December 2007

A Striking Vision For The Future

  Technology shapes how we experience music. From the Edison player to the iPod, hardware exerts a profound effect on the listening experience — and not just in terms of sound quality. For example, the 8-track tape and its successor, the Compact Cassette, liberated music from the home and laid the groundwork for the idea that music could be a constant accompaniment to your life at any time and in any place — a concept that was brought to full fruition 25 years later with the iPod.

But new audio technologies don’t always deepen our connection with music. The debate over sound quality aside, when CDs effectively replaced LPs for the vast majority of the population, some things were lost. There was a special feeling about browsing through LPs in a store, taking several home, and listening to them while looking at their jackets. LP cover art was in many cases an important extension of the musical expression. You read the liner notes, looked at who played on the record, followed individual musicians’ development, and recognized connections among artists.

The CD still contained the album art and liner notes, but the package lost its visual and artistic impact when reproduced with just 16% of the LP jacket’s surface area. There’s also something almost reverential about putting on an LP side and sitting down to listen — a feeling that you don’t get from inserting a CD into a tray. Placing an LP on a turntable signifies a commitment to listening to the entire record from start to finish or at least to a whole side. CD introduced the idea of instant random access, which had the unintended consequence of fragmenting the carefully thought-out flow of an album. The wonderful tool of selecting any track on an album from the listening seat was a double-edged sword. Yes, it was much more convenient than getting up and moving a tonearm across a record, but this technological feature had the potential to subvert listening to a complete work of music in its entirety, as the artist intended it to be heard.

The next step in this fragmentation of music and diminishment of album art and liner notes has been brought about by another profound technological change — computer downloads and portable digital-music players. Young people today listen to individual tracks accompanied only by the artist and song name displayed in gray computer type on a tiny LCD display. What’s worse, the sound quality is atrociously bad, the result of the low-bit rates required by limited bandwidth and the high cost of data storage. In just 20 years we collectively went from listening to LPs in their entirety, accompanied by album art, to accessing individual MP3 files with the titles displayed in generic type and with sound quality that is substantially worse than that of 1930s audio technology.

Just as technology has the power to diminish the listening experience, it also has the power to elevate it. Despite my apparently Luddite view, I believe that advanced new technologies are poised to reverse the disturbing trends I’ve described. These technologies will connect you with music in profound new ways, exposing you to the new music you are most likely to enjoy, allowing you to navigate the vast expanse of recorded music from your listening chair with a few finger-taps, and delivering that music to you with sound quality far beyond what’s possible from CD.

In this issue’s special feature on music servers, I report on Sooloos and Qsonix, two servers that exemplify how technology can greatly enhance the way we access and enjoy music. Even when used in their basic forms to manage your existing music library, Sooloos and Qsonix are remarkable, as you’ll see in my reviews. But when combined with the prospect of Internet delivery of music tailored precisely to your tastes — with 96kHz/24-bit resolution, no less — music. servers are poised to revolutionize how we experience music. The confluence of speedy broadband Internet downloads, large-capacity hard-disk-drive storage (which also obviates the need for reducing bit rates and thus sound quality), and a sophisticated software interface that has capacity to recognize your musical tastes and suggest new artists that fit your interests will open up new vistas of musical exploration.

In addition to becoming powerful tool for discovering and accessing music, Internet-enabled music servers are our best shot at getting more high-resolution music into our systems. Why wait for high-resolution digital audio on packaged media such as HD DVD or Blu-ray Disc when we can download universally compatible high-res audio files — with full album credits and cover art? This striking vision for the future is laid Out in this issue’s interviews with Mike Weaver of Qsonix and Mark Waldrep of AIX Records.

Technology is purely the making of things. It's our relationship with those things that determines whether technology is a positive force in our lives. We've lived through a series of technology transitions in audio, and not all of them have served the music. But the threshold on which we now stand promises a different prospect.