HOW I DISCOVERED WE WERE LOSING THE MUSIC
My efforts to save music are not the result of a recent realization; it’s something that’s been a big concern of mine for more than thirty years. I’ve written about it, spoken about it, and have attempted to do something about it. Because of what’s happening to music, I’m putting a huge amount of my time and energy into this, and I’ll continue to do so for as long as I am able. And let me be clear about this: I’m not doing this just because of my own art. No, I’m doing it because of all the great art that’s been made over the last nine or ten decades.
Until the 1980s, all music that’s ever been recorded has been done using an analog format, such as tape and vinyl, capturing every detail and nuance. Unfortunately, these physical media are deteriorating over time. While many of these archival masters are being transferred, they’re preserved mostly at CD quality. That’s not a solution, because digital CDs are such low quality and can’t match the quality of the original analog recordings. As the analog tapes continue to deteriorate, all we will have left of all our recorded music will be the lower-quality digital copies. In essence, high-quality recorded performances are vanishing from existence.
This loss of quality is the consequence of the many roadblocks that have been erected by record and technology companies, roadblocks that have prevented musicians from bringing the full experience of their art—equal to the quality that was originally recorded in the studios—to the people. These roadblocks are in turn the result of financial and pricing considerations with no regard for the music itself. Imagine if the paintings of all the great masters of art were preserved only in photographs. Sure, we would still see the images and colors, but where are the brush-strokes, the textures, and the varying thicknesses of the paint?
That’s the reality of music today, and as a result we can’t enjoy the art nearly as much as we used to. These roadblocks have taken away a lot of the magic of the art, its soul—reduced it, and sucked all the life out of it. Yes, we can recognize the songs and the lyrics and say that it has a good melody and is performed by a good group or individual. But there’s so much more to music than just being able to recognize it. We have to be able to feel it. When singers sing, we feel something special. That’s the whole idea of music—without it, people would just be talking.
There wouldn’t be music if it weren’t one of the greatest ways of communicating that humanity has ever created. And all the sound recordings of the last hundred years or so are victims. Victims of the digital technology that we now have. Digital technology is capable of preserving music at the highest quality, but instead it’s being compressed to a much lower quality—nowhere close to the level at which it was originally performed—and there is no reason for that in the twenty-first century.
Look back at the history of recorded music to better understand what’s happening. The first seventy years of recorded sound used analog formats, ultimately relying on very high-end tape recorders. As a result, these recordings captured every part of the performance. There were downsides, of course. The limitations of the recording media sometimes introduced background noise or a slight hissing sound. But these recordings contained all the sounds that were heard in the studio during the original performance; no parts were ever removed intentionally.
HERE’S THE PROBLEM
Analog media, whether tape or vinyl, has a limited life span, while digital does not. With digital, the content is not recorded as it was played; it is recorded as bits, which can be transferred around without introducing errors. This allows music producers to make multiple identical copies without limit. It’s a step removed from the original, but you can have as many copies as you want. This has become the new standard. But while digital files can be preserved forever, they do not capture the original feeling and depth of the music content, especially at the lowest resolutions offered by numerous technology companies that sell downloads and streaming services.
Some digital recordings created at the highest level of digital quality available do have the potential of capturing the original performances for listening and archiving. These high-res recordings contain about 90 percent of the data captured in an analog format. As we move our culture’s older recordings from analog to digital, we need to do it at this high level of digital. If we don’t, the originals will be gone. We will be stuck with CD quality forever.
Comparison between Vinyl, CD, MP3, and Streaming
CD quality is greatly inferior to the best digital quality. A CD recording strips out about 75 percent of the data captured in the original analog recording, leaving us with a representation of the original that uses just a quarter of the data. MP3 streaming quality is even worse, stripping 95 percent of the original data.
Meanwhile, the analog tapes in the vaults are all disintegrating, even though they’re just sitting there and not being used. These are the tapes on which thousands of artists recorded their original performances—the world’s great artists, representing the entire remaining history of recorded music.
If we want to listen to these analog master tapes or make a copy of them, we would need to carefully take the tapes out of the vaults, bake the tapes to warm them up, unreel them, and carefully copy them on the first or second playback. Each day we wait it gets harder to do before the tapes will eventually just disintegrate and fall apart. This is why it’s so important to make high-resolution digital copies now to prevent losing the history of music. The art of doing this correctly is alive with the archivists and mastering engineers of the biggest record companies. So why isn’t the music industry making high-resolution digital copies of all these original analog recordings? They have the ability to do this. But they’re not interested in the expense of doing this if it’s just to preserve the content for historical reasons. The only reason they would do this is if they could sell them. To bother, they need to have a market.
TWO OBSTACLES
First, record companies have no market because they’ve priced these high-res recordings very high, often two or three times more than a CD or MP3 copy. No streaming company can afford to offer them, and consumers can’t afford to buy them. Most people don’t want to pay two or three times more than a standard download, even to get higher quality, and because no one is buying them, there are no machines to play them on, so even less high-res music is being produced.
Second, the playback devices most readily available to consumers are cell phones, designed for playback of CD or lower-quality files that are stored on or streamed to the device. There are few devices available to play high-resolution music in the convenient way people are accustomed to hearing their music. Most cell phones currently cannot play back high-resolution audio files without adding an additional piece of technology—a high-quality digital-to-analog converter (DAC). The version built into the phone, or integrated into the headphone adapter in the case of iPhones, is usually limited to CD quality or lower, so this external DAC would bypass it. This component, which costs only a few dollars, would then allow the phone to play high-resolution music. The problem, of course, is the bulkiness and lack of convenience. Most people want a single portable device, not a multipart, some-assembly-required player. And because people no longer experience high-res music, they don’t know what they’re missing. Fewer and fewer people will ever experience the true magic and soul of the greatest recordings ever made.
THE HISTORY
The degradation of music began with the premium pricing of high-res audio by the record companies. Over the past few decades, record companies segmented their products by creating a multitude of versions of the very same performance, each at different levels of quality. They charge more money as the quality goes higher and higher, consequently making music itself more elitist, as the best quality is reserved for those at the top.
In addition, customers have had to purchase the same album time after time as formats changed. First on vinyl, then cassette tape, then CD, and now at several levels of digital. These are issues that have happened relatively recently compared to the life span of recorded music. Rightfully, music fans have lost patience with record companies and don’t want to keep buying the same performance time and time again.
But it’s now the twenty-first century, and it’s become possible to have one format that plays all recorded music at its highest level as well as every level lower than the highest, when needed. I, along with others, have proven that, and we will tell you more in the coming pages.
CDs
In the eighties when CDs were first introduced, everybody was talking about how great the sound quality was. There was no buzzing, no clicking, no hissing or popping. But many of us soon discovered that CDs had their own issues, just different ones from what came before. They would click and pop and would repeat and repeat. As I spent more time listening to CD recordings, I also listened for overtones, air, echo, and nuances in the music, but found them to be almost gone. Just the surface of the music was there. No depth remained. That is where the soul of music used to live.
As I experienced CDs in the first year that they were available, I began to understand their limitations more and more. My awareness came from years of making music and spending many days and hours creating final recordings using a process called mixing. When I did the mixing of my recordings, I would create the mix from analog tapes. I did this for years and years, so I understood what the music feels like and what’s involved in the mixing process.
WHAT MIXING IS
Mixing involves balancing different tracks that have been recorded on a multitrack recorder and transferring them to a two-track recorder to create a stereo mix or a mono recording. We might start with anywhere from eight to thirty-two tracks. We would sometimes have six mics on one track. Sounds and vocals are divided up into tracks, so they can be blended; instruments can also be blended to create the final work, the balanced master blend of all the tracks. In the end, the sound would usually turn out great.
Mixing is rewarding work. It involves changing volumes, shifting equalization, adding echo, taking echo away, placing it to the left, placing to the right, to the center, center left, center right, panning it back and forth while recording so it moves. It might involve putting delays on the echo, so it shows up late, which gives it more of a huge sound. (Phil Spector used to do that with Jack Nitzsche. In the sixties, he developed the Wall of Sound, a production technique where everybody’s playing their instruments at once and the sound is recorded in an echo chamber. What you get is the microphone picking up all these reverberated sounds—all those things are what goes into a mix.)
So, if you take most of that away with CDs—the echoes, the sense of spaciousness, and the nuances of each track—you can feel what is missing. But you have to have heard the real thing to miss it.
TWO ERAS OF RECORDED SOUND
Before the 1980s, multitrack tape machines were analog, varying from eight to thirty-two tracks, mixed to another analog tape recorder, stereo, or earlier, mono. That was how we made our master recordings.
The first thing that happened in the digital era is that we started mixing to two-track stereo digital at the recording sessions for CDs. Everything got sampled at 44.1 kHz with 16-bit accuracy in the machines at that time. In the eighties, the Sony multitrack and two-track digital recording machines defined what became the standard for CDs. People would say that it was just as good as analog, that you couldn’t hear the difference, that no one could tell the difference, that any difference was inaudible. It was all marketing and had nothing to do with reality. Yet we were backed into this level of quality by what the machines were capable of at that time.
Some listeners were fooled. Even some of my musician friends thought that digital was better. There is a great producer, Mutt Lange, who felt that digital was better because the signal-to-noise difference was greater with digital; there was no hiss and the signal could be really loud and separated from the background noise. If you wanted to get a big drum sound and put a lot of echo on it, and then have it go away quickly, you could get it really loud and have it quickly stop using digital. And that was something he thought was great about digital.
I agree that this characteristic of a high signal-to-noise ratio can be much better with digital, but all the other things about digital were not great. The tonal quality, the granularity of the sound, the details all were missing. In other words, just because the technology was new didn’t mean it was better.
Here’s an important consideration between analog and digital:
With analog it’s a reflection of the original, with digital it’s a reconstituted version of the original.
I always like to use an example of Shasta Lake on a completely calm day with no breeze. The lake is like a mirror, so if you look into it, you can see Mount Shasta upside down in the water. All the beauty of Mount Shasta is right there in the reflection, and anybody can easily reverse the image in their mind to get it right side up. That’s what analog is. That doesn’t happen with digital.
Here’s another thought:
Imagine looking through a screened window from ten feet back. Observe. Now move right up to the screen and imagine that each square in that screen is averaged to just one color, the most dominant color that you can see through that square. Now step back, imagining that every square is limited to just its one dominant color. Look.
The amount of squares in the screen is the resolution. The larger the square, the lower the resolution.
High resolution = fine screen
Low resolution = chicken wire
With digital music, the original reflection really is not there. There’s no universe of sound, there’s no mirror in the lake. It’s a bunch of averaged squares, and because it’s not the same thing, your sensitive body isn’t reacting the same way to a bunch of squares. The body is going, “I hear it and I recognize it, but I just don’t feel it. I don’t feel it like I used to feel it. What’s happening? Am I going deaf? Am I getting old? Do I not experience this anymore? Did I wear myself out? What’s happening?”
Maybe you went to war and fired a gun for ten years. Maybe you were captain of a battleship. Whatever the hell you did, maybe your hearing is severely degraded. I can tell you from my own experience that no matter how much you hurt your ears, it doesn’t affect the quality of what you are still hearing. You only hear what you can. When you listen to analog, the magic is still there. You pick up the real shit. You may not hear as much of the high end, not as much of this frequency or that frequency. But what you hear is the real thing.
Is there some level of digital that’s equivalent to analog? I don’t know, I don’t think so. You can fool the body or the mind, but you can’t fool the soul. You can understand what it is. You may react, “Wow, this sounds great.” When I listen to Pono high res at 192/24 or my Xstream by NYA high-res streaming at full resolution through great speakers, I know the audio sounds great. Does it feel as good as what it’s a copy of? I don’t think it does. No, I don’t think so.
ANALOG CASSETTES
Cassette tapes, which were popular in the late seventies and early eighties, provided a good solution in their time and allowed for music mobility. But the cassettes had more hiss than the originals. They didn’t have the same big huge sound as a record or a tape master. When you listened to a cassette on a good high-fidelity system, the tape would start playing with a noisy background sound, something like shshshshshshsh, before the music would begin. That was because the tape was moving so slowly, and the background noise prevailed. It was the limitation of the technology at that time. Nonetheless, when the music started playing, if it was loud enough and the signal-to-noise (shshshshshshsh) ratio was great enough, you still heard a lot of the music that was a reflection of a reflection of a reflection of the original. That was how many generations the music had to go to get from the original recording to the cassette.
And yet, the cassette tape was a whole other world of quality from something like an MP3, which was not only not the original master, or a reflection of the original master, but maybe an eight-times degraded version of a digital reconstitution. It was, and is, the ugly sound sold to mass consumers today.
THE CLEAR DIFFERENCE
So, yes, there’s a clear difference between digital and analog. With that said, there can still be great digital, though never as great as the original analog. Great digital would have to struggle to be as good as an average analog recording—and still never make it. High-resolution digital might sound better, and it might sound more precise, and it might even sound crystal clear, and your reaction might be, “Wow, this is great!” But when you sit down and listen repeatedly, listen to the analog and then listen to the digital—listen to the music, not analyzing it in your mind, but letting your soul listen to it—you’ll gravitate toward the analog. The analog is always more satisfying because it feeds the body more of a universe of sound. It feeds your soul. That is the magic of music.
Different parts of your body react differently to the music. Your mind reacts one way and your soul reacts another way. Here’s an example.
I’ve been listening to Reactor, a record I made in the eighties. We’ve been listening to CDs of it for a long time. Then I remastered it to a 192-digital version for high-res streaming and we went back and listened to our analog master. Wow, that sounded great! In the process we made a high-resolution digital 192/24 master from the original analog. It’s the best digital ever. It sounds fantastic and it’s convenient—but it’s not the original.
When we made the analog stereo tapes, we made the sound as good as it could be, mixing from the original multitrack tape. I immediately mixed to two analog tracks for a stereo master because the analog starts deteriorating right away. The first playback is a wonderful sound, but the tape degrades each time it passes over the heads of the machine. If the tape machine is not aligned perfectly, it might wipe off some of the sound, so that it actually breaks down faster. From experience, I know that if I’m remixing the next day and my tape machine is not perfect, after three or four playbacks, I’ll go, Wow, let’s compare this to the first rough we made last night. I’ll discover that what we did today doesn’t have something we heard last night. The rough mix sounds a lot better than the polished one we just completed. It’s not because of the work we’ve done with it; it’s because of how many times we’ve run the tape over the heads. I have used many original “rough” mixes because I could not get the magic back when I remixed at a later time. My rough mixes captured the sound of the multitrack the first time it was played.
I have recorded analog and then gone direct to digital from the analog. I’ve also recorded direct to digital and I’ve compared the results from each. I always find the analog is going to sound better over the long run, as with the example of Reactor when we created a vinyl record of it. It’s like night and day, better than 192. It’s amazingly great. You get lost in it. You’re listening to it. It feeds your body. It’s the real thing. It’s like drinking water from a natural spring instead of water from a reservoir that’s been conditioned. It hasn’t been screwed with. That’s the difference.
So that’s why I’m so passionate about preserving what has already been recorded at the highest level. I can hear the difference. I can feel the difference. I know what I hear, and I know what I feel, and I want to preserve that for eternity, so it’s not lost in the future. Because once it’s lost, others will not be able to experience what I can experience now.
THE DIGITAL AGE
We’re stuck in the digital age. So, we must copy our original analog recordings now before those analog masters disappear. In another few decades we won’t have the ability to copy them. By the time people realize what they’re missing, it may be too late for them to get it back. And record companies continue selling crap while pricing high res out of the market.
How do the record companies react to my pleas? They don’t react much at all, yet. The heads of the companies I have spoken with agree with me, but what can they do? The world wants and is satisfied with the low-price, low-quality material. I’ve implored music executives to ask their financial people how much money they’ve actually made by charging so much for their high-resolution content. What has the company actually made from it? They’re the ones trying to make the companies profitable and successful by placing a value on the music. So, they have chosen to place a high price on the high-quality version and a moderate price on their mediocre quality and a low price on their bad quality.
People are buying the bad quality because it’s cheap and convenient. Few are willing to spend more to buy the high quality. Record companies get little profit from selling high-quality content. This has terrible consequences that go well beyond the recording industry.
With no sales and little availability of high-quality content, most hardware products, especially smartphones, are being designed to only play bad-quality content. With record companies charging two to three times more for high res, they can’t sell it, there’s no market for it, and there’s little interest in others accommodating it in their hardware products.
Meanwhile, more time goes by as the analog masters sit in the vaults and degrade each day, becoming susceptible to catastrophic events that could destroy them. Perhaps from a fire or a failure of an air conditioner in their temperature-controlled vaults. These tapes are almost like living things; they have limited lives and they age. If we don’t take care of them, they will die. They’re like flowers that need water to keep them alive.
It’s understandable that record companies are focused on profits. It’s not that they don’t want the heritage of music to continue to exist. They love music, too. They just don’t realize that their bean counters are screwing them. That they are charging too much while they should charge basically the same amount for everything and save the music that made record companies successful in the first place.
That’s what I’m doing on my NYA website. I charge $1.29 for a digital master and it doesn’t matter what the resolution is. It can be an MP3, or it can be a 192. They are all the same price. I’ve been able to negotiate this singular price, regardless of resolution, because of my relationship with my record company. They are only giving me this deal because they believe in my premise and because I’ve earned it. I’ve been working with them for fifty years and they are letting me do whatever I want.
IMPROVING STREAMING
Jay-Z has done a lot with Tidal to improve streaming quality. I don’t agree with their technology, but I think they are trying to do something good. I find the technology they bought into, Master Quality Authenticated (MQA), limiting. While there are people who think that’s something innovative or important, I’m not in that camp. I believe you leave the music alone. You use the original bits and you play them back. And that’s it. That’s all you need. You can’t improve music by adding something in between it and the listener.
MQA is just another format, another manipulation of the original performance, and proprietary, as well. It is obsolete—we’re past the time it was designed for. We’re trying to get away from formats. All formats. There is only a need for one method that plays all masters at native quality or as close to it as the streaming bit rate will allow: high-res digital.
GOING FORWARD
There’s no denying that we are in the digital age and that music will always be digital going forward. There’s nothing we can do about that. We’ve moved away from the analog age. That’s only in the past.
If we want to preserve what we have, however, we’d better copy it, and we’d better do it at the highest level of digital so that we have saved it as best we could while it’s still available. Because it is going away—even as we talk about it, more of it disintegrates. That’s the crux of why I am doing this. To save music for eternity. To save the art of recorded sound. To feel the music.