Is music quality moving away from the "audiophile"

Are most artists and producers moving away from "audiophile" type of recording? I would say for the most part, yes. The days are long gone by when people had a dedicated two-channel system and while maybe they couldn't afford SOTA equipment, certainly were aware of the sonic benefits that such such systems could deliver, and certainly wanted the recording they were purchasing to be able to deliver everything their systems could deliver. Nowadays it seems it's more about "quantity over quality". People don't care how good a recording sounds as long as they can download as many recordings as they can. The Ipod and MP3 generation only cares about "how much" and not about "how good" the music recordings that they get. Unfortunately to many artists and producers are more than willing to cater to that mindset and give them their super-compressed mixes. Support "Turn It Up".

The trend toward compressed recordings must be only in certain genre's. I have found considerabel dynamic range in recently recorded classical music CD's. A number of months ago I was talking to folks in the mixing / recording end of the business, albeit working primarily in hip-hop - they claimed that there was simply less compression in classical recordings. However, from my subjective perspective, I don't find it. Indeed, Vanska's recent recording of Beethoven's Eroica for example could not be listened to without having the peaks at 90 dB or better, you simply would not hear the softer sections. I don't think this is my hearing as my last hearing test - a couple years ago, had me within 5 dB of reference from 250 to 8k, the test range. I have listened to some remasters of rock music and was rather surprised to see the needle on the power meter of my amp pretty much sit in one spot.

More disturbing is some of the transfers to CD seem to have changed the music in other ways. For eg. the White Album on CD does not sound like the old vinyl. Even G. Harrison said that he heard sounds on the CD that he did not know were there. Would be curios to hear if anyone else can point to specific transfers of other 60's 70's rock with the similar changes - (that is, other than compression).

Compression is the future. It's potential, unlimited. This is unavoidable and, ultimately, not incompatible with musicality. Early CDs sucked. But, technology improves. . .
It is no different with compression. Engineers look forwards, not backwards. It is up to us "audiophiles" to provide them with direction.
It is useless to attempt to thwart them, or bemoan what was.
For instance, when John Atkinson says MP3 files cannot be of "audiophile quality" that just means he hasn't heard them played on a system optimized for them. Like mine. Btw, I listen to old mono vinyl Lps and MP3s off my hard drive--exclusively. The compact disc with its uncompressed files is a dead format. It's time to adjust.

Recording quality has been in a very steady decline for a very long time now. But speaking as a performing classical musician, most of us absolutely detest compression and over-amplification and fake digital reverb and all the other favorite tricks of so-called "sound engineers." I would place the blame on them and the record producers that employ them - very often the musicians themselves have absolutely nothing to do with such choices. Perhaps very famous pop artists sometimes get some control over it, but this is quite rare. Most musicians have absolutely no control over what they will sound like on a recording, or even live if the performance is miked in any way, as it often is even in a wonderful concert hall where it is absolutely not needed, simply because that is what everyone is used to and expects nowadays. On the other hand, you wouldn't want to hear most pop singers until they have gone through the mixing board first....even many audiophiles have absolutely no clue what their favorite artists really sound like unamplified and without their mixing boards.

Sorry for that rant, but I just had to put up with some really atrocious live sound tonight in a pops concert. To get back to the original posters topic, yes it is especially true that these things happen in hard rock recordings, and that they are indeed happening more and more as more people listen exclusively on iPods. Technology and sales figures have always come before musical considerations for the vast majority of engineers, and if iPods and computer downloads are selling even more music, then I fully expect the situation to get worse yet before it gets better again. This negative assessment has much to do with the fact that most young people interested in sound engineering nowadays have no clue about how things used to be done - they simply don't know any better. Any idiot with a computer and a mike can make a recording now and put it on the web, and many do. OK, I'm scaring myself. Time to stop this - I just wish alot more people cared about quality sound.