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Preface: Keep in mind that the only reason I care about audio fidelity and sound quality is that I care about good music. I love music of all kinds, and I believe it deserves faithful reproduction. I make it a point never to forget why I strive for better quality audio.

The trend in recorded audio quality has been a bell curve over the last hundred years or so. From the phonograph to the LP to higher quality recording and digital mastering, to the slight step down with the move from vinyl to CD, music is moving today toward a huge decline with the advent of “perceptual compression” like mp3 and other formats. The music industry should know that it’s their fault entirely that this decline happened, and that it led to the entire mp3 revolution, the file-sharing predicament, and the eventual decline of the physical media.

The analog record in the 1970’s and 80’s was a very high-quality format, believe it or not. If you’ve ever heard a good recording on LP, then you’ll know that there’s stuff there that just can’t fit on a CD. It’s fidelity, and it’s nice. When the industry decided to switch from analog records and tapes to CDs in the early 90’s, they had to convince everyone that they were better, and to do that they pushed convenience over fidelity, and promised better reliability and a lower noise floor. They delivered on that promise, and for the most part CDs were recognized as better than records (and obviously better than tapes) for those very reasons. For the first time, people had the freedom to have the same high-quality audio everywhere they went. It really was convenient, and eventually no one cared about the analog vs. digital debate, because digital audio was pretty decent.

Yet, the mentality of trading true fidelity for convenience remained. When computers became ubiquitous, and when mp3 came along as a way to get high quality audio onto computers at managable sizes, the digital music revolution began. The combination of that fact and the Internet, which allowed people to easily and quickly trade mp3s and build gigantic collections of music ushered in a whole new level of convenience.

Like the move from analog to CD, the move from CD to mp3 (and other formats, to be fair) was accompanied by a giant drop in quality. A whole new mentality developed: “I don’t care about the quality”. The convenience of digital music and file sharing was a tipping-point: so that as long as the quality wasn’t so bad as to make the music unlistenable, people just didn’t care anymore. The convienience trumped everything.

Of course, nerds and people with decent ears tried to make their digital collections as high-quality as possible, but for (I estimate) about 75 percent of users, the quality just wasn’t important.

Why did people stop caring? I think it’s simple. First, the music industry trained them that way when they pushed CDs. Convenience over perfection in the audio — give up a little quality for a little portability — it became accepted. Second, the industry had the option to push both fidelity and convenience when the SACD and DVD-Audio formats came out. But they didn’t push them as a standard, and only marketed them as a high-end product for people who cared. What they should have done was make people care. Don’t tell me they wouldn’t be able to market a higher quality format to the mainstream listener, and if they did, people would start caring about it.

Care for audio fidelity is there in the average listener, it’s just that they haven’t been told that they should be listening for any flaws in the compressed audio. They’re told “128 kbps mp3 is CD quality,” and if they actually listen to the music, they eventually realize that number is more like 192kbps. With the iTunes Music Store, people aren’t even told anything about the quality. It’s simply advertized as “high-quality audio,” and if you’re not listening for any deficiencies, then it sounds pretty darn good. But the fact is, it isn’t CD quality. I had a friend say to me the other day,
“So 192 kbps is CD quality, right?”
and I replied, “No, CD quality is CD quality,”
“Yeah, but what’s CD quality? What mp3 bit rate?”

It’s understandable. People really don’t listen that closely or care that much about the fidelity of their music. People today are caring more about the quality of the music itself than the faithfulness of the compression. That is almost hard to say looking at the pop artists we have these days, but it is true that as long as a song is good, people will listen to it regardless of the fidelity. I think that a faithful recording with high-quality (or no) compression truly makes music better; it’s more real, more enveloping, more emotionally present — it’s better all around, and it escapes me why people would do away with these qualities. I listen to nearly all my music in lossless format, and listening to uncompressed music casually is better than people make it out to be, putting claims like “oh, well I’m not really listening closely” to shame. You don’t even have to listen closely; the music is just better.

Of course mp3 will eventually be nearly indistinguishable from the real CD for most people, probably somewhere around 192 kbps. But it’s still not real CD quality. Nothing but the uncompressed audio right off the disc is that, and people just don’t have an appreciation for it anymore. In the interest of convenience, yes, of course we have to compress our music. Drive space, especially on portable devices, is not infinite, and we try to get the closest we can to the CD. But like I said, there’s nothing like music straight off the CD, but that fact is lost to the general public.

It’s the music industry’s fault this has happened — they haven’t trained us to want higher-quality music. If they had, people would listen to an mp3 and say, “what is this crap?” and most of the industry’s problems would be moot. But it’s too late for that. The new format is digital, restricted, low-fidelity, convenient, and infinitely accessible. It’s a trade I’m hesitant to make, but without a doubt one the public will embrace.