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Reader’s Note: This post is a bit geeky. It deals with things like audio quality, bit rates, and the meaning of life. If you’re fortunate enough not to suffer from audiophilia, reading on may give you a better appreciation for the disorder.
I used to be a bit of a hi-fi gearhead (or audiophile, if you prefer). I honestly cared about the tracking of my Heybrook TT2’s tonearm (with its splendid Van den Hul cartridge), and where to position my ProAc Tablet II speakers (connected by pure copper cables to my Cambridge amplifier). Every time we moved I’d double double check that the stereo’s uni-directional component cables were pointed in the right direction, just in case a fraction of the signal might get attenuated. Did the scrape of the coins on Pink Floyd’s Money sound just a little bit dull? Hmm! Better screw those speakers to the floor, move the potted plants, and kick the dog out of the room. Ahh, that’s more like it!
When we sold everything and bought Aleta I gathered my moldering collection of vinyl records and sold them to a guy in East Portland. I hear the hipsters among you gasp! What, you ask, was I thinking? The guy evaluated my collection, returned a quarter of the albums and finally handed me a check for 627 bucks. We were both happy. He’d found a couple of LPs that were worth at least that and I’d saved months of research figuring out which two they were.
The reality was I hadn’t played many of the albums since I’d adopted CDs in the late 1980s. Suddenly, I didn’t need to fiddle and futz with all that gear to get clear, focused sound. Yeah, I’d lost a bit of sound stage and a bit of dimensional depth compared to my LPs when the stars and moon aligned just so. But, gone were the pops and clicks and flipping the album every 22 minutes. The trade-off was just about worth it. Besides, the rest of my life was busier than ever. Family, work, travel all got in the way of sitting in the middle of the living room, alone with Mark Knopfler winding down Telegraph Road.
Ten years after CDs, I was well on the way to burning myself out with a cross-country commute on top of all my other mid-life obligations. Then Winamp and MP3s hit the scene. The very idea that my entire music collection could travel with me was a source of great excitement. Sure, MP3s at 128kbps sound like a kid’s Sony transistor radio circa 1968, but my memory of how an album used to sound on my stereo was enough to fill in the gaps. It was about this time I started separating my music collection from the technology used to listen to it.
Each innovation in musical reproduction over the last 30 years has attenuated, compressed, and otherwise destroyed audio signal quality at the point of listening. Each innovation offered a major benefit to offset that signal loss. CDs didn’t scratch as easily, and MP3s made tiny files so iPods could carry hundreds of songs in a shiny little box. Like so many of us that grew up in the 1960s listening to crappy radios, our relationship wasn’t with the radio, it was with the music. And great music transcends its media. Hell, great music survives bad orchestras, bad cover versions, even badly scratched vinyl.
So, selling my LPs wasn’t like losing a box full of negatives. All my music is out there. Somewhere. Today our CD collection is (re)ripped at 48kHz/320kbps and all told takes about 250GB of disk space. Sure, it’s flat and brittle compared to a CD – a CD that lacks the depth and warmth of a well set-up analogue stereo system. But, with judicious use of equalizer settings, a good pair of headphones (Shure and Bose), things aren’t so bad. As soon as the first notes play, any memories associated with a song instantly come to life. Such is the transient joy of my pre-dotage.
Plus, there is some good news, especially for those of you with decent internet. Streaming music has finally embraced high resolution digital audio. For the next month I’m trying out Amazon Unlimited’s HD option. So far, anything I can think of streams in HD at 16-bit/44.1kHz, i.e. CD quality. Compared with 320kbps, CD sound opens up to reveal individual instruments and separation returns. Then there’s Ultra-HD streaming at 24-bits and up to 192kHz. That output is, in theory at least, as good as any analogue system I could have afforded, ever. My computer is only capable of outputting 24-bit/48kHz, so I can’t really comment on the super high-res stuff. All I can say right now is, the more bits the better.
I may be at an age where my ears are less discerning. I can’t sit in the middle of my living room and blast music on a high zoot pair of speakers through a hand-built valve amp, either. Yet, I can still hear an improvement, both subjectively and physically. Besides, I have my eye on a pair of audiophile headphones, a discreet DAC, and a valve pre-amp. Shoot! Once a gearhead, always a gearhead!
