The Death of Music?

Long has the audiophile waged war against the evil Steve Jobs and his iPod. The poor sound quality? The compressed music? BLASPHEMY!!! At least in the eyes of a audiophile. Audiophiles are, as urban dictionary defines, one who listens to the stereo rather than the music. Perhaps this is true, but one must consider their viewpoint. They figure that quality music=happy ears. This of course leads to happy audiophile and/or selling one's car to purchase a stereo which makes one ears happy. A truly vicious cycle indeed. I for one consider myself a semi-audiophile, or as I like to call it, an audiophile who has no money to buy a $5000 stereo system.

This debate about the quality of music has lead me to ponder deeply about music and its seemingly deep roots in the culture. With this my first thought was "man, new music has sucky sound quality". After reading Rolling Stone, I am glad that I am not the only one who believes that. Many people feel that today's music is just "too damn loud" and they are right. By analyzing the modern songs, Rolling Stone magazine has found that even the loudest rock from back in the day is nothing in compared to loudness. This so called "Loudness War" is meant to make the casual listener of today's music (ie the kid who turns his iPod to full and explodes his cheap plastic white iPod earphones, or the kid who has some crappy computer speakers) pay attention to the blasting sounds coming out and damaging their ears. Try listening to even rock intended to be loud such as Nirvana and compare it to some modern band. There is a distinct noticeable difference. The louder, newer modern music lacks the small nuances that makes the older music much more textured. This is partly due to the mastering of the audio, which like I said before is meant to catch one's attention by blasting out of lower end audio equipment.

After discovering these facts, I proceeded to think about how this shift in listening to music occured. Personally I think that the shift from actually sitting down and listening to music (yes back in the day people actually just sat and listened) vanished due to newer technologies and the speeding up of our society. Just like the railroads of the 1800s that sped up America, portable audio players were perhaps the beginning of the end. Apparently some editors at CNET.com share my ideas in a way. Steve Guttenburg feels that, "

...when CDs came out people immediately used the format's longer playing times to do other stuff, they were no longer tied to the music and stopped listening. Music was just there, filling up space.

Fast forward to the present and now they don't even have to think about the music they want to play. They hit shuffle and let the iPod program the music. And once music is relegated to the background sound quality is no biggie."

I have had personal experience with this. If anyone has ever played a LP vinyl record (yes they still make them), it completely changes the musical listening experience. An LP gets the listener involved in a way no CD can. There is no track skipping (totally serious here) and in the middle of it you actually have to flip the sides (yes way). This involvement in the actual playing of the music emerges the listener in a much more personal experience that cannot be had with the modern iPod.

Though sound quality and the times have changed, I am glad that we still have music. At least we haven't evolved to the point where all music would sound like this: