Does Music Sound Better Today Than 30 Years Ago?
(Martyn Ware discusses the huge changes in making and listening to music with a panel of experts in our exclusive podcast)
In a small recording studio in East London, four industry professionals – and passionate music fans – met with Martyn Ware to discuss this all important question. Given the huge technological advances enabling anyone to make an album in their bedroom that sounds as if it were recorded at state of the art studio, surely music does sound better today.
Listen to the podcast below to hear what they thought:
Martyn Ware (Musical innovator and sound artist):
“The thrill of live music and the full dynamic range of it is something that you simply can’t get off the internet.”
Tom Dunmore (Brand director of Stuff magazine):
“I would say that the benefits that you get from the freedom of the internet and of iPod and MP3 devices is far greater than the loss you get in terms of quality.”
Rob Kelly (Strongroom Studios director and engineer):
“The majority of music produced in studios today sounds less good to my ears than they did 20-30 years ago.”
Stephen Budd ((Manager of producers, songwriters, Franz Ferdinand and many others):
“I’m looking forward to this period that’s gonna come when high quality audio is as easy to access as poor quality audio. And when that happens I think that will create it’s own demand.”
Tim Lawrence: (Senior lecturer in music culture and author)
“I think there has been an incredible democratisation of music through the spread of iPod technology and through the spread of MP3s.”
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Posted by Bowers and Wilkins on Monday, 4 August 2008 Comments (33)
Some does, some doesn’t…I remember trowing away some of the early CDs because the only noticibale difference with the vinyl recording was the noise…..The Diana Krall recordings are really good, as are the Fourplay ones just for example. Springsteen has lost a lot because of the popular equipment it needs to sound ‘good’ on. Some of the flamenco guitarist recordings are very very realistic (Paco de Lucia, Vicente Amigo, Tomatito).
I used to sell loudspeakers for a loudspeaker company based in Boston. At a CES show, for example, my pitch would be something like -
Repoducing music is like taking a picture with a camera. Do you want the finished picture to be as realistic as possible? Or do you want the sky to be brown instead of blue? Do you want faces green or fleshtone?
The job of a speaker (and the electronics) is to reproduce sound as accurately as humanly possible.
That being said, sound quality wise, I would pick any direct-to-disc source material over 99% of CD’s made today. Too much digital manipulation and trickery. Mostly because it’s so easy to do.
Absolutely no comparison beteewen quality of internet music and a well recorded cd.
But internet has given us a chance to navigate in an wide ocean of music so far out of our reach and often completely unkown. So far we have got the music that somebody else decided commercially to let us know. Now we can listen, judge, choose and than at last buy the appropriate recording for our hifi. At last democracy in music too! (Nevertheless some music is still not available through normal channels.)
It is obvious!
Music today is sadly bad and the performers worse.
A few weeks ago I listened to a pair of 802D, truly phenomenal!
On the other hand the more terrestrial enclosures like 685 are painful. I know it because I unfortunately bought a pair of 685. How can one place a pair of excellent drivers like those in such an ordinary
and inappropriate cabinet?
People at What Hi-fi must be deaf!
My granddad 80 something now is one of the most respected (movie) sound engineers in Poland and has similar views to the company at the round table and has been saying this for the past 4 5 years. As i am a producer and i keep showing him my work from my desktop he defintely sounds like you lot
On the other hand i was glad that some of you acknowledged the fact that genre has been a big influence.It is ultimately what has made music sound dirtier if i may call it that.
P.S
one of you had terrible cotton mouth i could barely listen.. stop making your speakers so good.. and give the man some water !!
Got to hail Steven’s perception of emotionally charged conservative LP vs CD/digital, and in fact the XRCD phenomena corroborates the point: recorded music is as good as it is akin to analog. Period. To me - and hell of a lot audiophiles in this country - speakers’ mission is to try and compensate for what MP3/digital compression/digital-optical principle/filed music have done to human perception. I wish the analog were given more attention at all. I personally use very old vintage system to bring “that certain something” out from CD albums that were obviously made to exactly ruin analog perception. That regards particularly so called garage bands of today… To briefly comment on some other points. In Russia sound degradation is particularly “en vogue” as one topic of your discussion goes. The Beatles on CD in particular suffer dramatic loss of G.Martin’s play with phase and counterphase in studio - the very mizardry of the audiophile. Thank you guys for the club idea and the opportunity.
What many of the older 'fellows' don't understand is that many of us younger audiophiles (or wannabes) hate mp3 and lossy music for critical listening just as much as they do. Many private 'music sharing' communitites are filled with lossless CD-Rips and even many vinyl rips (16bit/44.1khz, 24bit/96khz, respectively). However, you cannot argue with the leaps and bounds mp3 has taken over the years (as well as other lossy formats such as ogg vorbis), and that said formats are more than ample for portable listening or for in the car where, lets be honest, we arent sporting B&W or other high end hi-fi speakers or monitors. However, I agree that there is too much distribution of low quality (poorly encoded lossy as well as lossy in general). Getting kicked off the computer. May finish this comment later.
Just a comment about the podcast. A number of the members of the panel casually drop the 'MP3 is lower quality' than CD line, however I think it's important to distinguish that they really mean is low bit-rate MP3. In my own careful (studio) tests, 320 kbps MP3 is all but indistinguishable from 44.1 kHz, 16 bit audio under most realistic listening conditions. While it is easy for me to say that, I am sure B&W has the facilities to put this to the test.
I agree that large numbers of consumers are sucking down gigabytes of MP3's (128 kbps is common) and when it is pointed out to them, they don't seem to care. They do however seem to be aware that encoding artifacts exist and where that 'underwater sound' (if audible) comes from. Just as long as there are no obvious artifacts then they seem happy. I don't see this is all that different from the way many of the older ones of us consumed our music from scratchy records, poorly biased cassette recorders, inappropriate noise-reduction settings etc.
The implication here that MP3 is somehow destroying the quality of the audio depends entirely on the bit-rate it is encoded at. IMO, over compression has had a much bigger impact on the quality of what we hear in commercial releases.
To link this post back to my first inquiry about studio monitoring, as a greater proportion of music will come to market from independent project studios, I think the next hit on quality will come from inexperience and poor quality monitoring/studio setups. This is in no way meant to be degrading these producers, just that music will come from a grass-roots distribution channel.
Dan, thanks for your interetsting response.
The examples you have given focus primarily on the upper-end of the professional audio production chain, although the same principles and concerns are valid. I have no doubt that the 800 series, for example, delivers what was the most uncoloured sound the engineers could deliver within the limitations of budget and technology available.
However, I was in my original question making reference to the relatively newer industry of smaller project studios and home studios, in which music is being produced in increasing numbers. Indeed, even established producers such as Peter Gabriel, whom I notice is one of your (http://www.bowers-wilkins.com/display.aspx?infid=3516) fellows, have home studios that more closely match the upper-end of the project-recording environments I am talking about. Witness the 'Peter Gabriel' shed http://www.wired.com/entertainment/music/news/2007/10/gabrielstudio
I see a gulf (driven by marketing IMO) developing between the companies who manufacture and sell 'nearfield monitor' speakers and those who exclusively sell to the domestic market. The claim is being made that Hi-Fi speakers are unsuitable for monitoring purposes. While it's clear to me that this depends entirely on the particular monitor and hi-fi speaker under consideration.
These home producers are rushing out in droves to buy what are, in essence, self-amplified bookshelf speakers. Your response focuses mainly on your high-end range in professional studios, I was in particular thinking about the relevance of products like your 865, CM1 & 705 that span the price-range being consumed by this new wave of home producers.
In my experience, as you also were noting, the design principles of a good hi-fi speaker and good monitor are inseparable up to the level of aesthetics and amplification mode.
In answer to the posts about the Podcast and iTunes, you can actually stream in Flash in the player but I’ve asked our Web Team to post the file too, and we’ll do that on-going. Thanks for the feedback.
In answer to Mixing:
I think that's an interesting question, which our engineers at B&W have often mused over. B&W speakers are actually used in many studios including Abbey Road, Air, Skywalker Sound, Sony and are liked by engineers there because they believe the are as close as possible to the idealised aim of: nothing added, nothing taken away - essentially our design objective.
However, notwithstanding subjective issues - i.e. engineers with the same need who identify other companies speakers as, to their ears, better fulfilling that aim - they are also all sorts of requirements which don't directly relate to quality in a literal sense which complicate the issue. Those issues include: other stakeholder needs (if a composer or producer insists on listening through a speaker she/he knows), a common paranoia about how things will sound in the "real world" requiring cross referencing on "less good" speakers a certain Japanese model being infamous in that regard; film mastering (where at least the main release will be played in a cinema auditorium which represents an utterly different and far less optimised acoustic environment than the home); and, less relevantly, the proximity to the ear of particularly a near-field monitor compared to a speaker used in the home. And that's not even touching on the dramatically different acoustic environments that occur between home and studio.
Since John Bowers days, B&W has always had relationships with a number of senior recording engineers who are a formal part of our listening team and we have always found their needs and tastes pretty much reflect ours, and hopefully those of a discerning listener.
We've never formally entered the studio market for purely commercial reasons: it's a relatively small market and - if you browse the full depths of our speaker pages - we have our work cut out already!
Yes, what’s with the iTunes thing to hear the blog? You guys in bed with Apple now? Please please just put the audio file up for download with a direct link.
A lot of todays music is mixed and mastered on near-field monitors. It's interesting to note that the explosion of home recording and self-distribution or at least Internet distribution means that a lot of recordings that are purchased today may not see a professional studio or mastering suite.
The current Wikipedia entry has a fairly good summary of the genre…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Studio_monitor
So questions are -
1. Are the speakers music is being produced with inferior to the speakers that hi-fi enthusiasts are listening to the same music with?
2. What is the distinction between B&W Hi-Fi speakers and 'studio monitor speakers', near-fields in particular?
3. Why don't B&W produce a monitor speaker range? Surely if you care about the quality of music, you care about the quality of the production monitors too?
I refuse to install iTunes on my PC, why can’t you guys simply make an mp3 for download direct from your servers?
Hi from Portugal and sorry for my English writing!
I think that some of the music sound better today if we tecnicians put the same passion that they put 20 -30 years ago . And know there is less respect for music and less responsability from some musiciens.
I´m 31 year old and i prefer listen music that was made in the 70´s and 80´s with a powerfull B&W.
They are my reference from my studio works.
Thanks B&W
Regards
Vasco Ribeiro
"How much better is a top end B&W speaker today than its equivalent 20 or 30 years ago?"
We really like your question and we want to do some investigating. We've got an archive of speakers going back to the '60s so we're going to talk to our engineers and set up a session in our infamous R&D Laboratory. Watch this space.
Eventually more young people catch on to how much better the sound can be, and they will love it. Personally, I am interested in a slightly different but related question: How much better is what we CAN hear today, from the live music to the sources of recorded music to the amplification side of things to the speaker systems. Putting the question directly to Bowers & Wilkins: How much better is a top end B&W speaker today than its equivalent 20 or 30 years ago?
It’s very difficult to judge whether sound quality’s improved or deteriorated over the past 30 years for me.
As described by previous commentaters,there’s a far greater accessability with mp3’s and the internet,and i think this helps to dilute the listening pleasure.
I currently listen to music either through my classic ipod,Marantz amp and Gale speakers (Cambridge Audio cd player is nearly redundant now) and am bored witless with the sound emanating from this ‘goodish on paper’ system.
23 years ago i was lucky enough to hear a Linn LP12 with Naim amplification and Isobarik speakers and I’ve never got over this sound!!I cannot imagine digital music making such an impression on me as that system did all those years ago.
I used to own a relatively cheap Acoustic Resarch turntable which blows away my ipod (lossless),a prime example being Talk Talk’s ‘The Colour Of Spring’ album which was sublime in it’s production and,sound quality,in fact enough for me to purchase again on Cd,but to which was majorly dissapointing in comparison to the vinyl album.
For me,digital music is supremely convenient but lacks the dynamic ‘x factor’ of vinyl,however,I’ll stick with the modern format as I hope one day it’ll ‘move’ me like I was years ago.Maybe my system’s just crap!
Anyway,I’ll make more of a concerted effort to improve this system and maybe appreciate more of what’s on offer these days.
Love The Society Of Sound,keep up the good work.
It’s very difficult to judge whether sound quality’s improved or deteriorated over the past 30 years for me.
As described by previous commentaters,there’s a far greater accessability with mp3’s and the internet,and i think this helps to dilute the listening pleasure.
I currently listen to music either through my classic ipod,Marantz amp and Gale speakers (Cambridge Audio cd player is nearly redundant now) and am bored witless with the sound emanating from this ‘goodish on paper’ system.
23 years ago i was lucky enough to hear a Linn LP12 with Naim amplification and Isobarik speakers and I’ve never got over this sound!!I cannot imagine digital music making such an impression on me as that system did all those years ago.
I used to own a relatively cheap Acoustic Resarch turntable which blows away my ipod (lossless),a prime example being Talk Talk’s ‘The Colour Of Spring’ album which was sublime in it’s production and,sound quality,in fact enough for me to purchase again on Cd,but to which was majorly dissapointing in comparison to the vinyl album.
For me,digital music is supremely convenient but lacks the dynamic ‘x factor’ of vinyl,however,I’ll stick with the modern format as I hope one day it’ll ‘move’ me like I was years ago.Maybe my system’s just crap!
Anyway,I’ll make more of a concerted effort to improve this system and maybe appreciate more of what’s on offer these days.
Love The Society Of Sound,keep up the good work.
I’ve embraced digital and just as the vinyl gave way to CD then my CD’s have now gone all saved lossless all covers scanned all now on a hard drive(s) There are some great lossless formats Apple lossless for instance gives you CD quality and played with a good sound card through good hifi does sound indistinguisable from CD. great dynamic range good stereo image. Flac format is widly used and easily converted should you need to go to Apple formats for your iPod However flac files play fine with the correct codecs in Windows media player. At this point as technology moves on we should be looking to embrace the new technology as we did with CD and develop and grow with it The debate is easy sound quality can be better than it was 20 years ago as technologies in speaker and amplifier improve.If you choose your equipment wisley you get great sound.Have a look at the Sonus system for playing your digital media just one of many great products.As for iPods they’re a hell of a lot better than the 1st Walkman and have you seen on the high street of late there are a lot of Bose and Sennheiser head phones on the audiophiles ears. Try their noise cancelling headphones on the plane Plane journeys have never be so musical !
So I have to purchase a Mac or Redmondware and install iTunes for the sole purpose of subscribing to this podcast when my Linux box already does audio better than either ? Me thinks unsubsribing to the newsletter a far better option.
So I have to purchase a Mac or Redmondware and install iTunes for the sole purpose of subscribing to this podcast when my Linux box already does audio better than either ? Me thinks unsubsribing to the newsletter a far better option.
Re: compression
Yes dynamic range compression used to be common on Analogue LPs for the same reason - to get more music on the grooves. I have Sting's Album 'Nothing Like the Sub' on vinyl LP made in the 1987 spread over two disks rather than one, which is uncompressed - and its a marvellously clear and dynamic sound. That is 20 years ago. Its not that it couldn't be done its as said before, a marketing/accounting decision. Of course the other reality is a pair of B&W loudspeakers, even entry level, are an expensive proposition, so the majority of punters are going to be listening to their CDs through 10p speakers. It would be better if the cheap CD players included compression systems themselves rather than the record companies squashing the music for us. In this day and age their should be no excuse for bad compression on recordings.
Bit rate compression isn't as bad as audio compression.
But as far as Apple is concerned its a God send. Most itune files seem to be around 128k bit rather than much better 250 k bit rate or higher. That is just greed on the part of Apple. So in conclusion I don't think 'technology' has improved - B&W were making incredible speaker systems 20 years ago too - probably better than ones of today even!! The iPod generation has destroyed loads of good CD record shops, probably will kill off the CD or just relagate it to just a Niche object. I like my CDs and records. I don't care that I can get my entire collection on a hard drive, I like them as they are and the art work inside them. Just because its new doesn't make it better remember that.
Is there something I’m missing here, how are we supposed to see/hear the Podcast….is there a secret button?
One more thing, at 99 US cents per download……….if you were Apple, wouldn’t you want to process as many of those as possible per hour of given server bandwidth from a cash flow perspective? The answer is obvious as to why compress.
So there is dynamic compression of the sound to make it louder and Data Compression of the sound, to make for faster downloads, the deadly combination of which equals digital crap, despite the composer’s intents.
I share the same feelings about popularity vs. quality in the respective audio reproduction chains.
Absolute Quality is as much more the musicians and producers’ talents as as opposed to technology, since we have had plenty of technology since the microgroove records of the 50’s or the original Bell Labs Recording/Playback Systems of 1926! I just listened to “Kind of Blue” by Miles Davis recorded in 1959, and it’s better than 99% of the stuff being recorded today.
Bits are cheap to create, store and distribute today, more than ever, but very few are using the extra dynamic range that’s been available on the CD since 1983 in combination with the best artists. Everything is compressed to sound louder on low-fidelity radio broadcasts, unfortunately.
I fear that, even though it’s available and affordable, quality recordings shall remain a niche market forever and a day.
Has sound got better in the last 30 years? It all depends. Yes and no. Putting aside the iPod debate and Mp3 which I don't use much myself, I for one was present at B&W when the Nautilus loudspeaker was developed in 1991. It opened our ears to what was already recorded from before that. Certain music from the 80s were very well recorded indeed as analogue recordings, and even the early digital ones could be incredibly good or terrible. It was dependent on the engineer and producer, not so much the technology. The Blue Nile (as mentioned) from the late 80s is impeccably recorded.
Ironically Vinyl records have never been so good. The sound from vinyl is now superb even 24 years after the advent of CD. In some cases I would say vinyl has a better sound than CD but I also have CDs that sound wonderful too. It ain't the technology but the humans who mastered it. MP3 seems to work fine with me, but then again I have been listening to some 96khz 24 bit recordings and they are in a different league. And guess what I am listening to them on? 40 year old Quad electrostatics. Bloody marvellous!
Music has always been about quality and I cannot see that the need for higher quality will ever go away. It is there in any market, between the cheap that soon fall to pieces, and the highest quality that only the well heeled can afford. This applies to sound as well. Everybody strive to acquire as high as they can, while the suppliers try to increase their sales by offering the highest quality at the best price. I hope the likes of B&W and Linn will always be there to deliver cutting edge products. Make them affordable and we will buy them.
Hi
In my view we should open our ears, our hearts and minds to all of the formats, past and present.
When I first 'got into' music in the early '70's my main sources of music were the (free) radio, vinyl albums & singles, reel to reel tape and the then relatively new-fangled cassette tape.
As my passion for music increased I set about building a 'decent' Hi-Fi (or series of 'em) until I arrived at my current setup (all naim I'm afraid - sorry B&W). I owned a wonderful Linn LP12 for a number of years (before children), which has now been handed on to another music fan who has the space for a burgeoning vinyl collection.
For music on the go I bought several 'Walkmen', since replaced in this house by a number of iPods. I've owned crappy little cassette machines but also owned a legendary Nakamichi Dragon.
Although the hardware has changed, one thing has remained constant; the music.
Yes, I have a hugely expensive 'grown-up' system at home for serious music listening, but I also appreciate the portability of my iPod (just returned from a week in Cornwall with the blighter set on shuffle).
A week or so ago I dug out some old cassette tapes which I recorded off air over 25 years ago - OK, quality not exactly 'the ultimate', but the tunes were what it was all about.
I would suggest that the very best of today's music sounds rather better than that of 20-30 years ago (check out The Blue Nile), but then I guess that's what we would hope leading edge technology might deliver.
I also think that the iPod holds up very well when compared with the Walkman as a portable music device - no, it's not HiFi, but then it's not intended to be.
Downloading music from sites like itunes and the venerable B&W Music Club give people an opportunity to listen to music that might otherwise go unheard. I never really considered myself a fan of Brett Anderson, but grabbing a few tracks from the site and listening a few times on my 'WalkPod' hooked me sufficiently to buy the album.
I agree that people who listen to compressed music are missing part of the whole - but they are getting the 'tunes' just in the same way that somebody on a budget can read a paperback rather than pay considerably more for a hard back first edition.
What we need to do is to encourage listeners to use their mp3, DAB radio and the like as a key to the door to a world of wonderful sounds that can only be fully appreciated in a compression-free world.
First, sorry for any mistakes, I'm Dutch and not used to write in English.
We now have the possibilty to make superb recordings in the highest quality ever.
And many people like me enjoy them on our hifi.
(B&W 801's of 26 years old, still going strong )
Mp3 is responsible for spreading the music to a much wider public, but also for the loss of quality of the same music.
Many kids don't know how good a record sounds because of the compression for there mp3-player.
My son's friends come to visit and when they heard me playing an old fashion vinyl recording, they didn't
believe it could have such dynamics and power and also
soft parts.
They're used to music at 1 level( radio and mp3)
But please, keep on making high quality recordings for us who still enjoy them.
In that way we can let young people dicover real good sound instead of destroiing there ears.
I know for sure that two of my son's friends are buying
a new hifi set for themselves.
They are now listening and enjoying music again.
Best regards, Frank.
I think we probably need more events like the one just undertaken by B&W at Abbey Road Studios, but involving the younger generations as their listen to music seems to be governed by numbers - just like the car driving masses - where they think MP3 players are wonderful, but are soon caught up in the "I can get more on mine than you!". Hence sound quality takes a dive in their quest to jam more tracks on to their players, not ever realising till its too late, what they have done to the sound quality. So later when they come to make/mix /produce their own music, it's tainted because all they've been hearing for so long has been so bad.
Keep up the good work with the Music Club.
An interesting commentary indeed. It would seem that the acquisition of high quality, meaning full bandwidth high resolution audio recordings may be headed even further into the proverbial “abyss” as the industry caters more largely to the demands of the market, which seems bound for compressed “MP3 Land.”
It is unfortunate, in my belief, that the much better sounding and higher resolution formats of DVD-Audio and SACD seem all but history now. Those of us who have taken an interest in arranging our home listening environments to optimize the quality of the sound we hear have an ever-shrinking stock of titles to select from.
I had an idea not so long ago that might be considerable. With the vast catalogues of downloadable music on the internet, why not provide the consumer with a choice of audio resolutions? For instance, the original recording might be made in 192khz/24bit format and offered as such at a premium, followed by the various bit rates for the same material in MP3 (128kbps, 256, 512 etc.). I for one, would be happy to pay the difference should it result in a true, higher fidelity recording. Everyone goes home happy….
We are most all capable of recording to DVD and would simply need a bit more software to make it happen. Playback on any DVD player would then amount to something fairly basic, given the equipment is capable of 192/24 digital to analog conversion. Forgive the ignorance should this already be available, but I have not heard of it and would be pleasantly surprised. In any case, having made a considerable financial investment in speakers and other audio gear, most of us would likely really welcome such options.
That’s an interesting but rather puzzling observation by Rod Kelly about the current sound of studio produced music, compared with that of 20-30 years ago. Does he refer to his personal ability to judge the sound of music, or what else? It would be surprising indeed if that ability had not deteriorated over such a long period. But the ’sound’ of music is very different from the ‘message’ in music. That explains the comments of your other observers, who seem to confirm that it is the message rather than the sound of music which appeals to the bulk of listeners, particularly the young, even with their very wide acoustic bandwidth. That’s why they seem disinterested or even unable to recognise the true sound of live instruments, compared with the generally distorted sounds of MP3 players and rock/pop performances, which carry their own message through other more powerful forces than the quality of the sound they produce.