Issue 273   May / June 2017
It's All Good
Editorial By Robert Harley

  It's no secret that my dear friend and esteemed colleague Jonathan Valin favors analog over digital music reproduction. But his screed in the previous issue's guest editorial excoriating digital audio in general, and music servers in particular, laid bare the depth of his disdain. Jonathan's objection to digital isn't only about sound quality; he thinks listeners will disengage from the hi-fi hobby if participation requires no more involvement than pressing buttons on a touchscreen. Without hands-on tactile experience playing LPs, setting up turntables, and caring for records and styli — and the expertise and connoisseurship those rituals develop — high-end audio as a hobby is doomed.

I take a different view. As someone who spends about 75% of his listening time to music sourced from a server, I've come to regard servers, downloads, and Internet streaming as a tremendous boon to music lovers. Let's just consider streaming. The most obvious and compelling benefit of streaming is the exposure it provides to a wider range of music. In the two years I've been a Tidal subscriber I've discovered more new music than I have in the previous decade. When I read or hear about an artist unfamiliar to me I can hear that artist's music with a few mouse clicks or finger taps on a tablet. For example, a jazz critic I greatly respect recently published his list of the ten best albums of 2016. I had not heard any of them, but thanks to streaming I was able to sample each album, discovering a couple of records (so far) that I'm passionate about and will likely be listening to for many years. Streaming also makes it easy to swap discoveries with someone who shares your tastes. My older brother Stephen, who got me interested in music and audio when I was 12 years old by sharing his stereo, record collection, and love of music with his little brother, is still exposing me to great music 47 years later. He recently pointed me toward an album by Gerry Mulligan (Lonesome Boulevard), a musician I knew about but had never really listened to. Thanks to Tidal, I'm greatly enjoying exploring Mulligan's large and outstanding body of work.

When I consider the miracle of having instant access to such a vast music library, I'm reminded of how I acquired music as a young adult. Working in a hi-fi store to put myself through college, I spent Friday nights in Tower Records faced with the agonizing task at the end of the evening of returning to the bins the selections I couldn't afford. If you had told me then that in my lifetime I could immediately hear any music I wanted just by touching a device smaller than a magazine and unencumbered by wires, I wouldn't have believed it. But that technology is now a marvelous reality, and I'm going to take full advantage of it.

Despite my enthusiasm for streaming music, the technology may present pitfalls for some listeners. The abundance of choices that streaming allows you makes it all too easy to avoid challenging new music that can be appreciated only by repeated listening. If we can simply press a button to hear music that is more "comfortable," we're less inclined to persevere and realize the life-changing rewards of discovering new idioms. We have a propensity for initially rejecting music that is different— a phenomenon called "non-acceptance of the unfamiliar" by musicologist Nicholas Slonimski in his book Lexicon of Musical Invective. This compilation of excoriating criticism of then-new music — music that is now in the pantheon — vividly and often hilariously illustrates this phenomenon throughout history.

As much as I appreciate music sourced from computer technology, when it comes to enjoying the ultimate listening experience, to feeling a frisson of realism that makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up, to having the illusion of being transported through time to the same room with the musicians, to experiencing seemingly contemporaneous music-making, a music server is simply no match for a great turntable playing an LP. As Jonathan wrote so eloquently in his essay, "Digital is to analog as a butterfly pinned and pressed under glass is to a butterfly in an open field." On that we can agree. But pursuing that ultimate vinyl experience doesn't preclude enjoying the indisputable virtues of music servers and streaming. 
It's all good.

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