A Commentary

By R Barr

Lately I have been thinking about the quality of the reproduction of the music that I listen to. Like many others, I embrace the ease of loading all of my music onto a computer and transferring them to my iPods as it is very convenient for me to carry all of my favorite bands ENTIRE collections with me wherever I go. The question is, now that the excitement of this revolutionary device has died down, and it is now common place in my life, have I happily traded fidelity for portability and convenience? Are iPods and compressed files sucking the life out of the music I so enjoy?
The answers sadly to both questions is yes. No doubt the compressed mp3 files are ‘thinner’ sounding, many times crackly and tinny sounding. What’s even worse, new releases these days are engineered louder knowing the end user will either buy it compressed to begin with, or rip their own CD’s for their devices, which eliminates sounds and range contained on a recording. You would think knowing these things would make me trash the ipod and go back to only CD and vinyl, but convenience has trumped sound in the overall scheme of things.
One factor is when I listen to music. The majority of the time it is in the car to and from work – and at work on my ipod ready portable speaker system. I rarely listen to music at home anymore with all the other factors of life occupying that time. (Grand kids, favorite TV shows, sports, etc..). I used to just sit and listen to music growing up. It was an activity. The other side of this however, is that I actually listen to MORE music now than I have at any other time in my life. That is a direct result of the iPod’s portable convenience. The downside would of course be it becomes the background while I am doing something else rather than being THE thing that I am doing.
I have however retained my listening habits. I’ve never been a ‘mix tape’ kinda guy, I’m an ‘album guy’, and I preferred to listen to an artist work from start to finish, in the order it is on an lp or CD. I still do this even on the iPod. It is incredibly simple to create play lists on the iPod, heck you can even have it create them for you, but I prefer to listen to one artist instead of moving from one artist’s song to another’s. To me there is an art to listening to music, and the move to the jukebox-style playlist mentality delivery of songs was one compromise that I can say with pride I did not make.
So what to do? Well I will never abandon my iPod. It has become my central music delivery system, and shows no sign of being replaced any time soon. But to combat the degradation of sound quality in this MP3 era, I’ve started re-ripping my favorite music into a ‘lossless’ format, preserving the sound closer to it’s original intent. With external hard drives getting larger and cheaper all the time, storage of these much larger files is really not the issue of space and cost that it once was.
What’s lost is that there was a magical almost romantic quality with the album that has been lost in reducing the packaging and music that was inside to digital content. I do long for the days of listening to music on vinyl, holding the large sleeve, checking the sides to make sure it is centered correctly, looking at the lyric sheet, watching the label turn on the turntable. You felt like you were buying something to be cherished and that you became a part of. We will never feel that simply downloading a few files.