UHF No 70 (Net).indd - Ultra High Fidelity Magazine

Large record producers are
crying the blues, and their
sobbing is so loud hardly
anyone on the planet can
sleep through it. The executive résumé:
pirates (i.e. music lovers who own computers)
are taking the bread from the
mouths of the creators (A&R people,
record company vice-presidents and
indie fl acks). Curiously, not even the
recent upswing in CD sales has stemmed
the fl ow of tears. Or the threat of lawsuits
for that matter.
It’s really too bad that the large
companies whose continued hegemony
depends on people buying recordings
have ignored what could have helped
them immensely: hi-fi . Let’s see how.
The problems of the recording
industry with “piracy” are not new.
More than 20 years ago, in our pages, a
record industry spokesman was crying
about the record world being threatened
by copying on cassette (curiously, the
same spokesman is still around, and
guess what he’s crying about now). That
situation brings smiles today, because
cassette copies seem so primitive by
today’s standards.
But are they? I seem to recall that
tapes made from our reference system
using our Nakamichi deck sounded
pretty good, better indeed than the
typical MP3 download fi le…including
the MP3’s that actually cost money. Of
course few non-audiophiles had decks
like that. Back then, cassettes were made
either on boomboxes, aka “ghetto blasters,”
or on minisystems. Few of those
systems used Dolby noise reduction.
Copies were run off for friends using the
unit’s high-speed tape copier, which also
didn’t use noise reduction. Ugly!
Today these systems feature CD
players rather than cassette decks,
prominently labelled as compatible with
CD-R and CD-RW. But that isn’t all
that’s changed. Not so many years back
a minisystem was actually composed of
separate components, albeit not very
good ones. It then cost perhaps $700.
But notice what happened next. The
“components” became a solid box styled
72 ULTRA HIGH FIDELITY Magazine
State of the Art
by Gerard Rejskind
to look like a stack of components. That
allowed manufacturers to reduce the
price, as did a million shortcuts. The
$700 mini became a $500 mini, which
made it impossible to sell the $700
system. Then it dropped to $300, and
$100, and to $89.97 at Wal-Mart.
That much is known to everyone,
but consider this. The mainstream
audio manufacturers, such as Sony and
Philips, coinventors of the Compact
Disc, set out to convince the public that
you could greatly reduce the quality of
the music source, and it wouldn’t matter.
They launched new digital systems,
respectively MiniDisc and the DCC
digital cassette, which discarded more
than 80% of data, yet were referred to
as “near-CD quality.” Tech journalists,
many of whom appear to have slept
through high school physics, quickly
shortened that to “CD-quality.”
Interestingly enough, Sony and
Philips were then two of the world’s largest
record companies! Did they not understand
what they were doing, telling people
the source quality didn’t matter? They
STATE OF THE ART:
THE BOOK
Get the 258-page book
containing the State of the Art
columns from the fi rst 60 issues
of UHF, with all-new introductions.
See page 4.
were preparing the way for the success
of MP3, which typically contain as little
as 8% of the original digital data.
And the popularity of the increasingly
cheaper and trashier minisystems
did the rest. When the CD player, amplifi
er and speakers are so poor, do you need
more than 8% of the data? And note the
brand names on those systems. Sony is
a major record company. Philips was
Polygram until it (wisely) sold its stake
in an industry it was helping to strangle.
Panasonic owned MCA Records during
those critical years. Why were they doing
this?
While the typical system was sinking
well below mediocrity, some record
producers were actually helping make it
the norm, by mixing their albums so that
they would be optimized for what among
themselves they refer to as “shitboxes.”
Listen to a well-made CD on a good
modern system, or even on the $700
minisystem of a decade ago, and you’ll
perceive MP3 as what it is: no more than
a low-quality teaser for the real thing.
The development of SACD makes the
difference even more obvious. If Sony
and its competitors were smart — and
there is room for doubt — they would
bring out all future releases as hybrid
SACDs, and they would trumpet the
sonic superiority of their discs, using
MP3 in the same way they use radio
airplay: free promotion.
And since some of these companies
are still well-connected with hardware
manufacturers, they should start making
affordable little systems with SACD
players built-in. They wouldn’t cost
$89.97 and that’s for sure, but not all
buyers of cheap systems choose them
because they can’t afford better. They
choose them because no one has told them
it makes any difference.
Want to snare younger music lovers?
Bring out more portable players that
can carry uncompressed music. The
iPod can, though Apple doesn’t bother
pointing it out.
Nobody with any of these products
is going to think KaZaA downloads are
good enough anymore.