High quality audio has never been cheaper. (Of course you can spend any amount of money on sound equipment, but there is no correlation between amount spent and quality, above quite a low threshold.)
Oh, for sure. We can thank places like Bandcamp, 7digital, HDTracks, and Qobuz for that.
In my experience, sound equipment is the kicker and that partly depends on what you want. I don't think you need to spend USD$400 on a pair of Oppo PM-3's to get the most out of your mobile listening experience; however, I still spent about half that on a pair of Plantronics BackBeat Pro 2 SE's because I decided that I was beyond done with the annoyance of dealing with 3.5 audio cables, especially while riding a bicycle, but didn't want to skimp on that bass and general "fullness". Honestly, these headphones are
perfect for me in every way possible but I'm not sure that the average layperson is going to understand the reasoning in spending USD$200 on a pair of cans,
especially if they don't understand the advantages of lossless audio. Lossless files don't sound particularly good (read: better than lossy) out of a pair of cheap ear buds and those are for what most people will opt because they just want something that
works. So the connection is lost. I personally hate ear buds; they hurt and they're quite fatiguing but they seem to be the favoured solution.
That's mobile listening but what about in-home/living room experiences? Once again, lossless files don't sound particularly good or better than lossy files when they're played out of your average computer monitor or television speakers and no amount of spectrogram analysis is going to force a better experience for the listener. To get the most out of your lossless files, you'll at
least need a competent A/V receiver, a decent pair of front channels, and a subwoofer. That's not an insignificant amount of coin, even if the receiver isn't in Marantz' Reference series and the channels aren't Klipsch. Most people who bother with that set-up seem to be content with sound-bar-and-sub packages and even then, the sub is optional to them because they'd rather not risk disturbing their fellow tenets or their neighbours. Out of a basic system like that, lossless will once again not sound
that incredible relative to lossy.
In short, people don't understand the appeal of lossless because they don't have the equipment for it and buying the equipment for it is not a wise capital venture because they seldom have first-hand experience with the positive results of going to the trouble. Much of the time, they're taking the plunge because they love music and were told by someone else that it's "worth it"—like I was. I have no regrets but I know others will be for more sceptical.
All of that is aside from the ever-prominent need for the "feeling of ownership", usually in conjunction with the sentiment that a database of digital files is not a "real" collection. CD's satisfy most people as-is and those who are leaving them behind are doing so in favour of streaming services like Spotify—lossy but adequate to them.
I think lossless is on the rise but it's a
very slow rise.
Author
Topic: 24-bit Audio For People That Aren't Old (Read 91301 times)