here is my very personal opinion on things:
-people should be able to buy whatever they like
-manufacturers should be able to sell at whatever price they want
I agree. I'm just stating that there are however consequences. Audiophile manufacturers now pretty much exclusively focus on High Definition/Resolution instead of high fidelity and they do this because they are fulfilling a demand. This is circular though, because they have created that demand. The end result is that your first point cannot now be fulfilled! For example, I should be able to buy a new, reasonably priced 16bit 44.1/48k DAC which fulfils all practical fidelity requirements and, not just find one, there should be quite a bit of competition/choice. However, AFAIK I can't, I would have to buy into a "HRA" DAC and the extra cost (or lower fidelity) of resources being spent on supporting a wider array of formats (so called standard and high res formats) rather than concentrating on just 16/44.1/48. The choice of other audiophiles (to drink the koolaid and buy into HRA) has removed my choice! While this is annoying, the end result is typically fairly minimal as I can buy a reasonably priced "HD" DAC and the resources not concentrated on 16/44.1/48 should have minimal (or no) audible impact on fidelity. This isn't necessarily the case but regardless, there's a more serious problem, which is the consequences of consumer choice on the material that our audio equipment is reproducing. It's a more serious problem because it's both very audible and affects all consumers.
From the late 1950's to the 1990's the quality of recordings and the very evolution of all popular music genres was based on a combination of factors: 1. Advancing technology; audio hardware, acoustics, audio formats and audio software AND 2. Expertise; skill, experience and creativity of the producers and various engineers AND 3. Time; Time not only to allow the artists and engineers to fully exercise their expertise but time for the engineers, producers and artists to experiment with their expertise and the technology! We are facing two problems:
A. Recording technology isn't really advancing. Certain areas, such as transducers and acoustics are only advancing minimally. It's essentially old technology which has been developed over the decades to the point that new tweaks are relatively insignificant. The audio formats are not advancing at all, in terms of audible sound quality. Likewise with recording hardware (ADCs), which reached their peak about 15 years ago. The software (plugins, digital processors) have also by and large reached their peaks, 5 or so years ago. However, the options available to artists/producers are today almost limitless and therefore, far more importantly:
B. Consumer choice! Consumers such as
@pctazhp are choosing to purchase "virtually all of their music" from streaming services. The massive reduction in revenue this represents has had and will continue to have a massive effect on all three of the points above. The top commercial studio always represented not only the best technology but the widest choice of technology, such as; the best recording acoustics, the best monitoring environments, the best and widest choice of mics and the best recording and mixing/processing hardware. They also represented the best audio engineering expertise. Over the last 20 years, around 70% of the best commercial music recording studios have closed their doors for good and the pool of competing experts who knew how to get the best out of them has likewise declined. Furthermore, due to the far lower revenue, the amount of available time has been drastically cut, albums used to take several/many months to make, today they have to be made in weeks. There's barely time to achieve competency, let alone any serious time to experiment. In fact, many commercial albums are now partially or even entirely made without any involvement of commercial studios and therefore lack engineering expertise, quality recording acoustics or monitoring environments and choice of mics, etc. All this has been occurring as a consequence of consumers choosing digital download as their preferred purchase option. During a time of maturing digital hardware and software, when sound quality and musical innovation should have been advancing, they've remained broadly static or declined. And, it's set to decline further still, as streaming provides significantly lower revenues to music creators (artists, studios, engineers and producers) than even the shock of digital download revenues. I'm not a Luddite, I'm not trying to turn the clock back to "the good ol' days", I'm just stating the inevitable consequences of the choice that consumers are making, which, whether or not they realise it or whether or not they choose to take any responsibility for it, is the choice/demand for lower cost + declining sound quality + slowing musical innovation/evolution. We've already reached a point where there are effectively virtually no major professional recording artists any more!
This brings me back to a few posts ago. What's the point of increasing the quality of your reproduction equipment while simultaneously demanding lower quality recordings for your system to reproduce? The only obvious logical conclusion is; pride of ownership of reproduction equipment AND, little/no interest or care for music/audio itself.
G
