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In Defense of AudiophilesThe iPod hasn't made great sound obsolete.

By Fred Kaplan
Posted Tuesday, Dec. 4, 2007, at 11:48 AM ET
Illustration by Alex Eben Meyer. Click image to expand.

Nearly 25 years ago, I walked into a "high-end audio" store for the first time. I intended to write an article exposing the enterprise—$10,000 amplifiers, $5,000 turntables, and the like—as a fraud. Could this souped-up gear sound that much better than mass-market stuff at one-tenth the price?

After a few seconds of listening, my agenda—and really, my life—took a new direction. I'd never imagined that recorded music could sound so good, so real. The difference between the mass-market stereos I'd been hearing up to then and the high-end gear I heard now was the difference between bodega swill and Lafite-Rothschild, between a museum-shop poster and an oil painting, between watching a porn film and having sex.

Within a few months, I was writing for one of the top high-end audio magazines and spending scads on high-end audio components. I've kept doing both in the decades since.

Now two prominent music critics are telling me that I've been wasting my time and money. The pursuit of excellent sound is a "snare and delusion," writes Terry Teachout in the Wall Street Journal. Heavily compressed MP3 files through cheap headphones are "good enough," shrugs Anthony Tommasini in the New York Times.

Neither Teachout nor Tommasini claims that MP3s and iPods sound as good as a carefully chosen home-stereo system. But they do contend that quality doesn't matter. (Teachout's column is titled, "The Deaf Audiophile: What's So Good About Bad Sound? Plenty.")

For Tommasini (who once knew better), the convenience of compressed digital audio files outweighs the importance of sonic glories. Or, as he puts it, "easy access has trumped high fidelity." Well, to each his own. But, going much further, he also claims that the sonic compromises in MP3s are irrelevant. Transforming a complex song or album into a small audio file requires a tremendous amount of compression. Musical details unavoidably get squeezed out in the process. But Tommasini says this doesn't matter. A "cymbal crash in a symphonic orchestra, for example, will temporarily obscure the sound of other instruments," he writes. "So why not remove some of the covered sounds, which could not be heard anyway, to compress the file into a transferable format?"

If flutes under cymbal crashes were the only sacrifices, he'd have a point. But compression also removes a guitarist's intricate fingerwork, a hi-hat's shimmer, a bass line's pluck, and (to cite his own example) the sounds of many orchestral instruments even when they're not obscured by a cymbal crash.

Teachout makes a different point. "Why do I settle for inferior sound quality?" he asks. "Partly because of the near-miraculous convenience of MP3s." Partly, he adds, because "I'm middle-aged." It's well known that, owing to the degeneration of sensory receptor cells in the inner ear, most men older than 40 or 50 lose some of their ability to hear high frequencies. Therefore, he claims, good-sounding stereos—and many high-end components are particularly pure in the high frequencies—aren't important anymore

The bad news, Teachout writes, is that he's a tad over 50. (So, by the way, am I.) "The good news," he goes on, "is that I don't care … much." (The ellipses are his.) His mild loss of high-frequency hearing, he writes, "liberates" him from "the snare and delusion of audiophilia." In his younger years, he writes, "I forgot that every dollar I spent on speakers was a dollar I could no longer spend on records—not to mention tickets to live performances. … Now that my hearing isn't what it used to be, I understand more clearly … that recorded music can never hope to be more than a substitute for the real thing. … It is still an experience once removed, no matter how fancy your speakers are. Conversely, Stravinsky is still Stravinsky when you experience him through a $10 pair of earbuds."

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Fred Kaplan, Slate's "War Stories" columnist, reviews music and audio gear for Stereophile magazine. His jazz blog can be read here. He can be reached at .
Illustration by Alex Eben Meyer.
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Notes from the Fray Editor

"If listening to a stereo has never given you goosebumps, you don't understand." This comment by Psychedelicious is probably the motto for this Fray. Many posts received checkmarks, but that was rather unfair: most of them were interesting and knowledgeable--maybe they all should have checks. Or, put another way, this particular Fray Editor didn't feel qualified to judge all the technical posts--but feels qualified to say that this was a good-tempered (mostly), highly opinionated and informative board. If you're interested in the subject, allow plenty of time to follow the posts: advice, arguments, one poster's dramatic change of mind, and Nexofa's charming history of a hi-fi purchase, including some advice on how to listen (spit out the gum, close your eyes).

There's a good discussion of the difference between live and hi-fi music—and in the first post, below, a strange echo, we thought, of last week's Fray on Led Zeppelin—see the Fray notes below this article.

Comments from the Fray

The first major purchase I made after college (in '79) was a stereo, and it took months to select the right components. In those days I had plenty of time to listen to my vinyl collection for hours at a time, with the best setup I could afford. Years later, I'm over 50, my hearing isn't what it used to be, time is a precious commodity, and I haven't listened to a recording without multitasking in years. The last stereo I bought had to meet the following specs : less than 13" high. When I do listen, it's on a bus, train, or walking down the street. Sadly, I don't need high fidelity. But I wish I could go back to the days when its importance was paramount.

--thebigpalooka

(To reply, click here)

There is an elephant in the living room on the subject of hi-fi that no one ever talks about: In general, people like highly compressed music! This is the main reason most people, including audiophiles, prefer vinyl to digital. The limited dynamic range of analog is a positive; people describe the music as thicker, more intense. I remember my disappointment the first time I ever heard a CD back in the early eighties; it sounded washed-out and flat. It took me years to figure out that the impressive sounding spec of 90 decibel dynamic range was to blame. I see this as a prime example of the law of unintended consequences.

--case42tlc

(To reply, click here)

Yeah. I had a similar epiphany back in the dawn of the CD age, listening on the car radio to some random song, and the DJ came on to exult about how that was off a CD and wasn't it wonderful with that great CD clarity etc. and I thought: even assuming the input to the CD recording process was perfect, it was played back at the radio station, I know they usually have all kinds of limiters and Aphex 'aural exciters' etc., then through the transmitter which is probably designed for a lot of things before fidelity, then through a car stereo no less and listened to, in the interior of a car..... the fact that it's still recognizable as a CD under those conditions can't be because of the fidelity of the CD, it's got to be because the CD puts its signature on the sound so indelibly nothing can remove it.

--gzuckier

(To reply, click here)

(12/11)

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