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The new bad

Paul's Posts — 22 December 2011

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The new bad

For some reason I keep thinking that music reproduction is getting worse; what with the proliferation of iPods and portable music devices.  But I am wrong.

A quick listen and a bit of remembering about just how bad audio has been in the past – the first CD players, AM radio, cheesy one-box systems – and I am pleasantly surprised that the new bad is pretty good.

Which means that if the new bad is good, then the gap between low-end and high-end audio is narrowing.

This is great news and just in time for the music industry to start flourishing again with their new model.

I’d say with some level of confidence we’re right at the cusp of great things happening for music and high-end audio.

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About Author

Paul McGowan

Paul McGowan is the CEO and co-founder of PS Audio Inc. a Boulder Colorado design and manufacturing company of high-end audio products and services. McGowan has been designing and building high-end products for nearly 40 years. Hobbies include skiing, music, hiking, artisan bread baking, kick boxing and cooking. He lives in Boulder Colorado with his wife Terri and his 4 sons.

(3) Readers Comments

  1. Bassman23

    December 22, 2011 at 7:56 am

    For my perspective, the audiophile experience started with tube sets and speakers that delivered an “euphonic” experience.
    This was followed by the solid-state experience which set up a war between the “euphonic” crowd and the “analytical” crowd.
    We are now in the great golden age of “musical” sound reproduction, with the high end bringing us up to (and into?) the realm of “being there”.
    Let’s enjoy this; whatever your individual taste (and budget), it’s out there right now.

  2. Soundminded

    December 22, 2011 at 8:32 am

    When I was in school in the library one day I thumbed through an old Life Magazine from around 1941 I found and looked at an ad for an RCA radio phonograph console. “It’s just like the musicians were in your living room.” If you want to read the reveiw, just pick up any copy of a current audiophile magazine and look at some high end equipment reviews. Skip the measurements. The names and dates are different but the words are the lamost same. Here’s a link to something far more ambitious from that era;

    http://www.myvintagetv.com/updatepages1/capehart/capehart.htm

    Here’s what appeared here just a short time ago;

    ““real” is an illusion and we are so far away from fooling people that musicians are actually in the room that “real” is relative and “right” is temporary.”

    We can marvel at the old equipment built in an earlier era to different conceptualizations of an ideal and you can find something similar to read in any era since recording was invented even going back to wax cylinders. This begs the question, if yesterday’s good is today’s bad, will today’s excellent be tomorrow’s awful or tomorrow’s trivial? Will the conceptualization of the problem change so radically if and when much more is known about the physics of sound and how it is perceived by our brains that the best our art can produce today will be as laughable if still amusing and entertaining as historical artifacts as the RCA or Capehardt are today? Something to think about before you plunk down $20,000 for a phono cartridge preamplifier unless you have money to burn.

    It also begs several other questions. Can some of yesterday’s best efforts be improved upon by re-engineering them using currently available hardware? Can much or all of the gains made in recent decades be duplicated with enough insight and effort but not necessarily too much money adapting old equipment? Can the innovations they brought to the table be preserved while incorporating advantages of more knowledge and cheaper more widely available hardware we have today?

    More profoundly can today’s designers see the forest for the trees? Can they step back far enough to look at the big picture, go back to square one and see if what they are doing actually makes any sense? If you are in the business of manufacturing and selling products to a competitive market, for most people in this industry the answer is probably no. If you are not and you take this leap, all I can say is it feels awfully good when you stop hitting your head against a brick wall that will not budge and try to figure out a way over or around it instead. It may turn out to be only a few feet high and a few feet wide.

  3. Bloody Ban

    December 22, 2011 at 11:35 am

    I think we definitely have great things happening on the equipment side, but on the recording side, there’s a lot of garbage and since garbage in equals garbage out, it doesn’t matter how great teh equipment is, it’ll always sound terrible if the source sucks. My biggest beefs are compression and loudness, I think

    http://turnmeup.org

    does a better job of describing the problem than I could.

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