August 26, 2005
THE DIRECTION OF SOUND QUALITY
The Washington Post has an
href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-
dyn/content/article/2005/08/25/AR2005082501999.html"
target=_blank">interesting article today about the imminent decline
of compact discs as a musical storage format that is an example of, but
doesn't identify, divergent trends in consumer audio. A casual
impression of the state of consumer audio would seem to be an unbroken
progression of increasing sound quality, while this is not necessarily
the case. Audiophile purists could maintain that it is the somewhat
dated format of LPs that provide the purest listening experience,
because there is no reduction of the recording through a digital
sampling process that removes small portions of a pure analog signal.
The average audio consumer, however, has usually shown a preference for
portability, durability, and convienence over sound quality when
choosing a format. These factors are what spurred the widespread
adoption of the 8-track (to a lesser extent) and cassette tapes over
vinyl albums. On a head-to-head basis under optimal conditions vinyl
would compare more favorable to cassette tapes, but most people don't
listen to music under optimal conditions. Vinyl could become scratched
and worn, degrading the audio experience, and LP albums were
essentially non-portable. Cassettes allowed people to listen to the
music they wanted in their cars and, with the introduction of Sony's
Walkman, virtually anyplace else, while tapes were more resistant to
physical degradation.
For early adoptors of compact disc technology, there is almost no doubt
that audio quality was a major factor in choosing it over that of
cassette tapes. More widespread adoption, I suspect, had more to do
with the convenience of format than strict audio quality. The ability
to skip directly and cleanly from one track to another was a huge
advantage over cassette tapes. And while compact discs were susceptible
to scratching and data corruption if handled roughly, that seemed to be
less of a problem than cassette tapes becoming tangled or "eaten" by
their players. This was a common enough problem that it became a
regular plot point in movies and television. So while the audio quality
of compact discs is certainly better than that of magnetic tape
cassettes, I think this was less of a factor in their adoption than the
previously stated reasons.
The past half decade has shown one of the most rapid consumer adoptions
of a musical format in history. The availability of large capacity
storage drives on computers and devices like Apple's iPod, not to
mention the illicit but highly attractive availability of "free" music,
have spurred a conversion away from compact discs. How to classify the
new technology is difficult, because it is neither uniform in format or
medium. Just as on compact discs, music tracks are stored as digital
files, but compression formats like MPEG3 and Apple's proprietary AAC
have vastly reduced the size of these files and thus increassed their
portability. Consumers can now store huge quanitites of music on the
spinning magnetic hard drives of their computers or the compact version
of the same in portable devices like the iPod. Or they can store
smaller--but significant--numbers of these files on flash memory drives
that contain no moving parts. What's indisputable is that the sound
quality of these compressed files is lesser than that of CD audio.
Compression technology reduces the amount of data contained in a
recording with a subsequent reduction in sound fidelity. Clearly,
though, audio consumers are willing to put up with some lessening of
audio quality for the convenience, portability, and transferability of
these compressed formats.
Which makes especially puzzling efforts by the audio industry to forge
ahead in developing new formats that fly in the face of a longstanding
consumer preference for convenience over sound quality. Equipment
manufacturers and the like are attempting to develop and introduce
formats like DVD-audio and Super CD audio that will improve the sound
of music over CD-audio by vastly increasing the amount of data that can
be stored on a disc. It would be almost the opposite of compression.
An album that would be approximately 700 MBs on an audio CD and
compressed to 80 MB for storage on an iPod would be increased to a few
GBs of data. While this would likely be of interest for audiophiles,
it makes little sense in a consumer environment when the first thing
people do when they purchase an audio CD is to take it home and
compress it to a smaller file format. Quality and conveniece are
usually at odds with each other in the world of recorded audio and
consumers regulary make trade-offs whose balance more often than not
tilt towards the latter. Perhaps some day, storage formats or data
transfer rates will grow to such size that these trade-offs are not
necessary and any increase in sound quality will essentially be
costless in terms of convenience. Until then, any expensive investment
in new audio formats that diverge from consumers' longstanding
preference for convenience seems to be an ill-conceived pursuit.
Posted by Lexiphane at August 26, 2005 11:22 AM
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