People who complain about digital media, who moan on about the difference between the “warm” sound of vinyl versus digitally encoded music, really piss me off. I could understand if they were fully committed Luddites, playing ancient madrigals on harpsichords, and condemning all forms of audio recording as sterilising music, that it should be a moment shared between musician and listener. I would disagree, but I would respect their point of view.
But people who claim to prefer the sound of digitally produced music when it has been recorded onto vinyl? Stupid. Peter Kain’s post on CDM sums it up:
If “new records have sound all over them”, and MP3s “take out some of the music,” does that mean the resulting record has the right amount of sound on it? You know, like taking your finger and wiping extra jam off of toast?
The flipside to this is the crappy sound quality that’s being accepted as OK in consumer devices and software. The default import bitrate for iTunes is a measly 128kbps, which means that a lot of the music I’ve imported (and thrown away the CDs, probably) is now way too low quality to play out. I will have to find these tunes and again and import them. But that was my bad for trusting Apple, or at least not thinking enough to distrust them.
320 MP3 is fine for most uses, or use FLAC if it really matters … the difference between the best and the worst in either digital or analogue is way more (to human ears) than the difference between the two. JA 7″ singles, for instance, are often of crap quality – way worse than even a low bitrate MP3. If you really object to digital encording, I have some overdue news for you:
Curse! This means the end of the horned phonograph and the little doggie that looks in to it!