Listening to music

[Angrboda]

I'm going to say some things that will be unpopular and get lots of hate, but here goes.  The only "real" music is live music, hard stop.  If you aren't listening to live music, you are not hearing anywhere near the total sound quality.  That said, I've experienced music in a range of systems including vinyl, reel to reel, 8 track, cassettes, CD's, mp3's, OGG.  Of those, reel to reel is superior to all the others.  Digital recordings on CD are indistinguishable from vinyl unless the producer made some mistakes in production, and they have the advantage of having no ticks and scratches, and you don't have to clean them if you want to keep them from scratching.  Ripping from CD's to mp3's does lose some sound quality, but here's where for me the issue becomes subjective.  I rarely sit and focus only on the music.  I listen to music as a background while I'm engaging in other activities, so if the sound quality is slightly inferior, it makes no difference.  The only time I'm truly focused on the music is during a live performance.

Now, where music has been getting far worse in recent years (like the last 20) is not in the medium or equipment at all, but rather in the mixing/production.  Producers have been destroying music by engaging in compression of the dynamic range, or reducing the difference between different tracks in the music.  So soft sounds like a high hat are just as loud as a guitar solo, which robs music of subtle moods and textures.  I don't buy much new music nowadays, but when I hear current songs, they sound offensive to me, and not just because the songs suck.  It's like everything on the song is turned up to 11.  I generally only listen to pretty old music and not remasters because they often do this on remasters, too.  One note, this may not be as much a problem with jazz and classical music, as I rarely listen to those genres recorded.  But anything from pop to rock to country, all of those are guilty as hell.  Not really sure why they do this.

Meh. Recorded music is just different from live. Not better or worse. You get things live that you don't recorded. But the reverse is true as well.