Don't Be So Quick to Criticize!

In the past few days an interview between Bob Dylan and Rolling Stone had leaked. This may not sound like anything shocking, but some of the things Dylan had said have created quite a stir on the Internet. Dylan who's new album "Modern Times"is set to hit shelves tomorrow (I am hoping to have a review of it on Imagine Echoes: The Review by tomorrow) had bluntly attacked the recording industry of the past twenty years. Dylan had this to say:

We all like records that are played on record players, but let's face it, those days are gon-n-n-e. You do the best you can, you fight that technology in all kinds of ways, but I don't know anybody who's made a record that sounds decent in the past twenty years, really. You listen to these modern records, they're atrocious, they have sound all over them. There's no definition of nothing, no vocal, no nothing, just like -- static. Even these songs probably sounded ten times better in the studio when we recorded 'em. CDs are small. There's no stature to it. I remember when that Napster guy came up across, it was like, 'Everybody's gettin' music for free.' I was like, 'Well, why not? It ain't worth nothing anyway.' "

All over the Internet I have been reading snippets of that full quote and people taking it completely out of context. Many see this as Dylan attacking the artists of the past twenty years but instead what he is truly doing is attacking the recording process, now this is obvious when seeing the full quote but blogs and websites all over the net are just posting pieces of the full quote.

Even those who realize what Dylan was trying to get across still continue to call him a belligerent and angry old man. The biggest misconception in music is that CD's are better than any other source of audio. If you were to walk up to random people on the street and ask them the question: "Which audio source has better quality, CD's or Vinyl's?" Odds are 95% of people would laugh at the question and quickly answer CD's.

The one thing I don't want to do is to get too deep into this topic because if I were to, I just may have a novel on my hands. The main thing we must observe when comparing the two is the difference between digital and analog. With Vinyl an analog source we are receiving the original waveform which had been recorded and with a digital we are receiving snapshots of the full waveform, so we are losing bit and pieces of the waveform. There are a variety of other arguments but there is one more thing that I would like to get to before I bore you at of your mind.

The next problem with music industry these days is: COMPRESSION COMPRESSION COMPRESSION! What recording studios are doing now is trying to make all the sounds more equal so the listener can hear the quiet noises just as well as they are able to hear the loud ones. So what record producers are doing is squishing together all the sounds to create a low dynamic range which gives it that "loud" sound just as if you were listening to the radio.

It is one thing to take Dylan's comments out of context but to argue with the sheer fact that the recording process is better now than it was back in the 70's would be wrong. Technology is moving forward but the mentality behind producing CD's is going backwards.