Designs by Devin

Lou Reed, who I am big fan of his music, made a point at the SXSW premiere of the documentary Lou Reed's Berlin that, "people have got to demand a higher standard". Coverage at ZDNet. While I agree that MP3 is a crumby file format, Lou misses the point.

There are two factors at play here. First, most people don't know the difference between old and new technologies until it has reached a critical mass or is forced on them. One reason the market isn't demanding better quality music files is due to a lack of critical mass in HD-Audio equipment. Secondly, most people can't the difference in low-def and hi-def audio because of a lack of exposure to hi-def audio. This is called cognitive perception training.

In order to gain a critical mass, the price point for high-end electronics must meet two criteria: palatable price point and easy access to distribution points. For example, until HDTV was all over Best Buy and Circuit City at a decent price point (spelled access to financing), Americans had little interest in HDTV. Now everyone is raving about it.

Along the same lines, until Americans had easy access to HDTV, they generally had no clue how terrible the SD standard was. They had been trained into thinking that SD was just fine. Now that HD is mass-market, enough people have seen HDTV to know that SD stinks.

The same can be said of HD-Audio. Most people don't know what it sounds like. They don't know what it sounds like because the equipment isn't available at a price-point the market is willing to pay. How many people are willing to bay $10K+ for an amplifier and speakers that will even let you differentiate between 128k and 256k MP3 files much less AAC, FLAC or OGG Vorbis? My guess is very few. Until high-end AAC/FLAC/OGG Vorbis players, amplifiers and speakers are available at a price the market will bear, few people will know the difference in fidelity between 128k MP3s and a FLAC file.

Making matters worse is the availability of cheap but not so good sounding, recording equipment. Most of the bands that I listen to these days are of the mind of getting thier tracks down without regard to the fact they are recording on poor microphones to a poor audio interface with a poor A/D convertor at a low bit-rate and low band-width. For example, CDs still play 16-bit audio at 44.1 KHz. MP3s with compression vary; however, most MP3s purchased are 128Kbps at 44.1 KHz (something less than 16-bit but more than 12-bit). My recording equipment records at 48-bit and 192KHz, yet I don't have anything that will play it back that way except the actual recording equipment, digital amp and studio monitors. Once you've heard that level of detail and gotten used to it, CDs sound like AM radio. This really became self evident over Christmas when Rush released their latest album, Snakes and Arrows, on both CD and MVI DVD formats. The difference was so remarkable that I ripped the audio from the MVI DVD instead of the CD into MP3 just to pick up the extra detail on the recordings of the acoustic guitar.

So Lou Reed is correct in saying consumers should demand a higher standard; however, Lou should know that it is not just about a better file format than MP3 128Kbps. It's about the entire music industry providing better music recorded on better equipment, distributed on better file formats, and played on affordable equipment.