The 128 kbps Orchestra

As someone who likes music from most periods after the Baroque (my dislike for that genre is best summed up by a friend's description of it as 'too tinkly'), and has had a long-standing interest in how it has been reproduced since its reproduction became possible in the first place, I have acquired a collection of mechanical and electrical equipment that would not be possible for my other great obsessions. I've always dreamt of having a 35mm projector in my living-room and having occasional screenings of My Fair Lady after dinner parties, but I'll save that for after I get myself a manor house of my own.

While packing up to come to to Oxford I was momentarily torn between my beloved Pathé gramophone and a selection of my favourite records, and my iPod; I eventually settled on the latter. I also left behind towering collections of CDs stacked on spindles (you can treat CDs this way because the reflective surface is either underneath the label or sandwiched somewhere in the middle). I don't have a cassette collection because I don't find the technology particularly interesting, and my musical coming of age occurred just after the tape recorder was the most uncool thing to have, and the age when music matters is usually the age when in matters to be cool.

Vinyl was a format that I came to terms with when I began my explorations into classical music. Square cardboard sleeves with faded pictures and crumpled paper liners were part of the house I left when I moved out. But ever since I got myself a proper turntable and discovered the wealth of good music to be had for a few pence I've never looked back (see earlier post, 'Vibrations in Time'). I regularly come home from Notting Hill or the Dickensian maze of dim, dusty aisles in the basement of Harold Moore Records in Great Marlborough Street heaving a load of records home. And at the risk of stating the obvious, records are eminently physical. They are heavy, they get scratched, they get lost; for no explicable reason, you end up loving one more than the other, like a ratty sweater that you'd rather wear than the latest fashion trend on those days when you feel the world is conspiring against you. So there are some perfectly good recordings that simply sit untouched, while a few records are cleaned more lovingly, wrapped in double layers of plastic sleeves, and played over and over. This is fetishism, at least as it is technically defined: the delightful physicality of a symphony embodied as a beloved object. Spin the record; turn me on.

One of the perks of having residency in the UK is being able to use the iTunes Music Store. It's actually now called the iTunes Store because in America they are now able to purchase and download television shows and movies off of it, but in the UK it's still music and music videos, so I will insist on the old name. Just as the invention of photography happened not with the daguerrotype but the negative and its capacity for infinite reproduction, the real shift between analogue and digital music came with the invention of the CD, which could be reproduced without degradation. The paranoia about piracy associated with MP3s and digital downloads is misplaced on more than one count: first of all, MP3s are just another way of writing down music 'digitally', AIFF being what is used on CDs; second, record labels have always been paranoid, as one will see by the number of LPs with warnings about the dire consequences of home recording printed on the sleeve. It's actually rather amusing to read these, and note that they have been worrying about the same thing for the last thirty years.

But although the labels and the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America, also responsible for the equalisation standard that allowed a greater tonal range to be pressed onto the vinyl grooves) think they're worrying about the same thing, they're mistaken. There is a radical difference between analogue and digital: it's why music piracy should be the least of their concerns; it's also why vinyl sounds better than CDs and infinitely better than anything one downloads off the Internet, even from the iTunes Music Store. Digital is about numbers, expressed in terms of ones and zeroes; to transform music to numbers, one quantizes, or 'samples' the information coming off (usually) a mixing board; the higher the sample rate, the more accurately it conforms to the original. An analogue recording creates something, that can range from a wax cylinder to quarter-inch magnetic tape to a light show, that is analogous (hence the name) to the original. For mass production, an analogue 'master' is then transfered to another medium that will hold a copy that can be mass produced which is in turn analogous to the master. A digital distribution system, on the other hand, will take the 'master', which might be digital tape, a hard drive, or CD-R, and turn it into either CDs or the files you will see on iTunes, 128 kbps AAC files.

Digital will beat analogue most days of the week; but an analogue recording made using the best technology available today played on a very good turntable and cartridge is the best sound reproduction possible at present, because it hasn't been sliced up, turned into a number, and then decoded back to music. Classical music heightens the constrast between the two means of getting music into one's home because of its complexity: great tonal and dynamic range, and the layering of a wealth of information that, on analogue systems, can be problematic for a mediocre stylus (particularly problematic are the cannons on the 1812 Overture, which will always sound wimpier than a CD, and definitely pales in comparison to sitting beside the gunpowder at the Royal Albert Hall). But the 128 kbps file is problematic as well; it does not present a problem for pop music (this not being a disparagement of pop music, which can be occasionally scintillating), but if you think of alll the aural information that is being dispersed at the same time during a symphony, even if you get everything in the 41,000 times it is sampled in a second, all that information cannot be compressed into the file size. Another, equally important, problem with the iTunes Music Store is the amount of DSP occurs before it is finally encoded and put up on the site. There is a reason for this, which is that the sound engineers at iTunes create a sound that, not unsurprisingly, is optimised for use with the iPod, and therefore earpieces. All headphones, even the ones that are worth more than some of the heads that wear them like the legendary AKG 1000, have an inherent problem with spatiality. The sneaky solution to this has always been to introduce a certain amount of crossover from the left and right channels; no doubt Apple's sound engineers have even more complex algorithms these days to minimise the impression of the sound coming from the middle of one's head. Not surprisingly, the best-sounding tracks to download from the iTunes Music Store are those that were recorded exclusively by them. I like the simple acoustic version of Aimee Mann's songs from The Forgotten Arm that she recorded for them, perfect for the intimacy of in-ear listening; the album mix, which is also excellent but has very distinct channel separation, sounds very close to the live gig of her band that I caught at the Shepherd's Bush Empire. Yet another consideration is the dynamic range of classical music: if you put a classical CD on, you might notice that you have to turn up the volume; this is the issue of headroom, and what it allows is the fortissimo that happens later to rattle the window-panes the way it should.

There is even more to be said about the iTunes Music Store and the phenomenon of the iPod if we leave the technical aspects behind and look even cursorily at the social aspects of it, but this might be better left to actual sociologists. There is an incompatibility with listening to classical music at a low bitstream rate on earpieces; a technological solution will present itself in the foreseeable future; in the meantime, one can wait for returns at the Barbican. Classical music, like really good food, doesn't come out of cans.