The Question isn’t “Can I Tell?” but “Do I Care?”

In pro audio, audiophile, and just general listener discussions, we often get heavily involved and invested in the miniscule things we can and the things we imagine we can hear. When I was teaching the McNally Smith College “Recording Theory” course, I spent some time on digital and analog recording technology including digital compression algorithms and the history of their development. You shouldn’t be surprised to know there were a fair number of committed vinyl analog fanatics among 50-120 young music technology students and you might use that as evidence that young ears supposedly being more discriminating would pick the “higher fidelity” analog technologies. Jumping to that conclusion would be better evidence that the jumper is biased and doesn’t know kids very well. Critical thinking and discrimination are skills that are developed, not something we’re blessed with as children and lose as we become older, cynical, less sensitive, and lazy. (Although all of those things do seem to be a part of growing older for many people.)

  In this class, I played a variety of analog and digital musical signals, demonstrating dynamic range, signal-to-noise, harmonic and transient (slew rate) distortion, and a few other concepts that are important to audio professionals. One of the early takeaways for many of us is disappointment in our lack of ability to accurately pick out some pretty dramatic signal flaws in excellent critical listening environments. One of the class assignments was to setup a listening test (A/B, A/B/X, etc) and document the experience as accurately and honestly as possible. Not an easy thing to do, I know. However, many students came away from that assignment with a lot more questions than answers regarding their own hearing, the analog vs digital arguments, digital audio compression, and all of the other related issues in this debate. Which was the point in the assignment.

I, too, have had a lot of questions regarding all of these issues for the last 40-some years, beginning with the compromises and systemic defects I discovered in phonograph RIAA pre-emphasis/de-emphasis when I built my “Musicians Preamp” product in the 70s and the analog tape recording limitations and compromises I wrestled with for almost 40 years of my audio engineering career. Now that I’m 70+ years old and am quite certain that my hearing is compromised and will only get worse with age, I am seriously questioning even my own opinions and dogma regarding what I am capable of hearing in recorded music. I mean I question what I hear all the time. Even more, I wonder how much I even care about the miniscule differences.  

In Glyn Johns’ bio, Sound Man, he commented regarding some work he did at Ocean Way in the late 90’s, “the few remaining studios that had stayed true to the acoustics for which they were originally designed in the late fifties, not succumbing to the commercial pressure of having SSL consoles and Hidley acoustic designs, both of which have been responsible for systematically reducing the quality of recorded sound like some invidious cancer." I am more than with him on the SSL consoles and while I’m not sure if I’ve been exposed to any Hidley rooms, I agree that most studio designs are intended to be as neutral and boring as possible to compensate for the lack of engineering skills that is common today. You can’t screw up the mic or instrument placement if every spot in the room is the same as every other spot.

Compare Johns’ statement to the more typical old guy’s whine about digital recordings: this one was in the June issue of Tapeop Magazine, “The reason I’m contacting you is what I’m hearing in many 'digitally remastered' CDs, and even records cut from them. Which is… nothing. No air around the instruments, like a picture done with tempera paints. Listening on a reasonable stereo sound system, the image collapses front to back. I started to pay attention to this after a conversation with a friend about how, even with the hiss, cassettes have more life than the digitally remastered CDs." This guy (Peter Engel) is old enough to be able to brag about having worked with Steven Temmer at Gotham Audio, so he is at least my age if not a decade older. (Never listen to the fidelity opinions of old farts, that is the first rule of any critical listening discussion.) Of course this guy imagines he is comparing apples to apples by discussing remastered CDs that he can compare to his vintage vinyl collection, but even that is tainted by the acoustic design of the mastering facility which is in no way similar (usually massively improved) to 1970s mastering engineering facilities. </engepeter@gmail.com>

The “problem,” if there is one, is that we like what we’re used to; especially when we can identify that the sound source is the one we’re used to. Whatever artifacts and distortions that are present in compressed digital audio are what most of us are listening to now: through streaming audio, DVD and Blueray videos, our car and home stereos, our phones and other portable audio devices. It is, obviously, easy to identify a record in playback. Even an old fart can hear the pops, crackles, hiss, and weird panning limitations of a cut record. You can’t practically A/B/X test vinyl against any fair digital reproduction thanks to all of those anomalies and distortions.

A younger-than-me friend is a fanatic about his CD collection conversions. Every CD he buys is converted to a 44.1k/16bit AIFF file and stored on a huge hard drive and played through a 90’s Nokia phone that he is convinced has “great converters.” Years ago he tried compressing a CD and let Apple’s iTunes do the job. The default iTunes MP3 format was/is 128kbit/sec and even an old guy can hear vocal sibilance distortion and cymbal harshness in that format. However, his attempt appear to be mostly to “prove” that MP3 compression was audibly defective and he accomplished that goal. When he in my home, we are as often as not listening to an MP3 version of whatever I’m demonstrating and if he knows he’s listening to an MP3 he “hears the artifacts,” but when he doesn’t know the source he either assumes it is an MP3 and gets snooty or when he assumes he’s listening to multitrack mixdown he does not notice anything anomalous or irritating. My takeaway from that is that it’s more about what he sees or thinks he sees than what he hears.

However, I have decided the real issue for me at this point in my life is “do I care?” I do not. Since reducing my several-hundred CD collection to 320kbit/sec MP3s and copying the collection to a trio of USB sticks that I have plugged into my studio computer, my office computer, and our home entertainment computer, I listen to my music collection almost infinitely more than I have in the past decade. Like all of those terrible young people, I am picking convenience and playback variety over purity. Your mileage may vary.