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Does Portable Music Have to be Compressed?
FunkeyMonk writes "The Christian Science monitor has an article discussing the gap between music fans and audiophiles when it comes to portable music. Would you pay a few cents more to have lossless downloads from iTunes and other online music retailers? As a classical musician myself, I choose not to download most of my music, but rather rip it myself in lossless format."
I would personally pay a few cents less to get CD Quality music. Often when I buy CDs they are priced anywhere from 7.99 to 13.99. I think that if you average it out, the CD ends up being about the same price as iTunes, possibly a dollar or two more. But for that extra dollar, you get a physical copy, that's lossless, and doesn't contain any DRM. I try not to buy CDs with copy protection, and even for the few I do, I can still easily rip them, by disabling autorun. The only advantages of iTunes and other music services are, the ability to buy one track, and the ability to have it right away. I don't usually buy music from artists who can't fill up a whole CD with good music, and I'm not that impatient that I can't wait for the CD to arrive from Amazon, or wait until the next time I happen to be in the mall. Sometimes, if I know I won't be in the mall for a while, I'll download the cd in MP3 format and then buy it later. So, I could buy off iTunes, but i'd get music that was of inferior quality, and locked by Apple, which means that I couldn't play it on another MP3 player without degrading the quality even further.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Not all sound engineers are as dedicated to the art as you suggest. Okay, sure, if one wants to listen to something recorded in a state-of-the-art lab by consummate lovers of both the music itself and clean audio in general, then one should invest in the right conditions.
From my own collection, I'll take the world premiere recording of Boulez's Repons as an example. It was recorded in the projection space at IRCAM, one of the world's foremost music and acoustics research laboratories, and I only listen to it from the CD on my home stereo system, which isn't the most whizbang, but the best I can afford.
Contrast this with Rush's 2002 album Vapor Trails , a musically strong release which was recorded in poor circumstances and remastered in worse. The clipping that plagues every track in the album has long been criticized by fans (see the Amazon reviews for further info). So, since the guys who engineered the album didn't aim for clear audio, I feel no shame in putting this in 160 kbps Ogg Vorbis and listening to it with merely average headphones on my portable MP3 player.
As has already been said in many places in the discussion, lossless is probably going to be a draw mostly for classical (or, in my case, modern-classical) fans.
Now, if you wish to sell stuff to audiophiles, then players supporting lossless compression are excellent - they will buy it (along with anything you claim, on whatever grounds, will improve the playback quality).
If you however want to bring better music quality to the general population - make them get better headphones.