. . . continued from Hot News I was let down by the music I was downloading. I listened to lots of great talent for sure, but too much time spent in front of the computer meant less time in front of the stereo listening to a sound field of truly high fidelity proportions. The $8K, three foot stack had swollen slightly into a completely different set of reasonably esoteric brand names worth about $10K and occupying the same three foot stack. Three speakers—can't be without a subwoofer, for shame. 4. 2003 - Fast forward. It's iPod time! I got mine. 10GB full of all my favorites and plenty of hard to find esoterica, the occasional podcast, and all of it jacked into the car stereo or playing through headphones. MP3s fill the hard drive so the Logitech three-piece speaker system being driven by a SoundBlaster Audigy 2 also gets a workout. None of it sounds right. More discomfort. The living room (I lost my dedicated music listening room somewhere around two houses ago; 1991 I think), was populated by about $4K worth of audio gear plus a good DVD deck and a medium sized high definition Sony Wega XBR TV. The 5.1 PSB speaker setup is being driven by a discrete A/V receiver. It looks and sounds great. Movie watching at home has never, ever been better. But I don't listen to great musical recordings anymore. I listen to MP3 files on the iPod. Even with Variable Bitrate (VBR) rips of really good CDs, compression is a factor which demeans the quality of sound taken from the original CD. Dynamic range is reduced. Car stereo listening is horrible. I don't care how much money you spend on your vehicle audio setup. It's wasted, because in its final form the sound system is still installed in a car! Listening to MP3's playing on the computer through so-called highly rated computer speakers (2.1, 5.1 or whatever) is burdened by the fact that the music source being streamed off the hard drive is still an MP3. Inferior. I guess I've found the source of my growing discomfort.

"Cool gadget," he remarked after a couple of minutes of Norah Jones, "easy to navigate. Really easy to use. Huh. Too bad it sounds like crap." This said, even with my superb Sennheiser headphones firmly in place on his ears.

My good friend Bernie is not burdened by the latest technology fads. He can't tell an MP3 from a fruit bat. Bernie can barely send an e-mail. He's a technological lummox. He tolerates computers because they're crucial tools needed to help run his large business. The last time I was at Bernie's house, we sat down in his entertainment room and listened to a DVD audio recording of Don Giovanni. It's not for everyone I'll tell you, but even so, only a lunatic could fail to appreciate the stunningly gorgeous audio soundscape. His Ethera speakers are, in a word, spectacular. Bernie noticed my iPod. Not being a total idiot, he recognized the device and asked to listen to it.

"Cool gadget," he remarked after a couple of minutes of Norah Jones, "easy to navigate. Really easy to use. Huh. Too bad it sounds like crap." This said, even with my superb Sennheiser headphones firmly in place on his ears.

And that was it. The Eureka moment. The answer to my growing discomfort. My music collection, stunted for years for years by the demise of the LP and the subsequent (and very gradual) replacement of LPs with corresponding CDs, has actually grown quite rapidly over the past couple of years what with all the online music buying I've been doing. The problem is, the dowloaded music is all WMA and MP3 files. I don't have an original CD, SACD or DVD audio release of any of that stuff. So I left Bernie's house with a new resolve.

The big business mandarins squatting in their aeries have gotten one over on us yet again. We're buying crap for a buck apiece, bragging about how much of it we've accumulated, and listening to it on aurally substandard equipment.

This is not progress. This is only convenience. This is the means by which we shut out the noisy world, replacing the drone of contemporary life with the sounds of music recorded at a quality level just acceptable enough to ward off outright complaints. We've jumped on a bandwagon that positions convenience far ahead of quality. But the quality of any musical experience is inextricably intertwined with the quality of the recording. Reduce the quality and you inevitably reduce the experience.

Listening to MP3's on my stereo will never happen again. I will spend my music money on SACD and DVD audio and good quality CDs. I will continue to use my iPod, but I will not be buying any more music online. I want the real thing, or at least something that is much closer to the real thing than MP3, WMA, AC3, AAC and blah, blah, blah. I will rip for my own use (on the iPod) some of the things that I buy. But first and foremost, I want to be able to sit down in my living room and hear it all! Can't do that with an MP3. If you're listening to MP3's only, you're just not hearing everything.

I'd rather pay twelve bucks for a nicely remastered Blind Faith CD than pay eight bucks to download the crappy MP3's. The extra four bucks gets me everything I want—no additional compression, the full dynamic range, the details and the nuances—and I can still rip MP3's for the iPod. I'll still yearn for a (not too distant) future when broadband pipes and hard drives are globally capacious enough to facilitate access to uncompressed and truly lossless song downloads. Until then, all of my source music will once again be source recordings on CD, SACD and DVD audio. It's about time I spent a bit more time listening to quality. What about you?

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