High Fidelity (not the movie)

The notion that work that was laboured over intensively for prolonged periods of time will be stolen the moment it’s released to the public has naturally had many negative side-effects amongst musicians but there is undoubtedly one thing that’s come of it that I find to be exceedingly positive.

As we all know, much of the stealing that goes on in internet land is in the form of dastardly mp3s, tiny little files that throw out all of the sonic information that is determined to be “not necessary” and cram what’s left into as little space as possible so as to make for easy archiving on your hard drives and portable players. All but the most inept of us are aware that low bitrate mp3s (mp3s encoded below 192 kilobytes per second) sound like utter shit and the grand majority of civilization has moved onto 320kps as standard. It’s true that mp3s ripped at 320kps do sound pretty much indistinguishable from the CDs they were copied from and a lot of the consumer market is happy with that.

But it’s interesting to consider how lo-fi CDs are by their very nature. This flies in the face of the propaganda that we were fed when CDs first arrived on the scene, when we were le to believe that those hopeless old vinyl records could now be thrown on the scrapheap and that CDs would last forever. Now it seems quite the opposite. Now that the information on a CD can be encoded virtually as-is there seems little use for the nasty little things, especially seeing as no one seems to be buying them anymore. Vinyl records, on the other hand, remain vastly superior in sound quality and are still being pressed today. They may not sell in the billions but there is undeniably a market for them amongst those who care about the quality of sound they’re listening to.

It’s this sort of person who will no doubt be rejoicing that some artists have seen the piracy issue as a challenge and who have decided to step up a level in what they’re presenting for their fans to purchase from them. Artists with good hearing have long been complaining about how their music sounds on CD and while you may think they’re out of their mind, there really is a good reason for this. When you make music in a professional context, you will be working in far higher fidelity than a CD can handle. CDs have a very finite amount of space and the higher the quality of sound you work in, the larger the file sizes are. So inevitably, no matter how perfect the sound is in your studio, when it comes time to master it for compact disk the sound quality is reduced.

What’s happening now is that some artists are starting to offer their music in much higher quality than CD allows, thus giving them a vastly superior product to sell that genuinely offers you value and gives you a damn good reason to pay for it rather than to steal. Autechre, long-term haters of the mp3 format, make every new release available as 24bit wav files; for the uninitiated, these are raw files of the same quality as Autechre would be hearing in their studio. So when you buy these files, you are literally hearing the exact same thing as what the artists themselves heard when they made the record.

Even more intense than this was the set of Blu Ray disks that Trent Reznor included in the deluxe editions of Nine Inch Nails’ 2008 album Ghosts I-IV. Trent records in extremely high fidelity (24bit 96kHz, as opposed to the standard 24bit 44.1kHz or 48kHz) and the Blu Ray disks in that set had those exact files. So if you had the convertors to handle files of that quality, you were privy to a listening experience virtually unmatched by any other format. This is exciting stuff! Imagine how good the future is going to sound when people realize that if they want to keep selling they need to offer you more value and everyone catches onto giving you their music in greater and greater quality!