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Has high fidelity had its day?
Does your normal everyday music fan concern themselves with the recording and production quality of the music they are listening to? I was idly pondering this question recently at a family gathering so I decided to do a bit of impromptu research and I asked everyone there. Grandma and grandad don’t buy much music but grandad did mention that he thought the radio used to sound better. The rest of the group was a good spread of ages from late forties to eleven and the overwhelming impression was that none of them noticed the difference in quality between CD and mp3. Uncle Paddy said mp3 sounds terrible but he has always been a hi-fi buff and spends enough on his stereo to make a point of appreciating the quality. The only other person to even care was cousin’s girlfriend who liked to buy CDs because she enjoyed looking through the covers when deciding what to play. I know this is not very scientific but I was pretty surprised that out of twelve people only one was really concerned about the sound quality of the music he listened to. I guess that this is not a new phenomenon. When cassette tapes were introduced, the quality was undeniably inferior to vinyl but they were a huge success because they were convenient and reliable enough. So is it worth spending the time and money striving to achieve that extra few percent of production quality when the end result is going to be only CD quality at best? Well, in some ways, low quality can be good. The lack of interest in fidelity means that the music is appreciated for its other qualities, strength of the song, melody and emotion. I’m sure we’ve all experienced that ‘first take’ that while not the best recording level, has a great sense of performance and sounds better because of that feeling. It could be argued that the ease and low cost of producing low-fi mp3s has allowed an explosion of musical abundance that may never have occurred otherwise. Producing music and writing songs is a creative pursuit that is naturally driven by a desire to improve, to challenge yourself to better things, to write a better song. The vast majority of people who play live and record music in this country do it for pleasure, not for money. These people benefit greatly from being able to get their music out on the web and if that means mp3s then so be it. However most of them still aspire to work in the top studios with the best people around them. We need those who can put in the time and money to keep pushing forward the boundaries of sound quality - it’s an extension of the desire to make the best possible music that motivates us all in the first place. What many listeners may not understand is that a better sound quality gives the musician a better feeling and enables better performance and often it is while we are searching for that ‘perfect’ sound that we discover those new and interesting noises. Great recording quality may not be so important to the end-user, but it seems an integral part of our efforts to come up with different and exciting, ground-breaking music. Long may it continue.
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