Various technological advances have surged in the past decade, including high definition television, 3-D and surround sound. Each advancement in technology has enhanced the overall experience with this form of media. Although the improvements have greatly increased the quality of various types of media, music has seen a decline in quality.
The quality of what people hear, as in how well the playback reflects the original sound, has taken a step back. To many expert ears, compressed music files produce a crackly, tinnier and thinner sound than music on CDs and vinyl. To compete with other songs, tracks are engineered to be much louder as well.
Audio engineer Jon Zimmer believes that iPods and other compressed computer files, the most popular vehicles for audio today, are “sucking the life out of music.”
The songs themselves are usually saved on the digital devices — iPods, Zunes, or other MP3s — in a compressed format, often as an AAC or MP3 file.
That compression shrinks the size of the file, therefore eliminating some of the sound and range contained on a CD while allowing more songs to be saved on the device. The compression also allows the download time to be faster.
In a way, the music business has been the victim of its own technological success. The ease of loading songs onto a computer or an iPod has meant that a generation of fans has happily traded quality for portability and convenience.
This is the obstacle the industry faces in any effort to create higher-quality, and more expensive, ways of listening.
“If people are interested in getting a better sound, there are many ways to do it,” Zimmer said. “Many people don’t even know that they might be interested.
According to LimeWire’s official site, LimeWire.com, “LimeWire is the world’s most popular peer-to-peer file-sharing program.” With over 50 million unique monthly users, the software is downloaded hundreds of thousands of times every day and boasts millions of active users at any given moment.
LimeWire uses the BitTorrent protocol and the Gnutella network to provide unparalleled searches and download speed to the user. As always, LimeWire takes the security of its users very seriously and offers the world’s most technologically advanced peer-to-peer software.
“Although I can’t say I’ve noticed a difference in sound with my music, other than the blatantly obvious, I have noticed strange voice overs or parts cut off in a few songs in my iPod,” said junior Denisse Chavez. “I suppose it’s just something I’ve learned to overlook because I do use LimeWire, and it is free.”
Because LimeWire is such a popular website for free music, people overlook minor glitches with their music. The simple fact that it is a peer-to-peer program makes it almost impossible to tell there’s something wrong with the file until it has already been downloaded. Even at that point odd glitches are overlooked because downloading the file was free, fast and convenient.
“People used to sit and listen to music,” said Michael Fremer, a professed audiophile who runs musicangle.com. “The increased portability has altered the way people experience recorded music. It was an activity. It is no longer consumed as an event that you pay attention to.”
Instead, music is often carried from place to place and played in the background while the consumer does something else: exercising, schoolwork, commuting. Therefore, imperfections in portable music go unnoticed and, if the consumer is happy, what reason do music retailers have to improve audio files?
Even if music companies and retailers — like the iTunes Store that opened in April 2003 — want to place an emphasis on sound quality, the companies face technical economic limitations.
“It would have been very difficult for the iTunes Store to launch with high-quality files if it took an hour to download a single song,” said David Dorn, a senior vice president at Rhino Entertainment, a division of Warner Music that specializes in high-quality recordings.
The music industry has not failed to try. About 10 years ago, two new high-quality formats, VD Audio and SACD, for Super Audio CD, entered the marketplace, promising sound superior even to that of a CD.
Neither format gained traction. In 2003, 1.7 million DVD Audio and SACD titles were shipped, according to the Record Industry Association of America. By 2009, only 200,000 SACD and DVD Audio titles were shipped.
Last year, the iTunes Store upgraded the standard quality for a song to 256 kilobytes per second from 128 kilobytes per second, thus preserving more details and eliminating the worst crackles. The increase in the level of quality will eventually lead to an increase in cost for consumers.
In increasing costs to preserve quality, consumers may decide what’s more important: when it comes to portable music is quality a necessity or is convenience just enough?
