Compression often gets a bad name. Having lived through cassettes and 8 tracks, few remember what an improvement digital reproduction was around the issue of mobile sound. I personally love the notion that I can travel anywhere with my entire music collection in a device that is the size of a cigarette pack. Compression makes this happen and I can live with the tradeoff.
The audiophile community has always been very small compared to the mass market of consumer electronics. The everyday person could care less about sonics; it has always been about convenience of the format. I remember fondly how everyone ditched their vinyl for the living room space enhancements of the CD jewel box--it fits in one rack!!!! I never saw people rallying around vinyl back then. MP3s are just an extention of this movement into the confines of flash memory and a hard drive--no more shelve space needed in the brave new digital world.
The real death of the high fidelity space has been on how record companies allocate funds to new and established artists and it started 30 years ago. Fleetwood Mac and Steely Dan got $1 million budgets to record Aja and Tusk in the mid-70s, the last of their kind, and this kind of money was usually spent on quality session time within the studio, or a mound of cocaine. It is no wonder why these classic rock albums sound better than today's music. Record companies were footing the bill on multiple takes. No label today would allow Bruce Springsteen to spend a year recording 100 takes of "Born to Run."
Additionally, there was more stability in the production environment suggested by Sugarbrie above. You had trained studio personnel who knew how to tweak an individual artist's sound around the dynamics of a room. Olympic Studios in London, Goldstar in LA, A & M in LA, Capitol Records Studios in Hollywood, STAX in Memphis all had very distintive sounds on how tracks eventually sounded. Just review the work of a producer like Glynn Johns.
The emergence of MTV in the early 1980's killed off the recording studio environment as we know it, as the video became the primary promotional means to reach the audience. Less time was spent in the studio and more time was spent charting the "multi-media" image of the artist.
It was no longer necessary to spend hours in the studio toiling away. Additionally, the rise of Hip-Hop and sampling allowed the next generation to flourish away from the Guitar God mentality of my generation. Any kid with a Sony Tascam could create music without the pretense to dilligently learn an instrument. Ton Loc's "Wildthing" just needed to steal from Eddie Van Halen's guitar to recreate a wonderful new world. I rarely see anything written here on Audiogon about this fundamental shift in music taste as Urban music became the desposable soundtrack of the life's of Gen X and Y. You just moved on to the next sound. Albums lost their luster and I don't think that music suffered from this. It seems as vital today in motivating a legion of bands and fans.
During this time, the record industry also did a very poor job at maintaining the intellectual inventory of tape libraries. There was a huge consolidation of labels during this period and a corporate discipline was imposed on what was largely a cottage industry of small labels. Sadly, it was not applied in intellectual inventory management. As these mergers took place, there are too many cases of master tapes disappearing in the shuffle, so that later issues were birthed from second and third grade source material. 70% of all revenue in the 1990s came from the reissue market, so there is a lot of product out there that is a pale imitation of the original sessions as they rushed to release product. This is probably the only reason why old vinyl sounds better to the average person's ears--it is closer to the master tapes.
Having been in the pro music space for 25 years, I don't expect to see any trend around high fidelity reversing in the future. Artists make very little, if any, money from their record contracts. Live touring and merchandise sales are their primary bread-earners and I think recorded music is very much an afterthought in their minds. There will be a few exceptions, Radiohead comes to mind, but I don't see the audiophile being served on a move forward basis. We have already walked in the tar pits if we think otherwise.
The audiophile community has always been very small compared to the mass market of consumer electronics. The everyday person could care less about sonics; it has always been about convenience of the format. I remember fondly how everyone ditched their vinyl for the living room space enhancements of the CD jewel box--it fits in one rack!!!! I never saw people rallying around vinyl back then. MP3s are just an extention of this movement into the confines of flash memory and a hard drive--no more shelve space needed in the brave new digital world.
The real death of the high fidelity space has been on how record companies allocate funds to new and established artists and it started 30 years ago. Fleetwood Mac and Steely Dan got $1 million budgets to record Aja and Tusk in the mid-70s, the last of their kind, and this kind of money was usually spent on quality session time within the studio, or a mound of cocaine. It is no wonder why these classic rock albums sound better than today's music. Record companies were footing the bill on multiple takes. No label today would allow Bruce Springsteen to spend a year recording 100 takes of "Born to Run."
Additionally, there was more stability in the production environment suggested by Sugarbrie above. You had trained studio personnel who knew how to tweak an individual artist's sound around the dynamics of a room. Olympic Studios in London, Goldstar in LA, A & M in LA, Capitol Records Studios in Hollywood, STAX in Memphis all had very distintive sounds on how tracks eventually sounded. Just review the work of a producer like Glynn Johns.
The emergence of MTV in the early 1980's killed off the recording studio environment as we know it, as the video became the primary promotional means to reach the audience. Less time was spent in the studio and more time was spent charting the "multi-media" image of the artist.
It was no longer necessary to spend hours in the studio toiling away. Additionally, the rise of Hip-Hop and sampling allowed the next generation to flourish away from the Guitar God mentality of my generation. Any kid with a Sony Tascam could create music without the pretense to dilligently learn an instrument. Ton Loc's "Wildthing" just needed to steal from Eddie Van Halen's guitar to recreate a wonderful new world. I rarely see anything written here on Audiogon about this fundamental shift in music taste as Urban music became the desposable soundtrack of the life's of Gen X and Y. You just moved on to the next sound. Albums lost their luster and I don't think that music suffered from this. It seems as vital today in motivating a legion of bands and fans.
During this time, the record industry also did a very poor job at maintaining the intellectual inventory of tape libraries. There was a huge consolidation of labels during this period and a corporate discipline was imposed on what was largely a cottage industry of small labels. Sadly, it was not applied in intellectual inventory management. As these mergers took place, there are too many cases of master tapes disappearing in the shuffle, so that later issues were birthed from second and third grade source material. 70% of all revenue in the 1990s came from the reissue market, so there is a lot of product out there that is a pale imitation of the original sessions as they rushed to release product. This is probably the only reason why old vinyl sounds better to the average person's ears--it is closer to the master tapes.
Having been in the pro music space for 25 years, I don't expect to see any trend around high fidelity reversing in the future. Artists make very little, if any, money from their record contracts. Live touring and merchandise sales are their primary bread-earners and I think recorded music is very much an afterthought in their minds. There will be a few exceptions, Radiohead comes to mind, but I don't see the audiophile being served on a move forward basis. We have already walked in the tar pits if we think otherwise.
