Look Backwards

We're living in an absolutely amazing time for sound reproduction. Audio has never been better than it is right now. The average Joe has access to more recordings than at any time in human history, at a lower cost, and with higher quality.

Consider that landmark 1913 achievement of the Berlin Philharmonic becoming the first major orchestra to record a complete Beethoven symphony. That was back in the days before microphones, when the only way to make a record was to play into a horn-shaped device that focused the sound waves down to a point where hopefully they had enough mechanical energy to make a stylus wiggle a groove onto soft wax. The frequency range was small, the overall fidelity lousy. Orchestras, with their richly complex sound signatures, were at a dreadful disadvantage. They generally sounded terrible.

But there was another consideration: those suckers were expensive. A high-quality recording like that Beethoven ran about $5 per disc, and it required four double-sided 12" discs to fit the thing. Each disc weighed about a pound. Discs were fragile, easily broken or damaged. They were good for maybe 20 playings max before groove wear became overwhelming.

For that you paid $20 for the set -- this in an era when the average weekly salary was about $15. In modern terms, that four-disc set cost about $650. It was a luxury item, rare and precious.

Things got better, but as of 1913 that's where matters stood for a quality performance of a Beethoven symphony from a leading orchestra: it cost a fortune, playing that record set was a special occasion, and it didn't really sound very good.

Now think of the present. We have high-definition digital audio that has abolished extraneous noise; no tape hiss, no groove swish, no pops, no crackles, no inner-groove distortion, not even any wear. And it takes up no physical space to speak of. My home audio server contains about 6 terabytes of high-quality sound files. That's more than most libraries ever had. Then add to that my subscription to Tidal and Qobuz; between those two damn near everything there is is available to me, for about $11.00 a month each.

I can probably access 600 some-odd recordings of that Beethoven symphony (the Fifth, of course) right from my home.

And then the playback quality: beyond anything we could have dreamed about not very long ago. And not anywhere near as expensive. High-quality modern audio equipment can do more, and do it better, for less money than ever before. Speakers, headphones, sophisticated solid-state electronics, computerized everything, streamers, you name it: you can have a really wonderful-sounding audio system for next to nothing, compared to what it used to cost just to get mediocrity.

Which leaves me once again dismayed at the number of audiophiles who seem absolutely stuck in the past. They invest jaw-dropping amounts of money on turntables and cartridges and phono pre-amps; they go ga-ga over vacuum tubes or magnetic tape, all essentially obsolete technologies. But they insist it's the best, against all evidence, and against all common sense.

You see that in the big audiophile magazines, which are filled with monstrously large and even more monstrously expensive boxes. Maybe they can eek out a little more sound quality – I wouldn't know. But it just isn't necessary. Don't those guys (they're always guys) remember how shitty that stuff was back when it was the only game in town? How you had to wait for the hi-fi to warm up, and then deal with replacing tubes? How swooshy and boomy most 'big' record players sounded? How we all had to deal with clicks and pops and skips and inner-groove distortion because there wasn't any viable alternative?

No. I'm a happy modern audiophile who loves the convenience, the flexibility, and the brilliant sound of modern audio in all its glory. Sure, I can enjoy those old Chicago Symphony "Living Stereo" jobbers with Fritz Reiner, preferably in high-def digital remasterings instead of those clicky vinyl records. But I can also hear perfectly well that the brass instruments don't always reproduce all that well on those, thanks to oversaturated tape. Inner-groove distortion was a thing. The records were expensive, and although they lasted longer than in the shellac 78 RPM days, they still had a limited lifespan. Analog audio is a relatively primitive technology that carves out shapes in media roughly corresponding to sound waves. Digital audio rewrites all the rules.

Except that a lot of audiophiles don't seem to know that. They're still stuck in what was the 'best' audio of their teen years and early 20s. Essentially those guys are seeking the passions of their youth. They would be far better served to look around and appreciate what they have now, old age or not.

Look around. Don't look backwards. The audiophile world needs to cleanse itself of its fixation on the past. How about entire issues of big audiophile mags without one single turntable, one single tube amplifier, or one single vinyl disc. The rest of the world has moved on. You can move on, too.