I was reading your introduction and was struck by the last paragraph where you talked about today’s generation getting used to the lower quality of compressed downloads. It got me to thinking about the music delivery systems of my youth and how it might compare. Well, it was all analog and usually on an LP or 45 played on the Philco phonograph in a pull out drawer under the TV picture tube. A little later on we had a stand alone phonograph with a built in speaker and a ceramic pickup; just perfect for the Disney albums :-).

When I was 14 a friend of mine bought a 4 track tape player made by Muntz for his car, and I thought it was the coolest thing. A friend of his had managed to get a multi disk turntable in his glove box! I don’t know how it was amplified. Eight track players replaced the 4 track by squeezing 4 more tracks on the same width tape. Better fidelity? I don’t think so!

My first stereo was a Craig 8-track player/amp with two single-driver speakers connected via RCA plugs to the player. In college my roommate had a Lloyds combo TT, radio and amp with speakers and we wore it out. Everyone eventually moved up to Pioneer, Marantz, Sansui, Kenwood, etc. Integrated amps with separate turntables and speakers were the thing to have. Cassette decks were very popular as were open reel decks. Cassettes were great for carrying your music in the car, which by now every car had either a factory player or the user installed one.

Well, I could go on but the point of my recollection is that none of those systems were even near mid-fi let alone hi-fi or audiophile grade. Most people (including myself) didn’t know how to setup a TT and if the needle skipped, a quarter taped to the headshell took care of it. The 8 track tapes were very noisy and the wow and flutter was horrible, and about every 10th tape was eaten by the player! Cassettes were much better than 8 tracks but they still had a lot of tape hiss. I guess what I’m trying to say is that in spite of the poor playback systems, people still clung to their music and were always looking to up the quality when they understood where the deficiencies were. So I wouldn’t worry about highly compressed formats leading to the demise of hi fidelity; the iPod and MP3 format is much better than anything I listened to growing up.

Good Luck!

Bill

I think the point missed is that you could take those records you had in your youth and play them on a top quality high-fidelity system and get truly high quality sound. With the compressed formats today you have a built in limiter on just how good they are capable of sounding. A person can buy hundreds of songs in a compressed format and then decide to go with a nice high-fidelity playback system and will discover he has to replace his entire library of songs to get the most of his playback system. With the older records and standard CD's, you can keep upgrading your equipment and keep seeing an improvement without having the recordings become obsolete.

Dave

Yes, I agree and I considered that when writing my reply, but still, kids today have better sound systems in their cars than we had at home when we were their age (one note bass bins not withstanding). Heck most of those have more invested in their car audio systems than the car is worth!

As far as having to replacing low quality libraries with higher quality recordings, how many of us replaced our LP collection with CD? Or replaced CD's with DVD-A or SACD? Not that those are better than LP, but that moving to a different format is just a natural progression in the quest for "better" sound, and I'm sure that when the difference between compressed and uncompressed is worth the change, users will do it.

Bill

It really doesn't take a lot of effort to keep records in reasonable condition. I started cleaning mine with a brush while I was in my teens. Always put them back in the jacket when done. Check the stylus under a microscope every once in a while and replace when you see any blemish starting. Check tonearm adjustments a couple times a year. Through most of my years, starting in the late 60's, I used an old Dual 10xx or 12xx turntable. Don't need anything fancy to keep records in good shape as long as the simple maintanence steps are taken. Upgrading equipment through the years always brought an increase in listening quality. If I would have had iPods years ago, I would have long since reached a point where upgrades became a problem as they showed up the flaws in the medium. If everyone had had this senerio happen, true high-fidelity playback would have indeed died off. I'm just glad I had such excellent source material right from the beginning. I feel sorry for kids today who invest heavy in compressed recordings, then in a few years decide they want really good sound from a new system. They won't be able to get it without replacing their whole collection of recordings.

Dave

I agree that the majority of listeners in the old days had lousy playback equipment. I know I started recording songs off shortwave(!) on a sanyo cassette deck (mono of course) and listened to those a lot. My first exposure to even reasonable good stuff was a Sony HSt99 cassette deck with AR bookshelf speakers.

Your point actually supports the thesis expressed in that para,
"As long as we have faith in the power of music to move the human soul, the attempt to reproduce music in the home will be a noble endeavor,.."
so compressed downloads may not matter so much.
There are other differences of course between the past and today, pointed out in that para, such as the other diversions available (visual stimulation & internet/gaming mainly) that folks growing up before the 90's did not have. So even though I began my teen years with a fairlyy crappy system, the aspiration for better playback was stronger, and listening to musc was always cool for me. Is it cool now...just listening to music? or do kids today need to play a videogame while listening to music? I'm not sure. Again, one can but have faith in the power of music, as the bard said, to soothe the savage beast...and so on.
-akhilesh