It was great to have the AES convention in San Francisco last weekend. Lots to see, although, no major surprises.
From the production side, it’s fun to be the audio field when it digital audio is on an evolution fast-track. I don’t think digital audio is anywhere near it’s apex like analog audio was in the early eighties. But it’s clear that we are learning how to create software that does really cool stuff with audio and can do it while sounding good. Or, should I say, while sounding better than…
On the consumer side of audio, specifically music, I had a realization that consumer distribution channels are coming closer to being exclusively electronic. Yes, I can now see a day not to far away when the only way music fans can hear artists they enjoy will be via downloads or streaming audio. No CDs, tapes, or anything physical.
While that may seem fairly obvious and like kind of a non-event, I will miss full resolution audio.
I think many forget, or never realized, that almost all electronically distributed music is data compressed at about a 10 to 1 ratio. That means there is about one tenth of the information in a song purchased on iTunes that there is on a CD of the same song. One tenth! The difference is fairly perceptible back to back, but we’ve gotten used to the sound of downloaded music, and more importantly, the speed of access. We love the fast access to tunes!
It was only about ten years ago that people were still arguing that CDs didn’t sound as good as LPs (for those of you who remember LPs).
So I’m glad to be in the audio production business. I will get to listen to high resolution audio for a long time to come. Much higher than CD resolution even…! And it appears that while the music distributed to consumer channels will sound lesser and lesser, the tools on the production side will sound better and better. That will certainly entice me to stay in the engineering and production seat.
