I was more than happy to move from vinyl to CDs but, as the kid said, digital compression sucks the life out of music.
And that's why so-called "HD Radio™" is a crock. Aside from the absence of background hiss, there's nothing "HD" about it. Thanks to lossy digital compression, everything on HD Radio—and satellite radio and typical MP3s—has an unmistakable, "underwater" sound.
I guess MP3s and iPods have taken the place of the 8-track tapes of the '70s. Those sounded awful, compared to vinyl albums (on good equipment). But, 8-tracks were portable and people who didn't really listen to music didn't care as much about sound quality. So, maybe "the quality of what people hear" hasn't really "taken a step back" after all. Instead, it's stayed pretty much the same. Most folks just want to hear the songs, while the audiophiles want high fidelity.
That's a sentence that couldn't possibly be any more wrong.
Would more bits be much of an improvement in listening to artists like that?
MP3’s work o.k. in the truck or on the boat, where the background noise would drown out the silence. I had a friend stop by yesterday and blew him away with the sound off a 10 and 1/2 inch reel-to-reel playing through a 224 dbx unit.
MP3 files sound like Phil Spector’s wall of sound. Midrange with lots of compression.
I recently replaced my 12 y.o. Bose Wave Radio with a new one. I was amazed by the sound quality. I could hear tiny details that I never heard before on the old Bose. It’s unreal how “real” it sounds.
Too many years in the artillery. It would take a heck of a sound system for me to hear the difference between MP3s and real music.
In any case MP3s are more portable, and I’m mostly listening to books on CD, anyways.
I’m a musician with a pretty fair ear.
I don’t get involved much in the argument, though, because I care more about the quality of the performance as opposed to its audio fidelity.
Ahhhh....the days of Wow and Flutter. Long gone they are. Yet, I still have...and use...my Yamaha YP-211 turntable hooked up to my Yamaha CA-610 amp.
Of course that still wont satisfy the purists, but it would be MUCH better than what is standard now.
I have NO USE for the compressed formats.
Even at my age I like hearing the ORIGINAL 16track tape hiss on the Black Sabbath CDs :)
I’ve NEVER been able to identify the “underwater” quality you speak of. 8-tracks were sort of popular, but not really. They were kind of good for cars where the road noise prevented high fidelity playback anyway. And, it was almost impossible to keep a vinyl LP from getting scratched and/or wearing with time and repeated playings, so except for the first few times of listening, LPs NEVER sounded all that great.
I remember those days. Back in the early 1980s, I spent nearly $1,000 on a Kenwood system and that was a lot of money back in those days. At the time, I had nearly 600 vinyl LPs and dozens of reel-to-reel tapes that I taped off the radio (so sue me!). Also, I got most of my vinyl records from flea markets for dirt cheap. I remember one mother was selling her son's collection because he moved out of the house. Vintage Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd, Doors, Led Zeppelin, etc., she must have had no idea of the value of those as she let me fill a milkbox crate of them for just $10.
At the time, there was really no other way to play your music collection than to place a vinyl LP on the turntable and play out side 1 or side 2. Sure, you could move the stylus over to another track but then you risked damaging the record or the stylus needle so you just let the thing play out.
What I really miss about the albums is discovering all those "deep" album tracks that grow on you over time and you end up liking them even better than the hit singles you bought the record for in the first place.
These days, you can just pluck the singles off iTunes and you never get to hear the rest of the album. Just think of how many good songs go undiscovered as a result.
If only they didn't charge so much for the whole album, I'd buy the whole album much more often.