Sounds Good! Or Does It?

Some of the tech blogs recently highlighted an article from the Institute of Electronics and Electrical Engineers called The Future of Sound. This sort of thing is fascinating to me, but the gist of it is that recorded music today is loud and overly compressed so that its volume level changes very little.

There’s nothing new about this, of course. Singles were “cut hot” to sound good on cheap record players and AM radio, and a lot of rock albums had a lot of compression. For example, here’s a track that I had posted back in May, that was unfortunately lost in the Great Database Debacle — Nick Lowe’s production of his song “(What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding?”, performed by Elvis Costello and the Attractions.

[audio:http://www.dograt.com/Audio/MAY07/PeaceLoveUnderstanding.mp3]

Click to enlarge

I transfered this song from the 1979 American version of the “Armed Forces” LP. The audio spectrum shows the recording to be highly compressed, with relatively little variation in loudness. For contrast, next to it is the audio spectrum for the Dan Hicks song “I Scare Myself,” taken from LP and posted back here.

Obviously the Hicks recording is much more dynamic than Costello’s, but that’s to be expected, in part because it’s a recording of acoustic instruments. The problem is, this music is harder to listen to in a car, or on an MP3 player. And that’s the way most music is heard today. The age of the golden-eared audiophile sitting back and listening to the latest equipment while sipping wine and marveling at the “silky highs” and “controlled bass” is over. Was it ever really about the music for these guys anyway, or was it about the gear?

Speaking of MP3 players, The Boston Globe has an article called The Running Debate, about banning headphones in road races. For a long time I thought of running while listening to music the same way as I still think about using a cellphone while driving — NO! The latter I still believe, but I changed my mind about running.

I’ve been running for nearly 35 years, and as much as I enjoy it, the idea of going out for more than, say, 10 miles just listening to my own foot falls is a bore, now that I’ve done it with music. I buy $10 Sony open-ear headphones for my SanDisk player. They let me to hear approaching cars, and I toss them the moment that one channel inevitably starts to cut out. I don’t use sound-isolating earbuds because they’re expensive and I worry they might cut out too much ambient noise.

Having said that, I don’t listen to music when I race, mostly because I want to be as unencumbered as possible. I don’t wear my wedding ring when racing, for that matter. But I think the races banning players is silly because you have to sign a waiver anyway, saying you’re taking full responsibility for yourself. So I assume the ban is nothing more than a way for race officials to cover their bases if there’s an accident while racing. The idea that somebody would actually be disqualified for a music player is ridiculous.