But if you want evidence, consider the state of the market for audiophile releases. Most specialist labels do not sell large quantities to justify expanding their production. Indeed many go broke or just don’t see it as worth continuing, such as DCC or MFSL.
There was an album on MFSL vinyl that impressed me back in the LP era- Waiting For Columbus by Little Feat. Best live concert recording I've ever heard. I decided many years later to buy the CD, so I spent a lot of money and bought the MFSL again because I wanted to get the same mastering. It sounded fantastic. It was such a good album that it spurred me to buy a box set of Little Feat so I could hear what their studio albums sounded like. It turned out that the box included tracks from Waiting For Columbus. When they came on I was surprised to find that they sounded just as good as the MFSL, so I switched back and forth and compared. If there was any difference at all between the regular release and the MFSL version, I sure couldn't hear it. I suspect that sometimes labels will appropriate third party audiophile masterings and release them in their own expensive box sets.
SMH! I'm only 47. Why are so many folks who are older than me making such millennial statements?? Guess I'm really conservative culturally: 'Put on some Who and Van Halen and put a six-pack in the fridge for when Mike and Jim and their wives come over!'
That's fine. There's some good music there, but I don't listen to much of what I listened to as a kid any more. For a while I dug down deeper into my "kid music"- looking for similar bands that I hadn't heard of or solo albums or work before they became famous- but it was a dry well. The "greatest hits" really were the greatest hits and that's all there was.
In college I had an epiphany. I was listening to the college radio station and they played Cab Calloway's "Some of these Days" and it blew my mind. The second it came on, I jumped up and cranked the volume. This song had ten times the musicianship and ten times the energy and ten times the fun of anything I had ever heard. I grabbed a piece of paper and a pencil and sat by the radio until the DJ came back to say who it was by. The next day I was at Rhino Records asking the guy for Cab Calloway. I bought an album and devoured it. The next week, I was back at Rhino asking for more stuff like that. He started listing off names... Don Redman, Fats Waller, Fletcher Henderson, McKinney's Cotton Pickers, etc... and I was off and running.
Harlem Jazz led me to trad jazz and be bop. I dived in and tried to understand this stuff that sounded so different to me. Pretty soon I was getting into Cuban mambo and conjunto music. Pop vocals. big band... a boss turned me on to the best of classic country music. The world kept expanding faster than I could keep up following all the breadcrumbs. Classical, opera, ethnic music like Hawaiian slack key guitar and Balinese gamelan, bluegrass. My record collection exploded to over 7,000 LPs. Then I started collecting CDs and it doubled in size again. And I realized that not everything from the past has been released on LP and CD, so I got an acoustic phonograph that plays 78s and my collection doubled again.
At this point I have more music than I can listen to in my lifetime. I listen to music that is new to me every day, and every new kind of music I dive into helps me to widen my appreciation and understanding of all the other kinds of music. It's like learning a language. If I had just stuck with 70s album rock, I would still have the musical vocabulary of a 12 year old kid. That's fine for a 12 year old, but life is short and the world of the arts is vast. I want to experience as much of it as I can before I croak.
Getting back to engineering- I'll tell you something you might not be aware of since you are zoomed in on just one kind of music... bad engineering is not pervasive. It's primarily a problem just in "kid music". Classical music has always had great sound. I have an opera recording on 78s from 1935 that sound amazing. Studio jazz has always had very natural recording and engineering. There are amazing sounding records in the genres of ethnic music, country and easy listening as well.
The problem isn't a general one of engineering and the music business, it's specific to the genre of music you've chosen to focus on. Music aimed at kids are engineered for playing on cell phones and ear buds because that is what kids listen to. You have a nice sound system and you like this kind of music, but you aren't typical. The reason audiophile recordings of dinosaur rock exists is to serve your demographic. It's a small market, but you are being served. But the vast majority of the customers for pop/rock aren't like you.
In other genres, like classical, it's assumed that the listener is going to have a good sound system. The vast majority of classical recordings are remarkably well recorded. There is a pretty small market for audiophile recordings of classical music, but it's much smaller than in pop/rock because most classical recordings since the 60s could be considered audiophile.
You're extrapolating a problem in your particular niche to the entire music industry but it isn't really a valid complaint. It only applies to the type of music you've chosen to listen to. If I was you, I'd just focus on the audiophile labels that release pop/rock. Trying to get the industry to cater to your particular needs when you aren't representative of the overall audience for that music isn't going to get you far. That would be like raging at the ocean.
I want "Ace of Spades" with it's heavy compression and distortion, call me crazy but I absolutely DO NOT want Ace of Spades to sound like a nice gentle Lute Sonata! The ridiculous thing about your lack of comprehension is that it was us engineers who first started complaining about the loudness war, long before consumers even knew what it was and now you're blaming and insulting the very people who've been fighting against it the longest, what is wrong with you?
