Getting your hands on music is easy these days, very easy in fact. iTunes,
Spotify, TuneIn and a host of other online services will feed your addiction instantly.
Although convenient and cheap to get your hands on the quality of the
reproduction isn´t the greatest. Instead have you ever wished you could hear
digital music the way the artist recorded it in the studio, without the
degradation of MP3 compression? So has Neil Young (yes that Neil Young).
For the last several years, Neil and a team have been working on trying to
enhance the quality of MP3s, which inherently lose sound quality during the
compression stage. Young announced on PONO's Facebook page a few days
ago that the technology will be available early in 2014. The company will live
as an online music store with
software that coverts digital audio files into analog-quality recordings. The
enhanced songs can then be played using a triangle-shaped device. Meridian Audio known
for producing high-performance speakers and home entertainment systems, , will
manufacture the PONO music player.
So will people who are accustomed to listening to music on their iPods and
smartphones care enough about sound quality to make the switch? Young argues,
and I would agree, that the experience is worth it.
"Hearing PONO for the first time is like that first blast of daylight
when you leave a movie theater on a sun-filled day. It takes you a second to
adjust," he said. "Then you enter a bright reality, of wonderfully
rendered detail. This music moves you. So you can feel. That's why so many
musicians are behind PonoMusic - this is important work that honors their art.
This is the way they wanted you to hear their music."
PONO does this by getting permission from artists to use their studio
masters then, with the help of Meridian Audio, "unlock[s] the richness of
the artist's music to you."
The bigger plan is to make PONO-quality music as readily available as any
other digital music by having an online library where people can purchased the
enhanced songs.
I for one welcome the improvement in quality of the humble MP3
So why do we insult our ears with poor audio...
The advent of digital audio technology has seen an explosion in the way we buy, store and listen to music today. Although in many ways this has been a good thing, but are we sacrificing quality for convenience.
Ok the first generation of digital was awful because of the restrictions of the technology and the cost of doing it properly. With the first two constraints add the narrow bandwidth of the internet at the time and the MP3 was born. Now we have ended up with people that have been deprived the experience of quality sound.
Good quality sound is clean, transparent, spectrally (tonally) balanced, free of distortion and has sufficient resolution (quantity of clean information) to produce a stereo sound stage of depth and dimension.
To put some perspective on the MP3 format. Even a CD wav file at 16 bit 44.1 KHz is not enough information for true audio and an MP3 is only 10% of that! 24 bit 96 KHz is more like it and that could exceed analogue in transmission of detail and information.
 |
| An MP3 image |
 |
| CD WAV file |
When listening to an MP3 version of a CD wav file there is missing bass and also the notes are shortened so the tails are missing which altogether makes it sound weak. The high frequencies on the other hand are the opposite of translucent and crystalline, full of fuzziness and crunchy to the ear.
This loss of space and dimension is depriving listener of involvement, feeling and spiritual motivation.
Even though we now have the technology to easily exceed 25 year old analogue technology we don’t, vinyl is still the most human!
A high quality stereo audio generates a 3 dimensional left, centre, right sound stage. This is so the listener is submerged in an all encompassing sound field.
Ok what´s the answer then? We all have huge collections of MP3 music that we are not about to give up, me included. So for better or worse the MP3 is here, for the time being anyway.
So your music is stored on a hard disk in MP3 format and you want to get the most out of this in your audio set up. Well adding decent cables (wireless streaming is like trying to clean your windows with dirty water!), digital to analogue converters, amplifiers and speakers will help.
I myself have the above for my multiroom audio system, but I also have a special place where I go to “hear” music. With an old skool amp made by a Hi-Fi manufacture, a classic Technics 1210 turntable, CD player and a small but high quality bookshelf speakers. I also have a pair decent headphone for when you need to tap the volume up that little bit more...
Are we witnessing the last days of the humble CD? The download generation has taken over the party now and it seems even the hi-fi stalwarts going off to dance with its non-physical rivals.
Linn, one of the major forces in hi-fi and most famous for the LP12 turntable that's dominated the high-end market since the '70s, is pulling out of the CD player market.
Linn is turning its attentions to streaming devices such as its DS range. And the reason Linn's cited isn't that that's where the market is heading; it's because Linn claims that digital streaming is now superior to CD.
When you can get high quality downloads from iTunes and Spotifly offering downloads of CD quality, it's getting increasingly difficult to argue a case for CD other than "But I like actual things!" And that's an argument that's better suited to vinyl, with its ritualistic process of placing the needle in the groove and changing to side B.
Who would of said that vinyl might outlive CD?
