Philoctetes Center : Why Audio Matters

Philoctetes Center : Why Audio Matters

The Philoctetes center in New York, which is dedicated to “The multidisciplinary study of imagination”, hosted a round table entitled “Deep Listening: Why Audio Quality Matters”, which you view online or download – 2 and a half hours long. It is moderated by Greg Calbi, mastering engineer from Sterling Sound. Other participants are Steve Berkowitz from Sony Music, audio critic and vinyl enthusiast Michael Fremer, academic and audio enthusiast Evan Cornog representing the listening public, audio engineer Kevin Killen, and record producer Craig Street. A good panel, responsible for sounds from a glittering array of artist over many years.

If you care about such things, it is a fascinating debate – heated at times as participants disagree about the merits of MP3, CD, SACD and vinyl – but agreed that overabundance of mid-fi portable music has left the high end all-but abandoned.

Unfortunately absent from the round table is any representative of the teenagers and twenty-somethings who historically have been the primary audience for popular music. Too busy out there enjoying it I guess.

There is something absurd about sitting in on audio comparisons via an extreme lossy compressed downloaded or streamed video, but never mind.

I’m reluctant to take the side of the high-end audio industry, because while there is no shortage of good products out there, the industry is also replete with bad science and bad advice, absurdly expensive cables, and poor technical advice in many retailers (in my experience). On the other hand, I’m inclined to agree that sound quality has taken as many steps back as forward in the past thirty years. It is not only the loudness wars (which gets good coverage here around 2 hours in); it is a general problem that producers and engineers do too much processing because they can. Here’s Calbi:

Kevin would be able to detail what goes into the average album now, and how many stages, how many digital conversions, and how many mults, and how many combinations of things – by the time you actually get it, you wouldn’t believe it, we wouldn’t have time to talk about, we’d have to have a weekend.

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