January 21, 2008
The Death of High Fidelity : Rolling Stone
In 2004, Jeff Buckley’s mom, Mary Guibert, listened to the original three-quarter-inch tape of her son’s recordings as she was preparing the tenth-anniversary reissue of Grace. “We were hearing instruments you’ve never heard on that album, like finger cymbals and the sound of viola strings being plucked,” she remembers. “It blew me away because it was exactly what he heard in the studio.”
To Guibert’s disappointment, the remastered 2004 version failed to capture these details. So last year, when Guibert assembled the best-of collection So Real: Songs From Jeff Buckley, she insisted on an independent A&R consultant to oversee the reissue process and a mastering engineer who would reproduce the sound Buckley made in the studio. “You can hear the distinct instruments and the sound of the room,” she says of the new release. “Compression smudges things together.”
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That’s pretty sad.
Years ago, music was mixed to sound good on crappy OEM car radios. It sounded like ass if you played it on a “real” audio system.
Nowadays, music is mixed to sound good on crappy MP3 players and iPods. It still sounds like ass everywhere else.
Compression is a great audio processing tool, but like most tools, can be misused and abused. Digital compression is capable of even greater and yet more subtle enhancement but its ultimate potential is up to the human interface.
The power of the Dark Side is very strong.
What kills me is, after reading the article, I am hearing these problems everywhere, particularly with my ipod.