life in lossy format...

I was reading a blog posting the other day from a guy who has a stereo system in his house that he has spent $58,000 on, and the kicker is, the whole thing is comprised of second hand equipment! This is a guy who obviously cares a lot about music, the investment he has made into listening to music begs me to listen to his opinion. Some people think I care about music, and I do, a quick glance around my living room and you will see 2 guitars, a media PC, 3 mp3 players, a record player, and sound system. Yet this guy, this "audiophile" blows me away!

His blog posting was addressing the issue of music sales falling he writes

"I'll close with a theory of mine--crappy sounding music is killing the music business. MP3s are subversive because they have apparently stopped people from really listening. Music has become a background soundtrack to other activities. It's just not important anymore. So if the music isn't moving you, maybe, just maybe, it's the sound that's turning you off."

You see songs that are saved as mp3 files have gone through a process called "compression". Compression means that up to about 90% of the original recorded sound has been removed. They deem the information not necessary and "throw away" the information in order to make the music file smaller. The logic behind this technique is, the missing information isn't audible, so lets get rid of it. Someone figures if you don't know what you are missing then you will never know the difference. These files are called "lossy file formats". These files differ from the really large files called "lossless" ie. nothing is lost in the codec.

The "audiophile" surmises that people are not buying music because people no longer really listen to music because it actually sounds crap if you really listen to it, and it sounds crap not because of what is in the music, but because of what is not in the music. I think I agree with him too. When you stop to listen to a CD on a really good sound system it is amazing what you hear, even if you have heard the song 1000 times before. A good sound system will make you stop, and "wow"...

Even if technically what is not there we couldn't hear it anyways, I think it makes a difference. I think we do notice. Somewhere in our heads we tune out a little because of it. The colour and noise left in the music doesn't have any space on which to position itself. What is more, I think our lives begin to look the same, we operate in the same lossy format. It seems that if you are not being "productive" with your time that "someone" (not sure who this someone is, perhaps Santa, or some other figure from our childhood, must ask Freud about that one!) is frowning upon us.

It seems that everything in our lives is geared towards less downtime, higher productivity, staying in contact, being productive on the go, and maintaining your email account 24h a day. A new gadget comes out every week promising to make you more productive. It seems we are slowly compressing our lives into a lossy format. A lossy format where we minimize the amount of time where we are not making noise, we cut it out of our lives.

I know in my life I often feel like there are not enough "wow"s. Perhaps i need to start living my life in a lossless codec?