The quest for sound began in 1877 with Thomas Edison’s invention of the tinfoil phonograph. Recorded music would evolve into a kind of spiritual experience, flowing through the ears and soaking into our souls.
It must somehow reach our ears, and that’s where our ever-evolving stereo devices come in. They deliver Ray Charles’ crackling voice on an old record, soothing a sadness only he can soothe. Or Madonna’s “Hung Up” on an iPod, providing a last-minute energy burst on the treadmill.
“I call recorded sound a tool for living,” says Mark Katz, a professor of musicology at Johns Hopkins University and author of “Capturing Sound — How Technology Has Changed Music.” “It’s not just entertainment. It helps us live.”
But our experience of recorded music, the way we interact with it in our daily lives, is changing faster than Edison could have dreamed.
Few of us hold vinyl albums in our hands anymore. Those grooves on a record — analog sound — have disappeared into the digital realm of ones and zeroes to create the music on CDs and MP3 players such as the iPod.
Audiophiles mourn the near-extinction of turntables and vinyl records even as an iPod nation celebrates the liberation from lugging CDs and records — thousands of songs in the palm of your hand.
“There are those who like holding records, the ritual of pulling them out of the sleeve, cleaning them off, setting the needle down just right,” Katz says, “whereas with CDs and MP3s, all you do is click a button and click a mouse.”
Apple reports that it has shipped more than 30 million iPods since its digital music player debuted in 2001 — and industry analysts say that number is likely to be 37 million by year’s end. That’s a lot of dangling headphones. But will superior sound die with the turntable? What is more important to your ears — the ultimate high-fidelity experience or the ability to carry all your music wherever you go?
The best-sounding stereo device might just be a matter of taste. The sounds we hear, after all, are clouded by the preconceptions in our heads.
“We can scientifically measure the frequencies put out by different machines,” Katz says. “But the way we hear is subjective, and that’s shaped by our expectations, by our environment and by our mood.”
Chris Kipp still believes vinyl sounds best.
“It’s like a dot-to-dot picture vs. the photograph,” says Kipp, 36, comparing CDs and MP3s with vinyl. “Analog is a continuous waveform, whereas digital is only samples of that waveform. You’re missing so much [with digital].”
The garage of Kipp’s home has been converted into a showroom for his high-end stereo business, Audio Gallery. So the Miles Davis record undergoes a thorough scrubdown before it’s allowed on the turntable.
The album is sent through a vacuum powered cleaning machine, a kind of car wash for vinyl, that costs $500. Then the album is placed on the turntable, carefully, as if it’s a delicate truffle that plays music.
Kipp’s turntable, a Basis 2800, looks like something from “A Clockwork Orange.” It’s translucent, and an internal vacuum literally sucks down the record when it’s placed on the platter.
“See all the counterweights in there?” Kipp says. “They’re all solid gold, and it’s dynamically balanced. The bearings are ridiculously smooth. . . . It’s all on a hydraulically damped fluid suspension.”
Translation: This record player will cost you $19,000.
Two Buck Chuck
If comparisons were made to wine, audiophiles such as Kipp would say that perfectly preserved vinyl is like Screaming Eagle Cabernet Sauvignon; CDs and MP3s are Two Buck Chuck (or 99 cent Chuck, if you download them from iTunes).
Others hold on to their records for nostalgic reasons. George Kostyrko, 42, remembers how album jackets used to double as hanging artwork in his bedroom. Every so often he’ll fire up a vintage stereo system in his garage and place the turntable needle on his old rockabilly records.
“I’ll never get rid of my vinyl,” he says. “But once you get used to CDs, it’s kind of an irritant that you have to turn the record over every 22 minutes.”
The vinyl album was nearly wiped out once CDs started spinning in our stereos. When CD technology was introduced to the United States market in 1983, it boasted unmatched durability and fidelity. No more skipping needles or surface “pops.” No more having to get up and flip over a record.
A CD is about four one-hundredths of an inch thick but holds about 74 minutes of music. There’s no needle riding a dusty groove. Its laser beam translates a series of binary codes into, say, the guitar rage of Green Day’s “American Idiot.”
But anyone who owns CDs knows they don’t hold up well over time. Just like a record, they will skip and get scratched — and that’ll cause some audible moaning and groaning.
Sales of CDs also are slumping. According to the Recording Industry Association of America, 766.9 million CDs were shipped in 2004, down from 942.5 million in 2000.
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“I’m fairly certain that the CD is on its way out,” says Katz, the music professor. “But I’m not sure if a new physical format will replace it or not.”
iPod generation
Ashveer Singh doesn’t worry about scratched records or CDs. He just pushes the “play” button on his iPod. The 17-year-old high school senior reasons it’s easier than lugging around 2,500 songs worth of CDs or records.
“Even if the iPod has a lower quality of sound, I would still listen to it because it has the features and accessibility,” he says.
Singh definitely turns his nose up at turntables. He remembered how foul the fidelity was when his grandparents would play Indian music on a record player. No wonder he has never bought any vinyl.
Singh isn’t much for CDs, either. He owns maybe 15 of them.
“The main reason I got an iPod was so I wouldn’t have to [carry] a bunch of CDs around,” he says.
So Singh’s typical day includes a healthy diet of iPod. He plays it up to five hours a day.
“As soon as I’m in my room, I’ll click it on,” Singh says. “Even when I’m reading, I need to have background noises. I’m of the generation where I don’t think we can work in silence.”
But with the iPod, it’s not as much about finding the sweet spot on the couch and sailing away while Carlos Santana’s guitar resonates in the room. The iPod’s headphones are like an aural umbilical chord that goes straight from your ears to the body of your music collection.
The iPod makes it easy to tune out what’s going on around you. The music becomes an extension of whatever else you’re doing: working, working out or waiting to catch a flight while reading a magazine.
“With the extreme portability of music, it’s more of a soundtrack to our lives,” Katz says. “I don’t think the younger generation listens to music the [traditional] way. It’s the whole multitasking phenomenon. They’re doing homework, [writing] e-mail and exercising while listening to music.”
Music to our ears
Musical sounds are noisy ghosts that we welcome into our world. We can’t see or touch that squealing Jimi Hendrix guitar solo on “Voodoo Chile,” but we’re still rocked by its presence.
These sonic spirits are summoned in many ways, through the kitchen boombox spinning a Smashing Pumpkins CD, or the iPod strapped to a jogger’s arm. And some are of the school that insist vinyl albums still rule.
But the technological landscape is now littered with a scrapheap of audio also-rans: eight-track cassettes, reel-to-reel tapes, 78 r.p.m. records, DATs.
One thing is for sure: We will continue to be picky about how we experience sound. Even the iPod might be obsolete in a few years, and CDs will likely be used more as coasters than as a source of music.
“I may be getting science fiction here, but music technology could become a part of our bodies,” Katz says. “You hear these stories of people with chips planted in them, [so] you can imagine the iPod implant. How far off is that?”
In the end, the utmost in fidelity might not matter to many of us. It’s practicality that’s music to our ears.
“A relatively small population cares deeply about perfect sound,” Katz says. “For those people, it’s maybe about becoming one with the music, having no meditation between the sound and the person. It’s almost the spiritual experience of music.
“There’s quite the possibility of a generation of kids who will not feel that need to have [that], and will just be happy to have music come into their heads in whatever way.”