As an avid reader of Rolling Stone magazine, I’m aware of the music industry’s struggle since the advent of P2P networks and digital music. Do I feel sorry for the record companies and artists? Well, in a way. I still don’t buy the whole sob story that Metallica and other bands were polluting MTV with back in Napster’s heyday when they all tried to convince us that they would go broke. It’s obvious now that it’s a more serious problem than I originally thought, with thousands of record company employees losing their jobs, but that’s not the main reason I feel bad. That has to do with the quality of product we’re subjecting ourselves to because we don’t want to pay.
MP3, WMA and AAC files are so compressed that you’re likely losing 75-90 percent of the quality of the master tracks. (Kind of like pissing on a Picasso.) Like many of you, for years I was perfectly content with my MP3 files on my 2-channel stereo system while I was doing my homework, or (more likely) playing video games or glued to the computer. It was when I got older and obtained this wonderful thing called income, with which I could invest in a 5.1 channel surround system that I started to wonder why this sounded so weak.
Nowadays, it’s rare to open a copy of Rolling Stone and not see a quote from a legendary record producer stating how much we are cheating ourselves with this compression. It’s gotten so bad in fact, that several producers don’t even attempt to perfect the sound of their albums as much as they once did because they know how few ears the master tracks will actually reach, and worse, the fraction of those that will notice the difference. Thankfully for those of us that some may call audiophiles, (although to refer to myself as such is probably an insult to the term) there is still hope. All it takes is a little extra hard drive space, a little extra time and probably (the point where most people will stop reading) a little money.
Lossless encoding is the only way to get close to the artists intended sound in digital form. Apple and Microsoft both have their hands in the lossless game (Apple Lossless Audio Codec or ALAC, which you can compress to and play on iTunes and WMA Lossless, accessible via the Zune software) and even Sony’s in on it (ATRAC Advanced Lossless) but most hardcore audiophile blogs warn you to stay away from these in favor of open source codecs such as FLAC, which cannot be played in iTunes or Zune (I use Songbird). I personally can’t tell a difference and I wonder if the preference has more to due with anti-corporate sentiment than actual sound quality, but I could be wrong.
There are several major drawbacks to lossless codecs, beginning with compatibility. Each codec can only be played using their respective encoders programs and hardware (unless you use Songbird or a few other open source programs) and to my knowledge there is yet to be a universal lossless codec that will play on anything. The second drawback is drive space. No matter which codec you choose, they all take up considerably more space than MP3, AAC or WMA files. Third is availability. If you’re so inclined, you could search for torrent files of albums in these codecs, (which are few and far between, not that I look much…) but the safest and most available route is to buy the CD and rip it in your desired codec. Which of course, isn’t free.
Just like every other choice in life, this is simply a question of priority. And my personal opinion is that the majority of people who like dabble in the dark arts of digital music collecting aren’t bothered by the loss of quality and would rather miss out on the subtle, yet beautiful nuances heard in a master copy of Radiohead’s “Pyramid Song”. The music business has yet to find a way to recover from the financial damages caused by the digital music revolution, but I think their day will come. The art of music production however, may never be the same again.
