Music Quality (or something)

Hurray! More aimless crap because I’m bored and feel like I need to repopulate this wasteland with posts again.

Lately I’ve been getting kind of bogged down with music. In a good way. Specifically, I’ve been mulling over how to make the music that I listen to sound as good as possible on a budget. For a lot of people nowadays, music quality is not so much of a big deal; many people rip music at 128 kbps and listen to it through Apple headphones (they’re terrible, don’t deny it). I must stress that I don’t have a problem with this whatsoever; there are people who’s eyelids begin twitching at the very thought that people listen to music like that, but many do and so long as they don’t mind the sound and still enjoy it, then who cares, right? (Unless you bought Dre Beats, then I am morally obliged to look down at you.) The headphones part I can understand; dropping money on a good pair of cans or in-ear phones can set you back, and I can see why people are reluctant to part with their money over them. After all, it’s “only music”. Space, on the other hand, is rather cheap. If you’re ripping your music in at 128 kbps to save space that’s distilled crazy; I bought my 1Tb external hard drive 2 years ago for £80. That could hold tens of thousands of high bit rate tracks. Nowadays, you could probably pick something similar and smaller than that brute for half the price. If your portable music player is a bit more restricted in terms of memory, just convert and downsample your higher bit rate tracks. Piece of cake.

For the record, if I’m ripping music from a CD (rare these days for me) or downloading it (much more likely), I consider 320 kbps to be good, 256 kbps to be acceptable, 192 the bare minimum. FLAC is a bit of a luxury that I don’t really see the point of, since I can barely discern the difference between 320 kbps MP3′s and lossless audio. I don’t care if you swear blind you can distinguish the apparently enormous difference, I simply can’t. I, like many people, was a bit overhyped and swept up by the prospect of lossless audio, but in many settings I think it is unnecessary and a space hog.

The reason I’m making this post, just to go off on a tangent for a second, is because today I had a realisation. Last fortnight I was distraught because I thought I’d blown one of my headphone speakers. Big deal, you say. Well, yes, it kind of is when you’ve dropped £130 on them and have listened to hundreds of hours of music through them. You get accustomed  to hearing music a certain way and I freaking love my cans. Anyway, I normally listen to music via my iPod or laptop, but today I decided to plug them into my amp for the first time and spin some records through them. Holy mother of jesus. I know vinyl is a great way to listen to music, I’ve been giving my speakers a thorough going over and the quality is devastatingly good, but there is nothing quite like slipping a pair of headphones over your ears and just immersing yourself in the music. Honestly, music has never, ever sounded so good in my opinion, especially sweetened by the comforting realisation I wasn’t going to have to send mine out for repair. Sitting here now, going back over what I’ve just heard through iTunes instead (some Memory Tapes, M83 and SVIIB), it sounds like crap. Not really crap, but there’s a huge difference. It’s the same plugging my laptop/iPod into my amp -> speakers; the DAC (digital to audio converter) in both is terrible. Bass is distorted so badly at times it’s just not worth listening to. The separation of the tones, the dynamic range, all of it feels so much more expansive and flawless on wax. My headphones are pretty expressive in the bass department, and being able to push them to the limit bass wise whilst also holding on to the trebles was joyous; Massive Attack’s “Teardrop” is the perfect single to test this out. That sonorous, head-rattling bassline married with the more delicate female vocals is a difficult one to get right and by god it sounded good.

I get the general feeling that it is somewhat unorthodox for someone my age to own a hifi system/turntable these days. Because obviously records are worse quality than digital, amirite? Not in my humble opinion. Just because something has been phased out doesn’t mean that it wasn’t good in the first place. Vinyl was a mainstay in the music industry for a long time, and as such it had a lot of technical experience under its belt to make it sound as good as possible. Digital is good, but can only sound as the DAC can handle; you have a shit soundcard in your PC and you’re not getting the quality, regardless of bit rate, sample rate or the price of your headphones/speakers. Call me a hipster, call me anti-mainstream, whatever, this for me is the most enjoyable way of listening to music. It has fantastic quality right out of the box with no fannying around with DAC’s  and a unique sound that digital doesn’t have (in the same ways photographic film is different to digital). The clicks and crackles simply become part of the experience or can’t be heard over the music most of the time, and I kinda like them. It is also quite satisfying to look at my shelf of records and pick something up physically to play it. Not to mention the album art being given a glorious square foot of space to look sexy on.

I don’t have the best turntable, or the best amp, or the best headphones or whatever else, music is what you make of it. If you enjoy listening to low bit rate music on cheap headphones/speakers, then what’s the point in spending additional money? Me, I want to find ways of extracting all the little details within music and making it sound as good as I can. Am I willing to go full audiophile and spend thousands of pounds on gear? Heck no; there are ways of making music sound great to your ears without having to melt a hole through your wallet. I can lust, and so I will, over the gear that some people possess, but for the time being I am more than happy with what I have since what I’ve got going now is better than I’ve ever experienced before.

Music. Serious business yo.

 

For the curious, my setup is as so:

• Pioneer PL-516 (turntable) with an Ortofon cartridge (don’t remember the exact model)
• Kenwood KA660D (integrated amp)
• Bang & Olufsen Beovox 3800 (speakers (12″ woofers!!1!))
• Fiio E7 DAC (shit better come soon)
• Beyerdynamic DT990 Pro (headphones)

I’m looking into getting a graphic equaliser as well, when I have more money And preferably a better DAC, the E7 probably wont cut it for long with me, it’s just a stop gap. *looks longingly at a Cambridge Audio DACmagic*