While the film industry and home video formats have made regular
improvements, giving us better picture and sound after each decade,
the music industry and home music formats have gone in the opposite
direction, taking a dive down in quality year after year.
Most movie studios still use good old analog 35 mm film. Despite the
availability of High Definition digital cameras, most directors still prefer
35 mm film - because it looks better and gives a more natural picture.
This, unlike the music industry, recording studios, bands and producers,
who were quick to throw out their analog tape machines and embrace
inferior digital recording as soon as it became cheap and viable.
For home video formats, we first got VHS, then for a brief moment in the
1990s, MPEG-1 encoded Video CDs (CD-I), then MPEG-2 encoded DVDs
giving us higher resolution picture. And now we have the Blu-ray format,
allowing us to enjoy movies in full 1920 x 1080 high definition resolution.
Improvements were also made in terms of audio: first analog stereo HiFi
on VHS tape, then Dolby stereo 2.0 on early DVDs. Then came Dolby Digital 5.1,
and now with Blu-ray we can enjoy movies with uncompressed Dolby TrueHD 5.1
and DTS-HD Master Audio soundtracks.
On the other hand, let's see what the music industry and record companies
have given us:
First music was recorded live direct to lacquer using the direct-to-disc process.
Then two-track analog tape machines became available, still a fine
format for recording music. Then there was multi-tracking, with increasing
number of tracks through the years, leading to more noise and distortion, and
increasing the need for noise reduction. Now most music is recorded digitally,
on computers - yet another dive down in quality. These days with cheap digital
harddrive based recording systems and software, anyone can sit in their bedroom
and produce a CD.
In terms of home formats, there was first vinyl. Then along came cassette tapes.
Then we got CDs. And now with the popularity of portable music players,
downloadable music and compressed formats like mp3 and WMA, even CDs are being driven out.
It is bad enough that most music is only available on CD, a primitive and inferior 28 year old
16-bit / 44.1 kHz digital format, but with the popularity of mp3 audio, one wonders how much
worse the quality will get. Mp3 is a rotten algorithm. What a shame that home
consumers did not at least embrace high resolution digital formats like SACD
(Super Audio CD) and DVD-Audio for music, same way they are embracing Blu-ray for high definition movies.
Many people seem willing to spend large amounts of money to buy the best LCD or Plasma
TVs, Blu-ray players, and upgrade their movie collections to Blu-ray to enjoy movies with the
best possible picture quality, but then happily shove some mp3 files on a portable music player
with cheap earphones, to enjoy their music with the lowest possible sound
quality. Most people I know don't even have proper home stereo systems at home
anymore. Has music really become that insignificant for the masses? We have enough time to sit in front of a TV
for 90 minutes to watch a whole movie through, paying full attention, but can't listen to a whole album for 40 minutes?
Or spend enough money on good equipment to listen to our music in the best possible quality?
If people paid the same amount of attention to their music as they do to their movies,
we would be enjoying music on SACD and vinyl, instead of suffering with a 28 year old
CD format and rotten compressed mp3 audio.
|