Has the listening experience materially improved in the last 50 years?
Reply #10 – 2013-04-17 06:19:39
...but has the experience of listening to prerecorded music materially improved in the last 50 years? Conceding size, cost, and wider selection of media have improved, but has the listening experience and will it get better? I can't speak personally to the last 50 years as I'm a child of the 80s From my perspective it hasn't improved in many important ways. Sure, it's more convenient for most not to have to deal with analog and it's definitely convenient to carry around a huge digital music collection on a phone or an iDevice. (Compare that to the brick of a cassette walkman I had as a kid and a huge case full of cassettes, and I'm down with well-encoded lossy over a cassette any day of the week.) Since you already "conceded" that a "wider selection of media" has "improved" I'm concluding you weren't talking about formats or convenience but the listening experience itself. My answer again is (in general) "it hasn't improved" but worsened . The so-called Loudness War has ruined nearly everything for me. It's sent me back to vinyl and hunting down original CD pressings of music that I grew up with that were originally unaffected by it. DR6 and worse is getting to be the norm on every new release and reissue I buy now. I want to do the best I can to enjoy modern music anyway but it is what it is. For me I don't care about brushing or flipping a record, putting a CD in a tray and closing it, or having my iPhone full of transparently-encoded "albums." (The latter is indeed very cool and convenient.) For me it's the sound coming out of the speakers. That hasn't changed appreciably in my lifetime. What has changed in my adult lifetime is something I, as a consumer of music, have no control over: the quality of production and engineering. We have the means to faithfully reproduce music for human consumption but 99% of popular music is excessively compressed and pushed up to and past 0 dB FS. ...and obviously not enough people care or things would change.