Declining Audio Quality In Music
We‘re getting less and less of a good thing.
In the early 1980s, I had a friend who was a songwriter. He asked me to play guitar on a few demo recordings he was making. It was my first opportunity to record in a professional recording studio so, of course, I said yes. He booked time in the studio and we went in and recorded two songs.
Once we finished recording, the studio engineer played back the recordings. I was literally stunned by the audio quality. I had never heard recorded music sound that clear and realistic. It sounded amazing. The fact that it was me playing guitar on those recordings was a life-changing experience for me.
A few days later I got a cassette version of the recording. It was a pale imitation of the multi-track tape on playback. It sounded good, but the audio quality was not nearly as good as the original. It was a third generation recording. Multi-track tape to 1/4" stereo master tape to cassette tape copy. I learned a quick lesson in audio quality that day.
People who appreciate high-quality audio (music) are called audiophiles. They attempt to get the best possible audio quality by using high-quality (usually expensive) components in their music playback system. When I was a teen in the 1970s, a good stereo system was on the wish list of almost every teen…
