Why "audiophile" sound ain't all it's cracked up to be (for some of us, at least)

[thatcrazycajun]

Terry Teachout has an excellent piece in the Wall Street Journal here about why getting older means no longer having to say, "But I gotta have that Bang & Olufsen stereo with the sub-woofer and sixteen different speakers to really listen to music!" I've been in that boat for years, even before I started getting middle-aged, due to a hearing loss sustained since my mid-teens that causes me not to hear as much in certain registers as "normal" hearing allows. (scruffycritter, bless his generous heart, gave me his old digital hearing aids to help with this a year or so ago, and I'd be wearing them now if I could find a clinic that had the damn expensive/old software to reprogram them.)

For this reason, I never felt bothered terribly by the loss of sound quality MP3/MP4 compression creates that seems to so irk old-school audiophiles. I don't hear any appreciable difference in sound quality listening to my old favorite 1980s dance tunes on my Mac, my Dell laptop or my iPod shuffle from when I previously heard them on older media; and if I do, usually all it takes to resolve the problem is tweaking the equalizer controls in my player software a bit. I usually listen on headphones rather than speakers anyhow, for the improvement in sound reception that comes from my ears not having to fight half a dozen other elements of the ambient noise to hear the music from across the room.

Concerts are not often a problem either, if only because they usually feature big honkin' speaker stacks right up front that blast the sound out so loud even I can hear all the words. (I had to leave a concert at Dragon*Con a couple months back when the speaker stacks in the main concert room at the Hyatt actually began hurting my ears from all the way in the back; when it's so loud even I have to leave, you got a problem, Jack.)

Besides, I gladly trade the extra quality of sound you allegedly get from audio tape, vinyl or CDs for the convenience of being able to go directly to tracks I like and shift them around...and escaping the frustration of having a tape player chew up a favorite cassette's guts every so often, or an accidentally-jarred needle gouge a trench in a treasured vinyl disc. And as Teachout points out, money that isn't spent on high-falutin sound gear is money that can be spent on other, more important things...like, oh, say, buying the music itself.

Comments

[shelleybear.livejournal.com]

I've been an audio geek since I was 13.
Each year, I have seen the major companies touting better systems, with pureror sound.
And each year I remember that the human ear can only hear twenty to twenty-thousand

[acelightning.livejournal.com]

[scruffycritter.livejournal.com]

I think I gave you my pair of Widex Senso-Diva's.

They really aren't that old. Current Widex software should handle it. I want to say they were brand new in October of 2003. I can check my LJ. I wouldnt be surprised if Widex still sold them to this day.

I'm sure my audiologist can reprogram them. He did it for someone I gave the set I had 3 years *before* those, about the same time I gave you those.

If youre coming up for Darkover, please let me know. I'm sure the two of you can work something out.

[thatcrazycajun.livejournal.com]

All I know is, the clinic I went to didn't have any Widex software and promised to order it, but I never heard from them again about the matter. And going anywhere else means have to start all over again paying for another ear exam and so forth.

And sadly, it looks like I won't be doing Darkover this year, for the first time in over a decade; the car picked yesterday to start acting up, and my neighborhood bunco artists repair shop wants $370 to fix it. Which eats up pretty much all my disposable income for this month in one fell swoop.

[autographedcat.livejournal.com]

My hearing loss isn't as profound as you, but I'm in a similar boat -- I can't really hear the difference between lossy 128kps mp3 and CD audio. Which actually works well for me -- I can enjoy my entire music collection on shuffle and not feel i'm having to compromise on quality.

[mdlbear]

People tend to forget that cassettes and FM radio are only somewhere around 64Kb/s -- and that's without the quality boost that you get from MP3's compression, which is doing something similar to Dolby noise reduction.

I know my ears are pretty bad; last time I had my hearing checked I was rolling off about 3dB/octave at 6KHz.

Now hear this

[a-phoenix-afire.livejournal.com]

It's possible that just getting older reduces one's hearing, but I think a lot of it is hype from the medicos, and that it's more likely the damage one has done through carelessness than the passing of one's youth.

I've always been careful of my hearing, stuffing small pieces of cotton or paper towel in my ears when I work a saw or router, and even when I'm at a concert. (If it's so loud that your ears hurt, then it's loud enough to be heard well through the plugs.) I know I can't hear sounds from a distance as I used, but I can still hear the high pitch tone when you turn on the TV, whereas. nobody else I've asked except my kids can. And I can still pick out a conversation in a crowd when the people talking think they're speaking softly enough to blend in.