Un. real.

lofimustdie:

The Washington Post has published an article about Neil Young’s address to a technology conference, and it leaves me torn.  (Link in title)

The old man’s heart is clearly in the right place, and it does make me happy to see that there’s someone with industry clout and a household name that’s fighting for audio fidelity.  Surely any music lover has observed the last decade in horror, as our video brethren have been relentlessly upsold on the latest thing - HDTV, Blu-ray, 3D; meanwhile digital audio has backslid to a lossier format than what we had 15 years ago.  

Although I’ve bemoaned the MP3, a lot of people aren’t really grasping the quantum leap that has taken place between early Napster-era MP3 encoding and today. I’m not going to get into it here, but modern 320k MP3s sound good.  Really good.  Good enough that no one’s going to spot them in a blind test with otherwise lossless formats.  Don’t take my word for it, do your own A-B-X test - I dare you.

But with all this in mind, the glut of online digital audio still sounds like dogshit that’s been dunked underwater, because the average user still doesn’t know or care about bitrate or just can’t tell the difference.  Maybe they don’t know that every time they burn an MP3 album to CD and someone rips that album, it’s making yet another pass through the encoding process and losing even more data.  Some of the audio I hear online cannot have been mangled any less than 3 times by this kind of thing.  So Neil and the rest of us are right to be speaking up.  We are tired.  

But Neil isn’t just pushing for lossless.  He’s pushing for better than CD quality, and I don’t know what technology he’s banking on to deliver that (the article doesn’t say), but if it’s higher sampling rates and bit depths, he needs to know that we tried that once.  Twice, actually.  DVDA and SACD are both stick-a-fork-in-‘em dead, and the hush that fell on the audio community after their demise was telling.

It is going to be a hard, hard sell to convince Joe Consumer to spend more for his digital audio.  When Neil was talking about leaving the computer on overnight to download an album, I was quietly banging my head against the wall.  Of course I’m willing; hell, I’ve done crazier things in the pursuit of fidelity.  But leaving the computer on all night is exactly what we young’ns did in the early Napster era, and in the meantime there has arrived a generation that is younger still.  They have gotten used to downloading albums out of thin fucking air in minutes.  Only the dedicated are going to put up with unwieldy file sizes and long wait times in the interest of a heightened listening experience.

And perhaps the saddest part of the whole prospect, and the crux of the matter, is that that experience - whatever it is, however it’s branded and marketed - is going to be nothing close to vinyl.  It’s not going to be mistaken for vinyl any more than 1080P Flipcam footage is mistaken for 35mm Panavision.  I hate to stretch the analogy, but it’s true.  As video pretty much completes its transition to HD, you need only to stop into an electronics store to see that from here on out, movies and TV are only ever going to get more stark, more freakishly sharp and lifelike.  The march toward hyper-real has begun and the warmth and human touch of film and tape are gone. They are not coming back until someone sells it back to us when we’re all puking from every overly color-corrected hi-def Hollywood production looking like fucking Fight Club 2.0.

More data does not mean better.  Higher density of data does not mean better.  Vinyl is not preferred because of its fidelity, and compared to CD’s it has very little.     Vinyl is preferred because it has an EQ curve of its own, because it has nonlinearities, because it saturates, it causes pitch and sibilance distortion, it doesn’t sound the same way twice, it makes crackly fuzzy noises that make us feel warm inside, it’s big, it’s round, it’s ANALOG.*  It is a living, breathing format which is ANALAGOUS to the input signal that created it.  It doesn’t have a fucking resolution.  

That is to speak only of the medium - the absolute final step in the very long process of making a recording.  And we are not making them the way Neil Young made them in the 70’s.  To be exact, there’s at least 7 analog gain stages worth of distortion missing from the process today, since tape machines and analog consoles have been replaced mostly with the linear computer systems that have assumed their roles.  You don’t need to know what those machines are or what they used to do.  If modern recordings sound to you like disembodied robot heads floating over a backing band whose every member is somehow millimeters away from your ear, then you are more than qualified to mourn their loss with the rest of us.  It is not fidelity that’s missing in modern music; in fact it’s quite the opposite.  It’s distortion, space and distance.

I’m told that when Bertold Brecht and Richard Wagner built theaters, they intentionally left out the front few rows.  I have always seen that as a tacit admission that the play still ultimately takes place in the viewer’s mind, that it doesn’t benefit your audience to see the nostril hairs of the performers and thusly it doesn’t benefit me to buy into some new audio format that allows me to hear a cricket farting in the yard behind the recording studio.  We have been sold on fidelity, fidelity, fidelity all our lives and now at its blistering pinnacle we have so much fidelity that nothing sounds real anymore.  Analog and the human touch it imparted is dead or at least dormant.  And so whether or not Neil Young and Apple reinvent the wheel and manage to sell something that no one thus far has wanted to buy is not really the issue to me, because even if they succeed it’s going to turn into the same freakshow that’s about to have millions of Americans wearing 3D glasses in their living room.

*Go ahead, give it a hug.  I know you’re thinking about it.