From today’s WSJ:
If it seems like you are listening to music more but enjoying it less, some people in the recording industry say they know why. They blame that iPod that you can’t live without, along with all the compressed MP3 music files you’ve loaded on it.
I’m having a difficult time wrapping my head around the idea of listening to more music but enjoying it less. Why would I do more of an activity that I wasn’t enjoying? Besides that, I think this thesis is flawed. Since receiving my first iPod, I’ve listened to way, way more music than I did pre-iPod. I make fairly high-quality rips of my songs, but they are compressed. For most stuff, I don’t know the difference. Does it make me undiscriminating? Probably. I have a friend who makes lossless rips of all his CDs and stores them on a big, fat hard drive. A couple big, fat hard drives, actually. He has golden ears. I don’t see the point in lossless rips, especially if you’re keeping the CDs around.
The article quoted above goes on to say that sound engineers lament that compressed audio files are becoming the de facto reference for the music they produce. Seems a bit extreme to me. I’m sure there are sounds that don’t translate well between the studio and the MP3 (or, heck, even the CD), but to gear an entire recording effort to the MP3 as the final output is silly. Maybe for 50 Cent or Avril, but surely Classical recordings will continue to strive to maintain the integrity of the original recording regardless of potential listening formats. I suppose we’ll just have to wait and see.