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CD 12 is called “Entropy” and is the first album I’ve released in the popular MP3 format. It’s encoded from a 24bit audio master at 320Kbit/sec which is the highest MP3 rate that you would normally find on the internet.
Why? Well that’s progress!!! Or is it? Over the years I’ve always strived to produce good quality audio. I’ve always used the best quality equipment I could either buy or build. The available media quality unfortunately was a different matter though. I’ve released on cassettes, LP record and CD. Cassettes I hated, LP was so much better but it had plenty of problems. CD was the answer as it was convenient and the sound quality was at last very close to the original. When DVD-A and Super CD came along I was exited as for the first time the public could have copies that are identical to studio master recordings. With DVD-A reproduction can be full quality in surround. Sounds fantastic? They should have thought this was amazingly cool and flocked to buy it. But they didn’t. ...
So where did it all go wrong? Why is the world now so obsessed with MP3s a format that is decidedly inferior in sound quality to the well established CD let alone DVD-A or Super CD? After all MP3 is a format that compresses that signal to around a miserly 10% or less of the data from the source file and on playback very cleverly makes something like 90% of it up even at the higher download data rates. Worse still the punter often ends up paying around 10 to say 15 times per kilobyte for this data (compared to CD) from some download shops and then ends up experiencing the MP3 decoder’s clever attempt to reconstruct a sound field that it reckons you will believe is the original from this miserly basic data. Reconstructing 90% of a rich sound field is a tall order, a very tall order! MP3 is clever but can it possibly be that clever? The trick of course is that what you don’t know about you most likely won’t miss. No one but a privileged few get to hear it in the studio. Finally to cap it all there’s no hard copy or nice sleeve either for the money and you can buy into some nasty and unfair purchasing restrictions. It can seem very expensive when you think about it compared to what you already had with CDs.
The answer to this strange backwards step of course is the convenience of the internet, a fair bit of hype and millions of cheap pocket players with crappy earphones or computer speakers flooding the market. Hype has most certainly teamed up with convenience (the absolute ideal of a one click purchase) to become a powerful force that has convinced the general public that MP3s are not crap but really cool and a great deal. From a sound quality point of view it is of course actually very much the opposite. Mind you if the players are bad enough then no one can tell the difference anyway.
Looking deeper into sound quality I’m afraid it’s even worse than that. Because so much popular music is now released from the studio with a massive amount of dynamic range compression built in especially to compete for loudness on all this bad playing equipment and portable radios. In fact on a lot of it there just is no dynamic range to speak of. It’s maxed out nearly all the time. This is the new cool sound; loud, harshly uncomfortable and in your face. What ever happened to the CD’s original promise of 96dB of pure sounding wide dynamic range. On today’s releases often you’re lucky to get 6dBs and not to get hearing loss if you crank them up all the time through your earphones!
So if the CD is dead and sound quality is now something only a few remaining hi-fi buffs care much about where does that leave people like me? Well it’s somewhere I certainly don’t want to be. There’s no doubt that CD sales are not what they were for anyone producing music so duplicating in ever smaller numbers is getting too expensive to make it worth while. I feel reluctantly there is no alternative but to look at downloads. So I’ve decided for the time being to put “Entropy” up on the site as a set of free sampler downloadable MP3 files. They are encoded at 320Kbit/sec which is the best compromise I can find between download times and sound quality.
For the future I am looking at putting FLAC encoded files of some of my music on the site for sale as downloads and maybe fooleshly DVD-A. There is no quality loss with FLAC encoding but the files are getting on for half the size of the original. The good thing is the sound quality for the first time will be the same as the original which is an improvement over CD. I need some time to look into it and maybe bset this up so I’ll see how it goes. After the death of CD It’s all an experiment at present . If no one wants DVD-A or FLAC then I’ll have no option but to offer MP3. Well at least they’re better than cassettes!
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