Driving down the elevated section of the M4 towards Heathrow last week, I noticed a poster for the new Mercedes AMG 480-something BHP monster. Making it look a bit like KITT, from that masterpiece of TV that was Knight RIder, this very imposing car is adorned with an array of LED lights on its bonnet. Closer inspection shows it’s actually an overlaid volume control indicator from a portable music player which is set on maximum. The strapline for the advert reads - “It’s Loud!”
And then there are the media reports on the ever increasing volume of today’s recordings and how certain CDs are mastered just so loud that even die hard fans are complaining. Who would have thought that Metallica fans would ever say their favourite band’s new album is too loud! That’s exactly what happened with the release of Death Magnetic from the world’s biggest heavy metal band. Even the mastering engineer, Ted Jensen, sided with the critics, saying, in response to an email from a fan "Believe me, I'm not proud to be associated with this one." The problem comes about as a result of the battle to win what in marketing parlance is called the share of voice. In a world of almost infinite, and largely throw away, media content, being loud tends to get you noticed; so artists and the record labels are pushing all the sliders to 11. The result is a greatly reduced dynamic range - the loud parts of the music are loud and the quiet parts of the music are also loud! The subtleties in the music are lost and the fine detail just disappears into the mush. With iTunes and the portable compressed music formats being by far the most popular way to listen to music, the record companies are tailoring their output to suit these formats. The low quality ear buds supplied with iPods are incapable of reproducing a broad dynamic range and so the music is mastered in such a way as to make it work on the reproduction equipment.
So it’s obvious that there is an obsession with “loud” sweeping the world. It seems like quality really doesn’t do it for the masses any more, which frankly is a crying shame as people just don’t know what they’re missing, which I’ll come back to in a moment.
In the meantime, this week has seen the big announcement from Apple that iTunes now offers The Beatles re-mastered albums for download. Whilst it’s great that such iconic music is made available to the young iPod users, via a format they understand and possibly the only format they ever consider, isn’t a shame that they’ll only experience it at compressed music quality? There’s a consensus amongst many audiophiles (hate that word, as it conjures up images of the weirdo with food in his beard!) that the recently released Beatles remasters on CD don’t actually sound as good as previous releases. And therein lies another myth of the marketing hype surrounding remasters of classic albums - remastering doesn’t necessarily mean better. So not only are they buying new versions of classic albums that arguably don’t sound as good as they could, but they’re buying them in a compressed format that will detract from the performance even more, but tragically they either don’t know or don’t care.
Coming back to what people are missing, and to coin a phrase, there are unknown unknowns here - there just isn’t the awareness of what constitutes good quality. It feels in some way as if the rug has been pulled from under our feet on the question of quality music reproduction. Hi-Fi has always been about quality, with the founders of our industry and their successors constantly trying to find better ways of reproducing music (and now movies). We were the guardians of good sound quality and that was understood by the public, but now there is a lack of concern for quality as quantity has overtaken it. There is an ‘am I bothered’ and ‘whatever’ attitude towards what we do and so it could be argued that our role is becoming increasingly redundant in a world ruled by the mp3.
But before I slip any further into a morose epitaph for our industry and earn my place on Grumpy Old Men, I will regain my sense of pride in what we do. We make fantastic products that make listening to music and watching movies an absolute joy. We owe it to ourselves and all the music lovers out there to shout about it and to keep chipping away at the public’s consciousness. Of course it is easier to do this as a collective than as individuals, which is where a trade association such as BADA comes into its own. Let us not forget our roots - there would be no CI without home cinema and no home cinema without hi-fi and hi-fi is all about quality. We are all members of one industry and if we work together under the auspices our trade association and in conjunction other complementary associations, we stand a better chance of changing people’s perceptions of what we do and how relevant we are to their lives. Let’s join the obsession with volume and turn our message up.
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