 kbps, 256kbps, and uncompressed file… Most of the time.
The Loudness Wars and Dynamic Range
Ever wonder why popular music CDs have no trouble piping out of your stereo/iPod, but when you watch movies you really have to crank your system to hear the quiet parts (not to mention that you get blown away by loud parts)? Well, it has to do with something called dynamic range compression. In a nutshell, if you were to apply this technique to an audio clip of someone whispering quietly and screaming their head off, you’d have most of the qualities and textures of the sound preserved, but the two voices would sound close in volume and power. Conversely, that DVD you’re watching is not as compressed, so whispers sound appropriately quiet, and explosions startlingly loud.
This concept has weighed heavily on the music/audio mastering industry, and more than a few voices have been heard arguing about it. I just stumbled on an interesting site, Turn Me Up! | Bringing Dynamics Back To Music, which details the “loudness wars” in published music and the like.
This video briefly explains the difference between a typical popular song published in 1989 and its theoretical counterpart published in 2006. What this video details is a difference in audio dynamic range, or essentially the range between quiet and loud within a recording. From what I’ve read and heard about the Loudness Wars over the last decade or so, music is being cranked up to the maximum (just shy of clipping) to get the biggest bang for the buck out of your stereo/headphones. On the surface, it seems to satisfy consumers and people seem to want it.
However, in this case (via Mastering Media Blog), Metallica has been accused of compressing the hell out of tracks in “Death Magnetic” and distorting them. Interestingly, the problem doesn’t show up in Guitar Hero 3. Ian Shepherd notes that blame most likely falls on “800 pound gorillas” of the recording industry, which isn’t much of a surprise. I don’t think Metallica appeals to the audiophile demographic anymore anyway.
I know when I balance audio, I typically push it to within a comfortable range as far as it will go before clipping. But I’m usually working with dialog with a musical bed and not the music itself… And it’s usually a corporate market that’s listening on tiny, tinny weak laptop speakers. Or so I’ve heard. Sometimes there are board room presentations and trade shows.
It makes you think, though. The industry seems to be struggling to strike a balance between what pleases the masses and what has integrity. I know that’s been argued about for decades in terms of what’s popular versus what’s worth listening to… But the fact that it gets down to an issue of how it was mastered is amazing to me. I guess having that “popular music sound” isn’t just an issue of beat, chord progressions, and subject matter, but which technician was in the studio?