National | Globalnews.ca: A few years ago, I was talking to a high school student about music. “What do you listen to your music on?” I asked.
She pointed at her laptop. “That,” she replied. “Through the speakers.”
I was aghast. “You that’s how you hear all your favourite songs? Through laptop speakers?”
She shrugged. “It’s good enough,” she said.
2 comments:
I actually learned a lot in this article that I didn’t know about sound and the way that it varies across technology and time. I think often people think of older music formats like vinyl, as lesser. I’m a huge vinyl collector, but at this point I don’t have the space or money for a big speaker set up so I can’t wait until I do. Then I can listen to my favorite music as the writer of this article suggests. I was also really interested by this article as I’ve recently been obsessed with listening to Dolby Atmos Stems of various artist. Dolby Stems stip away the main parts of the song and are just a recording of the background and more electronic parts of song. After listening to these, it’s easy to see that the music that you listen to on streaming platforms is completely different from that produced in the studio. I would love to look into more ways to listen to my music better.
I think one of the strongest pieces of evidence for what the author of this article is arguing is that it’s a completely foreign concept to me. The community around high-quality audio, advanced speaker systems, and the clearest way to experience music isn’t something that I’ve ever been remotely familiar with. I understand a compromise on the quality of audio for convenience, but technology has developed so much since the invention of mp3. There are now ways to have both, and yet, as the author points out, no audience and push for it. I would argue this is maybe because of a generation of people who don’t know any alternative. I think a return to a culture of obsession around audio quality would be really interesting. It would create new ways to experience and analyze music. This article is a great intro to an exciting world I didn’t know existed.
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