Tech vs Music: how technology is ruining music’s specialness

It would seem logical to assume that thinking that sound quality in music is better than it has ever been with advances in technology. But if it sounds too good to be true, then it probably is.

If you have ever found yourself questioning the production standards of a new album, then you’re not alone. And according to some people in the recording industry the culprit is MP3 players and iPods. Most people know that music transferred to one of these players loses some of its sound quality. That is generally thought to be a small price to pay for having all your music compressed in the one product.

However, as a by-product of the the players’ popularity, industry insiders (producers, engineers, mixers and so on) increasingly assume that their recordings will be heard on an iPod. This means that this is becoming the ‘reference platform’ used as a test of how a track should sound.

In order to get CDs to be consistently loud, they get compressed; this means that the quieter moments are made louder so that they’re at a consistent level of volume with the louder moments in a song. During the compression process, the tops of signals can be cut off, or ‘clipped’. Compress a record too much and it sounds bad. Make it ‘clip’ even slightly, and it sounds worse.

The ‘Loudness War’ has been going on almost as long as pop music has existed, and probably longer; nobody has ever wanted their record to be the quietest on the radio. The Beatles lobbied Parlophone to get their records pressed on thicker vinyl so they could achieve a bigger bass sound more than 40 years ago. Then there’s Phil Spector’s legendary ‘wall of sound’ production style.

But since when has consistency of volume been the most important thing about a piece of music? It is meant to be dynamic, to move, to fall and rise and to take you with it. Otherwise it literally is just background noise.

Downloading has exacerbated this effect. Songs are compressed once again into digital files before being sold on iTunes and similar sites. But because both compressed music and the iPod’s relatively low-quality earphones have many limitations, music producers fret that they are engineering music to a technical lowest common denominator. The result, many say, is music that is loud but harsh and flat, and therefore not enjoyable for long periods of time.