Rants

I've met a lot of audio designers in my time, and all of the best ones have one thing in common, they have great "ears." They know what good sound sounds like. The opposite camp is populated with engineers that rely exclusively on measurements to "prove" their designs are better. To my way of thinking, the second group rarely makes great sounding products. Audio is too complex to be analyzed with just numbers alone.

Nowadays I'm meeting more digital audio engineers specializing in designing room and speaker correction software. They are usually very nice … Read more

Perhaps the question should be, "Did Steve Jobs help or hurt the sound of music?" He did not invent digital music or MP3 players, but that didn't stop him from redefining the way people buy and listen to music.

Then again, Napster was around before iPods and iTunes, and it allowed people to amass gigantic music collections at zero cost, which I don't see as something to be proud of. Having 10,000+ songs on an iPod is one thing, but do people ever really listen to all of that music? Record labels could not compete … Read more

I get a fair number of promo CDs in the mail, but don't be jealous, most of them are instantly forgettable or just awful, and only a few are worth a second listen. Greg Garing's self-titled CD was an immediate standout, and its rootsy, blues-infected grooves hit me hard. The music has a lot of soul, and sounds like it was made by a group of really talented players who were having a good time together. That happens so rarely nowadays I had to learn about how the record was created.

The Garing CD was produced by Lower East Side Records, … Read more

Thanks to streaming services and file sharing, there's little incentive to purchase music anymore. Everybody knows CD sales have been falling for years, but as soon as the record labels stop making CDs, their value will skyrocket.

Sure, there's still a sizable market for CDs, but if sales continue to decline I think the labels should offer a very limited run of each CD title on its original release, say a few thousand discs, with beautifully printed booklets and packaging, and auction them on eBay. When they're gone, they're gone. Prices would go through the roof, … Read more

It seems more than a little strange to me, but iPod speakers are really popular. This much I do understand, people love their iPods, and if they don't have a hi-fi system an iPod speaker might look like the best way to go. At $599 (MSRP) Monitor Audio's i-Deck 200 is priced at the upper end of the market, and competes with the Bowers & Wilkins Zeppelin Air ($599), Bose SoundDock 10 ($599) and the Monster Beats by Dr. Dre Beatbox iPod Dock ($449), but are any of these worth the money?

For most buyers of high-end iPod … Read more

Anyone can listen to music on $10 computer speakers, free earbuds, or a crappy car audio system. The only thing a good-quality hi-fi brings to the party is sound quality, which is something fewer and fewer people really care about. For audiophiles, sound is a big turn-on, and I figured that out when I was 13 or 14 years old. I was always saving up to buy better-sounding gear, and would spend my nights reveling in the sounds of Led Zeppelin and Doors albums. The sound was so fresh, and the layers of textures and spatial effects were endlessly fascinating. … Read more

It's a strange turn of events, but mainstream manufacturers long ago gave up on the idea of selling receivers on the basis of superior sound quality. I'm not claiming today's receivers sound "bad," but since almost no one ever listens to a receiver before they buy one, selling sound quality is next to impossible.

Back in the days when brick-and-mortar stores ruled the retail market, audio companies took pride in their engineering skills and designed entire receivers in-house. Right up through the 1980s most of what was "under the hood" was designed and … Read more

Most of today's music on CD, LP, or download is compressed to sound loud all the time. The engineers, producers, and record labels are afraid not to make music sound as loud as possible.

Dynamic range compression isn't new, it's been used by recording, mixing, and mastering engineers for decades. A little bit of compression is fine, but the unnatural onslaught of dynamically compressed sound obliterates musical nuance, delicacy, and emotional power. Compression's loud-all-the-time nature sucks the life out of music. The overuse of compression has become known as the Loudness War.

Before we go any … Read more

Quadraphonic was the first music surround format, and the first to bite the dust. That was in the 1970s. The SACD and DVD-A formats debuted at the dawn of the century, promising vastly improved sound quality over the CD, and both formats flopped. Their futures looked bright, so why did they fail?

Of course the record labels knew selling a new format on the basis of sound quality was a risky business, so they tacked on 5.1 surround sound. There were millions of households in the early 2000s with multichannel home theaters, so selling new music surround formats looked … Read more