SXSWORLD

2 6 S X S W O R L D / M A R C H M U S I C 2 0 1 4 Perfect sound forever!" screamed one of the many selling points of the compact disc, when its corporate sponsors—Philips and Sony—rolled out the innovative new digital format in 1982. And the hype worked to perfection. Over the next 20 years, millions of music enthusiasts duly sold off their scratch-and-pop vinyl, replacing all that analog depth and warmth with shiny, encoded, binary ones and zeros. e CD revolution was a win/win. Record companies luxuriated in repackaging old titles and offering unreleased material and boxed sets. Meanwhile, consumers willingly bought their record collections all over again at double the price. Music lovers everywhere believed that they were receiving the finest sound quality technology could provide, while enjoying the convenience and portability CDs offered. Fast-forward another generation and the revolution is done, with the once-monolithic music distribu- tion landscape now rubble. With music proliferation exploding in cyberspace, physical product of any kind seems quaint. Whether doled out via MP3s, streamed through Spotify or Pandora or sold via Apple's iTunes, access to multiple lifetimes' of music has never been greater, even as the idealistic notion of "perfect sound forever" drifts ever further out of reach. But some people are catching on. Witness oldsters and youngsters alike, eschewing digital and setting up the trusty turntable. Long dormant and left for dead, the vinyl format—warm, musical, real—has seen a rebound beyond anyone's expectations. "I think there was a pendulum swing back to the analog sound," sur- mises John Kunz of Austin's Waterloo Records. "It's sound waves rather than zeros and ones emulating a sound wave." Major labels and indies alike commonly produce vinyl editions of new releases, while vintage used titles, from Coltrane to the Misfits, are sold for hundreds or even thousands of dollars on eBay. Vinyl emporiums, too, are commonly stepping up to stock vintage stereo equipment, adding to the flavor of the old-school sound. "We never expected the vinyl resurgence to become as crazy as it is," noted Josh Bizar, of the revered audiophile label Mobile Fidelity Sounds Lab, to a New York Times reporter. "But it's come full circle. We get kids calling us up and telling us why they listen to vinyl, and when we ask them why they don't listen to CDs, they say, 'CDs? My dad listens to CDs—why would I do that?' " Meanwhile, others are chasing the opposite tack, refining digital specs while still chasing "perfect" sound. "I think eventually," says Gavin Lurssen, a Grammy-award-winning mastering engineer based in Hollywood, "when this hi-rez music is available to people … that we will see a great surge and understanding in the consumer. ey will see that have been fed a diet of something less than it could have been." It's a subject prone to endless subjective opinions and equally subjec- tive ears; or, alternatively, to an apathetic public possessing no opinion at all. After all, the audio quality found on sources like iTunes, Spotify, MOG and Google Music is apparently good enough to convince mil- lions of people to pay for access to it, right? But sound reproduction issues do, unmistakably, get right to the heart of what music is all about: How does it sound? How richly was it captured? Is its replication true to the artists' intentions? CDs only jarred open the doors of the digital insurgency. By the late 1990s, a spate of so-called "lossy," low bitrate formats, including MP3s, took music proliferation in strange new directions. Offering a mere approximation of true musical dimension, one-click convenience turned them into the default for a rapid-moving, technologized society. To quote Neil Young, though, "MP3s capture only five percent of the data present in any given original recording." "I am encouraged that people are taking a stand on making higher resolution audio available to mass markets," observes Lurssen. "ere are a few companies cropping up that will offer hi-rez files for consumer consumption. Hi-rez is a term that refers to anything larger than cd format, which is 44.1khz/16bit. Typically hi-rez files among the profes- sional community is referred to when talking about 96khz/24bit." FLAC, as well as ALAC (used by Apple) and DSD (available in SACDs), sampling at higher frequencies, are among the digital formats currently outdistancing the lowly MP3. HDTracks holds the inside track on hi-rez music distribution, having partnered with major labels like Sony, Warner Brothers and Universal, though 7Digital, NAIM, and others are also pursuing this line. Highest quality playback will require a new device, like a DAC (digital audio converter) or Woo Audio's fancy WA7 Fireflies, gadgets that the general public has yet to warm to. Young, meanwhile, introduced his new Pono contraption at SXSW this week, with sky high hopes. "What I admire about Neil Young," says Lurssen, "is that he using his celebrity to bring attention to this issue, or as he refers to it, the 'injury' that we have sustained in compressing audio down to a very small file that does not represent what happens in the studio when an artist expresses their music." "My goal," Young dramatically surmises, "is to try and rescue the art form that I've been practicing for the past 50 years." n Analog or Hi-Rez Digital? Audiophiles Still Pursuing Ideal Listening by Luke Torn Gavin Lurssen

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