Can you point to the research that indicates only a tiny minority care about the sound quality?
No problem: commercial radio. Listener statistics are taken continuously, ratings published periodically. The stations with the biggest numbers don't correlate at all with the best quality, and never have.
Additionally can you qualify that research with the method of asking, because when I play a well mastered track to anyone young they suddenly realise what they were missing and become interested in better quality. Is this one reason why the record industry suppresses decent masters today?
Yup. Historically there have been a couple of methods, including hand-written diaries distributed to a sampling of 1000 or so listeners who tracked their listening habits. Today's high-tech solution is the People Meter, a device that you keep with you that listens to whatever you do. Stations signals are encoded so they are easily recognized and counted, data is uploaded to a server when the device is placed in its charging dock. The data can include internet streams, satellite radio, and TV. Listeners have a wide selection of choices of free entertainment. The collected data includes time of listening, time spent listening, and station choice. Ratings and demographics drive advertising rates.
A couple of notes on broadcast audio. Even though audio quality has never been well correlated with listenership, stations obsess on individualizing their on-air processing. Think of broadcast processing as the loudness war gone nuts. It's been an armed conflict for over 60 years, and todays DSP processing units are brutal, though perhaps slightly more gentle than the most brutal analog processors. Each station is different, but stations with competing formats tend to be generally similar. Classical stations, what there are left of them, are the lightest processed, but still aggressive compared to anything on record or CD. AM radio is severely band-limited, and with a high noise floor, and deliberate clipping is commonplace. Yet with the worst quality on air, AM stations still win ratings.
Sorry to report, audio quality is worse than secondary for most listeners of radio. And that translates to recorded material as well. It's all about the content. People listen to what they want to hear, and audio quality is tertiary behind convenience.
Your statement is also illogical because you reframe the argument as a choice between cost and quality, whereas in reality not over-compressing and clipping costs exactly the same as mastering something properly.
Actually, today cost is reducing to almost a non-factor either way. The largest listenership of any on-line music source is YouTube, for free.
I.e. you appear to confuse your role as a creative one where we are supposed to appreciate the mangling, where in reality is should be an invisible one that allows us to hear the musicians.
We've all heard this before: blame the engineer. You don't understand the industry, though. If someone comes to me asking for maximum loudness to the destruction of quality, and I refuse to do it and attempt to educate him, he'll leave and go somewhere else. The only thing accomplished is my loss of business. That means I can't pay bills and feed my family. What would you do?
I think the patronising attitude of the Mangling Engineers and their industry moved into the realm of fraud a long time ago, in fact I've returned quite a few CDs now because of poor quality mastering, people buying CDs or downloads have a reasonable expectation of quality and only a tiny - but growing - minority have any idea how bad the problem is. Too much of the HiFi industry is complicit in enabling this, CD players for example are designed very carefully to avoid overloading on clips - plug in a pro-audio DAC however and the overload light and clips are obvious, a much more honest system.
Actually, you returning CDs is the absolute best thing you can do - vote with your wallet! I support your efforts, though they are futile in reality. I take strong exception to your labelling engineers as fraudulent. Nothing they or the industry does is criminal, and loudness processing is wrongful in some eyes, great in others.
These overload lights are the same ones the witless cretins at final mastering treat as a badge of honor rather than the stark warnings they are. It's simple audio engineering 101: don't overload and don't clip, which appears to have been forgotten in the Great Dumbing Down of the past 30 years.
Well, if you actually took Simple Audio Engineering 101 you'd know that audio can be fully loudness processed, and clipped without any overload lights ever lighting at all. It's easy, and done all the time. You're focussing on the wrong thing.
HiFi is a shadow of what it was in the 1970s and 1980s, an industry full of charlatans pushing snake oil digital wires, in 40 years it's still using unbalanced interconnects and the lack of anything decent to play has turned many people away.
Focussing on the wrong thing again. What does using unbalanced interconnects have to do with sound quality? Are you aware that the process of creating a differential drive signal to drive a balanced interconnect and then receiving it with an instrumentation amplifier configuration more than doubles the active devices, noise and distortion sources? How is that better? Balanced and unbalanced interconnects are topologies that each have benefit
when properly applied.
The 'still sounds good as no one cared enough to mangle it' still applied to many DVDs, often a DVD sound track will be far hight quality simply because the sound engineers are just doing their job, not the 'special' creative types who's aim in life to to reduce all sound to a solid brick shaped wall of noise. I visited a consumer electronics show a few years back and it was revealing that the DVD soundtrack to King Kong was the best sounding thing there, only comparable to some old vinyl, the 'HiFi' was just an unpleasant wall of noise that needed turning down - it seems this was thanks to people like you and Bigshot being creative and knowing 'best'.
Well, equating today's "best" with "old vinyl"...that would be a highly filtered personal opinion not reflecting the reality of anything important in audio...like reproducing the signal as true to what was heard in the control room as possible. Vinyl doesn't do that, never has.
Amirm's idea is the smartest, sell the 24bit un-mangled versions for a premium. But the record industry is terminally stupid and has constantly strived to avoid this. When SACD came out the internet was slow enough that a simple DVD density disk of 96k/24 audio would have been worth buying on silver discs, leaving the mangled 16bit for MP3 which people were downloading anyway even over dial-up. They missed that money making opportunity so here we are 30+ years later with mangled 16bit silver discs that people simply bypass in favour of mangled MP3s because no one can tell the difference after the mangling.
It's still revealing that music is on sale at Apple and Amazon. Where is the RIAA or the record companies? Go to Virgin Records today (
http://www.virginrecords.com/releases/) and you'll see they've just about worked out how to make a slow clunky webpage, but you can't even buy their product direct. Doh.
With the Greg and Bigshot attitude I've been watching the 'tiny minority' of audiophiles become a self fulfilling prophecy as the 'experts' dance around the steaming pile of 'product' to justify the production of mangled 16bit for all. For what reason is a mystery besides the overarching need to be 'right'. It's not a good enough reason.
Yet another case of misfocused attention. We have, and have had several easy channels of distribution of higher than red-book audio for quite some time. I doubt you'd find many record producers or artists that would permit an "un-mangled version" of their work to get out into the wild. They consider mangling, as you call it, is part of their art. You'd be asking the artist to release an incomplete early version. Not going to happen. If you want unmangled audio, there are a few sources catering to a small but loyal market. Give Mark Waldrep's AIX records a shot. Good clean unmangled audio in abundance. And not expensive, really. He's all about provenance, so you're getting the real deal. I have a selection of his stuff, and he does a good job. Unfortunately, it's not because it's 24/96, he just does a really good job! And unfortunately, not really much main-stream material. Still good, and entertaining.
You have a minority opinion, and while I share your feelings on the music product being overly processed, I don't think the solution lies in griping about it. Through history of recorded music there have been records ranging from excellent to awful, including the revered vinyl days. I have some very good vinyl, and a lot of just average stuff. It was easy to get great sound out of a CD, thus vinyl died. And yes, I know, it's had a "resurgence", but still is insignificant in the total picture. It's not better, it's a different total experience. But bad vinyl was more the order of the day before the CD, now we have bit-perfect copies of masters. You don't like what's on the master...well, that's a problem, but not an easy one to solve. Keep voting with your wallet, and get about 50 million of your best friends to do the same, and you might start to steer the ship.