Hard to Be an Audiophile in an iPod World

New York Times
November 25, 2007
Hard to Be an Audiophile in an iPod World
By ANTHONY TOMMASINI

IN the heyday of the stereophonic recording boom, during the 1960s and later, there were several magazines for serious classical music buffs with reviews of almost every new recording. But what truly defined these publications, like High Fidelity and Stereo Review, were critical reports on stereo equipment. The big advertising bucks came from the makers of hi-fi equipment, and well more than half the pages of such magazines were devoted to coverage of the latest stereo system products.

There were reviews of new speakers and amplifiers, reports on the latest developments in woofers and tweeters, jargon-filled analyses of new styluses, even feisty columns on the relative merits of locating one’s home stereo system in a room with carpet as opposed to hardwood floors.

Such articles were aimed at classical recording collectors for whom the holy grail of musical life was to have the best home sound system they could afford, a system that would bring the concert hall into their living rooms. Those fanatical consumers came to be known as audiophiles.

But over the last decade the ranks of true audiophiles have been thinning, in large part because of the growing popularity of MP3 players and iPods. These nifty devices enable you to store thousands of hours of your favorite music and take it with you as you bop through your day. You can listen while shopping, while jogging or even, depending on your job, while at work. No one, not even devoted users of MP3s or iPods, claims that the sound reproduction on these technological marvels is equal to that of the best home CD systems. After all, they work by eliminating some of the digitized sound bits to open up storage space for multiple compressed files of music, rendering the sound a little thinner. Still, for consumers, easy access has trumped high fidelity.

This is certainly the view of Mark Katz, an assistant professor of music at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the author of “Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music,” published by the University of California Press in 2004.

“An important shift in the rhetoric of recordings has occurred,” Mr. Katz said in a recent telephone interview. Historically “the stock rhetoric concerned fidelity.” Looking back through his research files, Mr. Katz found fascinating advertisements from as early as the 1890s touting the Berlin Grammophon. “It does not imitate,” a typical ad states. “It reproduces sound with lifelike purity and tone.” That mystique lasted a good hundred years, Mr. Katz said.

“But recorded sound as a re-creation of reality has almost been dropped,” he added, pointing out that ads today for MP3s and iPods seldom make claims for the beauty of the sound. Instead typical ads depict stylish people with iPods as accessories to clothing, clipped on jeans, belts and shirts. Music has become portable, wearable. The reproduced sound, if not rich and deep, is clear and lively. That’s good enough.

For decades the pursuit of high-quality sound on high-end sound systems drove the recording industry, especially its classical music branch. “Good enough had never been good enough,” Mr. Katz said. But now, he added, for listeners and even the industry, “good enough is good enough.”

Any discussion of recording technology has to note one intriguing quirk in the story: Few musicians have been audiophiles. More than the average music-

loving amateur, working musicians understand the big gap between recorded music and the real thing. They can listen through the inadequacies of any recording and focus on what they want to hear.

That has certainly been my experience. Since college days I have owned the 13-LP Angel Records set of Artur Schnabel’s 1930s recordings of the complete Beethoven piano sonatas. By now these vinyl discs are well worn. My turntable (remember turntables?), though nearly 20 years old, still works fine. Listening to these LPs is hardly a luxurious sonic experience. Still, for me, the freshness, immediacy and probing insight of Schnabel’s performances cut right through the crackling surface noise and the slightly tinny tone.

In another twist to the story, though musicians tend not to be audiophiles, they do like their MP3s and iPods. The sound is acceptable, but convenience is the selling point. They typically spend lots of time listening to recordings for professional purposes. To get this listening accomplished while exercising on a treadmill or walking to a rehearsal is an efficient use of time.

Naturally, the contention that audiophiles are an endangered species is strongly contested by those in the sound reproduction industry. Go to Stereo Exchange on Broadway in the East Village, generally regarded as a dependable outlet for top-quality sound systems, and talk to Alan C, as he calls himself. He’s nicknamed the Audio Elf by audiophiles who have been turning to him for decades.

“The demand for the best audio equipment has never stopped,” he said when I spoke with him on a recent visit to the store. “Even the death of vinyl is simply not true.” He noted that turntables, with sales of five million a year in the United States, are making a comeback.

Maybe. But at Stereo Exchange I was struck by the rows of huge high-definition flat-screen televisions hooked up to inconspicuous CD and DVD players. The sight did not suggest that fanatical devotion to audio quality was driving sales. But Alan C insisted that HDTV has increased interest in home audio because people want “excellent sound with their TV.”

He demonstrated some of the latest items in sound-system equipment. He sells most of the familiar brands. Lately he has been very keen on amplifiers and CD players made by Cayin, a Chinese company, and on Totem Acoustic speakers, specifically the Rainmaker model, from Canada.

I listened to some of “Heroes and Villains,” the baritone Dmitri Hvorostovsky’s new aria recording on the Delos label, on the modestly priced system ($1,295) that Alan C had selected. It sounded very good, not clinical and souped-up like some systems I have heard. He showed me what happens when you add an extra woofer to the mix: It enhances the resonance of the bass. But in deference to the musician in me, I must say that I enjoyed this recording every bit as much during a recent flight, when I listened on my new noise-

filtering headphones and inexpensive portable CD player.

As for CDs themselves, when digital technology and compact disc recordings galvanized the classical music market in the mid-1980s (and innovations in the industry were historically driven by classical music audiophiles), they were touted as space-saving conveniences, much as MP3s are touted today. Still, the real selling point was the sound quality: free of surface noise and crackle, crystal clear, not subject to deterioration. But as CDs gained popularity, a backlash came from traditional audiophiles, who castigated the sampling of sound involved in the new technology.

Digital recording does indeed sample sound: little slices, called bits, are recorded at the stunning rate of 44,100 times per second. Defenders of the old analog technology used in stereo recordings said that the infinitesimal missing slices of music on CDs undermined the sound quality. Yes, the sound was clear and flawless, but it lacked warmth and richness, they said; it was cold in comparison with the best vinyl recordings played on top-quality stereo systems.

That debate has never been settled, though even holdouts for analog technology have to concede that the quality of digital recording has vastly improved over the years.

The MP3 samples sound as well, but at a significantly reduced rate. The technology is complicated, and I don’t pretend to understand it. The term MP3, as Mr. Katz explains in his book, was taken from Motion Picture Experts Group 1, Level 3, “a name that reveals little about its current use.” The technology was developed to make it possible to compress huge amounts of video and audio data into manageable files that could be zipped through e-mail messages around the world.

Engineers argue that a sound recording has large amounts of irrelevant data; a cymbal crash in a symphonic work, for example, will temporarily obscure the sound of other instruments. So why not remove some of the covered sounds, which could not be heard anyway, to compress the file into a transferable format?

Not until peer-to-peer, or P2P, networking was developed in the 1990s, championed by Napster, did the potential of file sharing and the applicability of the MP3 as a portable sound system for music become apparent. Mr. Katz invokes a charming metaphor to explain the concept of peer-to-peer transferring, as opposed to the traditional method of client-server downloading, in which information flows from a central source to individual users.

“If a public library is analogous to a client-server model,” he writes, “P2P is more like the arrangement my wife, her mother and her aunt have to circulate their collection of mystery novels among one another.”

In any event, these breakthroughs gave us the MP3 and, later, Apple’s iPod. But neither manufacturers nor ardent users of these devices made exaggerated claims for the high quality of their sound. Convenience was the appeal, and the sound was, well, good enough.

One thing is certain: The users who are delighted by these handy new devices are not audiophiles in the old sense. Mr. Katz acknowledges that he is no audiophile. His stereo system is hardly fancy; the headphones he bought in 1988 still serve him well.

On the other hand, he explained, he could not imagine teaching without an MP3. This semester he is offering an introductory course in rock and a seminar titled “The Art and Culture of the Hip-Hop D.J.” It would be impossible to assemble all the CDs he would need for those classes. But with his MP3 and his laptop, he has every recording he needs right at his fingertips. If a student asks about the Rolling Stones, he can immediately call up any of 60 songs. And students never complain about sound quality.

Meanwhile, in the November issue of the British magazine Gramophone, a widely read journal devoted to reviews of classical recordings and DVDs, only a few back pages out of 138 are given to short reports on sound equipment. One article, “Choosing Desktop Speakers,” offers advice on how to “dock your iPod on a speaker system.”

The target consumers are not audiophiles.