Music purists often preach about the “superior” sound quality found on older cassette tapes and vinyl records and while the convenience of carrying today’s must on a single USB stick, Smartphone or MP3 player isn’t lost on those music lovers the legendary folk rocker Neil Young would still prefer the “real” audio of earlier days.
In speaking with MTV the rocker revealed:
“I’m finding that I have a little bit of trouble with the quality of the sound of music today. I don’t like it. It just makes me angry. Not the quality of the music, but we’re in the 21st century and we have the worst sound that we’ve ever had. It’s worse than a 78 [rpm record]. Where are our geniuses? What happened?”
His main issue is that an MP3 master, while clear sounding now only features approximately 5 percent of the musical data collected from an original master file.
As Neil Young points out, it’s not just the consumer who is robbed but also the artists who lose a large part of the work they have created because of new technological processes.
As Young Points out:
“It’s all about the bottom and the beat driving everything, and that’s because in the resolution of the music, there’s nothing else you can really hear. The warmth and the depth at the high end is gone.”
While he doesn’t like the way music is created and shared these days he does admit that he has great appreciation for the folk rock genre’s re-emergence, especially in bands like My Morning Jacket and Mumford and Sons.
Do you agree that today’s music is too “produced.”
