Mr Spock
demokratischer - sektor
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Digital audio forever disrupted the way music is recorded, mixed, and mastered—and, to even greater extents, how music is distributed, sold, played, and consumed. Music unmolested by zeros and ones is now nearly extinct.
There's no going back, but what if, in 1983, the Compact Disc had bombed? What if music lovers worldwide had rejected the shiny new digital format because they thought LPs sounded so much better? And what if later attempts at digital formats with higher resolutions also shriveled and died, due to lack of interest by recording engineers and consumers? What if, to this day, music had remained blissfully all-analog?
The digital juggernaut laid waste to much of what had been that all-analog world. Thanks to file sharing and streaming, recording production budgets are in free fall. It's no wonder we've already lost so many great studios: the Hit Factory, the Magic Shop, Record Plant NYC, RCA/BMG New York and Nashville, A&R Recording, Sony Music Studios—all replaced by MacBooks and home studios. The remaining big studios with great-sounding rooms should be placed on the list of endangered species. The engineering knowhow that once passed from one generation to the next is fast being lost. I blame digital.
How much better might LPs sound today had analog technologies of recording, mixing, and mastering continued to advance? Who knows? Had digital been a nonstarter, the 300,000,000 folks (!) who bought Apple iPods might instead have bought 300,000,000 turntables and cartridges. Omigod—with economies of scale, turntable design might have progressed so far that today's budget Pro-Ject turntables would sound like Döhmann models, and affordable cartridges surpass even the best Lyras.
Had the major record labels not pissed away the 1980s and 1990s by reselling their massively more profitable (zero recording costs) back catalogs on CD at artificially high prices that ignored the usual price-lowering factors of ease of manufacturing and far lower volumes of returns for defects, might they have developed a lot more new talent? In short: Would music now be better off had digital never happened?
There's no way to know, but we can look back and see that pre-digital recording was simpler, with less of a fix-it-in-the-mix approach by engineers and bands. How much more solvent might the major and indie labels—not to mention musicians—be today were their music not streamed for free on YouTube, Pandora, or Spotify, or offered in low-cost subscriptions? After all, in our 21st-century digital dystopia, most bands see recorded music as loss leaders, promotions for gigs. And, last but not least—had digital never happened, would we still have vast numbers of bricks-and-mortar stores selling new LPs?
Thanks to streaming, we can now hear more music than ever, but so much of that music is overcompressed and mixed to sound "right" in the car, or through earbuds while listening outdoors, or in trains, planes, and buses. The Loudness Wars, which have been so incredibly destructive to the sound of music, might never have happened had music remained analog and more people still sat down to listen at home. We might even have had time to read album liner notes. Remember liner notes? Another casualty of digital. [sigh]
Digital is so dominant that few of today's young non-audiophiles, even those who buy LPs, have ever heard pure analog music. Most new vinyl is actually DDA or DAA—ie, recorded and/or mixed in the digital domain, because it's faster and cheaper to do so. Even the new stereo remix of the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band was done [gasp] digitally.
I asked my question of composer and big-band leader Maria Schneider: "What if digital had never happened?"
Her reply: "People would be listening more thoughtfully to music, as they wouldn't be gorging on an all-you-can-eat buffet of 'content' shoved in their face every morning, noon, and night. We'd all have a little more space in our lives for imaginations to flourish, because Internet companies wouldn't constantly be pushing ads at us and sucking us dry for information. We'd have a little peace and quiet again, and in between, we could all just go back to complaining about record companies. Ah, the good old days! I miss them."
Neal Sugarman, cofounder of Brooklyn's premier soul and R&B label, Daptone Records, had these answers to my question: "First thing that comes to mind would be that the Dap-Kings and others in the Daptone universe would possibly be rich. I still believe [that] listening to music in a physical format that people have invested time and money into makes it so much more likely that people would really listen to the whole album. If more people were purchasing records, that would bring in far more income to the artist and record label, so everyone would be earning more money, which might inspire more great records."
Amen!
John Schaefer, host of WNYC Radio's New Sounds program, took the opposite view: "Seems to me that digital had a leveling effect on the music industry. So if the industry [had] stayed analog, it would be hard to imagine the indie scene thriving the way it has. Even more, digital has meant easy access to all the music that's come before. A generation that thinks nothing of having Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Adele, Dick Dale, and Thelonious Monk on its playlists would probably be a lot more monochromatic in its sensibilities."
As it stands, digital audio has virtually obliterated analog as a recording medium. It's a done deal—but billions of all-analog LPs are still in circulation, and at home I have my share of them to play with my audio system: SME Model 15 turntable, Koetsu Urushi Sky Blue cartridge, and Parasound Halo JC 3+ phono preamplifier. I'm still not sure how or why, but for me, a stylus tracing a groove brings music back to life more completely than does even the very best DAC processing zeros and ones. It's a magic trick that never gets old.—Steve Guttenberg
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