The future of new music.......

Young, modern engineers have been trained in very non-audiophile/purist recording methods and techniques, the term high fidelity meaning absolutely nothing to them. There is no absolute, all is relative. The idea of recreating an acoustic event is the furthest thing from their mind. The signal from the recording microphones is sent through an unbelievable amount of outboard gear, and subjected to extreme processing. I don't see this changing in the near future. None of them has ever heard a Water Lily, Chesky, Reference Recording, or Sheffield Labs album.

Let’s face it, only a very small percentage of music is mastered for use through full range loudspeakers. Most of it seems intended for playback through small portable speakers, radios and ear buds.
The majority of listeners seem to favour bass and punch over dynamic range.

It’s particularly frustrating when even long awaited so called ’original master tape’ prestige remasterings end up being dynamically compressed, often at the behest of some high executive or even the band/ performer themselves.

I appreciate that music is delivered as a commodity, and that market demands must be met, but can’t they just slip us audiophiles an earlier unprocessed copy. Surely it’s easy enough to click ’save as’ on a remastering project before you begin all that ’great’ compression magic?

Don’t audiophiles matter at all? OK, sorry I asked.

Well, I do think that audiophiles have become a rare breed indeed and have to admit that if my system had not been given to me I would not be dabbling in it now.

Having been exposed to hi-fi I have now become less tolerant of low end systems and very intolerant of poor recordings. Which is probably a a shame since I was fairly happy with my lower end system.

I do not know what the answer is but I think, from an audiophile standpoint this is a big problem. With hi-fi constricting in market share and the sound quality of recorded music going down it seems like a death spiral.

Two thoughts come to mind:

1) Can audiophiles do anything about poorly produced music? I know that in general the answer is no. I understand garbage-in-garbage-out. But with tech available I have to wonder if maybe decent equalizers and such might need to make a comeback. I know there is only so much you can do....but "better" is still better than nothing even if "better" does not rise to audiophile quality. I'm considering a Schiit Loki to put between my DAC and pre-amp. I know it won't work miracles but even the equalizer in iTunes helps some with this high loudness/low DR music.

2) There needs to be a robust mid-fi market. Let's face it, the market for $10k systems (which any of you would consider mid-fi) is pretty narrow. And let's face it, the extremes that serious audiophiles go to are not going to endear this hobby to many people. This is not a market segment that anyone is going to pay attention to. But let's say you could get a good-to-very good system for $2000 that was enough to expose the SQ of today's recordings. That is a market that might emerge and drive SQ gains. After all, some of the same kids listening to iTunes on ear buds will also drop $350 for a set of Beats headphones. So $2000-$3000 might be attainable to a new market of consumers if it could be demonstrated to sound good.

Of course, the corollary to that is that audiophiles might need to stop panning such systems and turning their noses up at speaker cables that cost less than a grand in order for such a mid-fi market to take off.

I have to make a little correction here:

Gary Clark, Jr.'s album Blak and Blu does have very poor DR on CD and lossless download but the DR on the vinyl is quite good.

I really, really do not want to be pushed into vinyl...........

If you haven't heard that album, you should...give it a listen...maybe on vinyl....