Do You Hear What I Hear?

The first revolution took place on November 29, 1877, when Thomas Alva Edison made the first public demonstration. At the time, few people saw the potential of the contraption he’d designed, mostly because he described his “talking machine” as a means for businessmen to record their own dictations with the ability to play them back at will. The secretaries of America (at least the ones that weren’t being schtupped at the time) paused for a collective shudder. Like any great invention that escapes into the pristine wilderness that is capitalism, evolution takes over as busy-fingered tinkerers strive to offer bigger, better, faster and more at low, low warehouse clearance prices. The phonograph, literally meaning “writing sound” in Greek, underwent numerous incarnations in the hands of manufacturers worldwide, such as the “Gramophone, “ “Zon-o-phone,” “Graphonola,” and the most successful, “Victrola.”



The second, and most important, revolution occurred in 1892. It was this year that a company called Berliner patented the disc recording media, which they successfully argued was so different from Edison’s cylinder technology, they needn’t pay royalties. With the recording discs being easier to manufacture and ship, and by avoiding the costs of royalties, they were cheaper than cylinder recordings. In addition to the cost benefits, consumers found it much easier to store and catalogue their collections as thin discs as opposed to the cumbersome cylinders, and with the affluence that typified the late nineteenth century in America, the home stereo system was born.

For the first time in history, music could be enjoyed without the need for live musicians.

Many minor improvements were made on the design over the course of the following years, but no great changes took place for a very long time. The record was the standard in almost every American home, but as we all know, technology builds upon itself exponentially and the next revolution was inevitable.

The next occurrence that most closely resembles revolution, ignoring the strange but very important 1956 invention by Bill Lear called the 8-track cartridge, was the reel-to-reel cassette tape, or the compact audiocassette. Introduced by Philips in 1963, this little technological wonder not only boasted the “not-terribly-crappy” sound quality guarantee, but its miniscule size shot off the next great leap forward in audio technology: portable audio.

Dass right, I’m talkin’ about the muhfuckin’ ghetto blaster!




It’s revolution left and right, because as soon as the boom box hit its peak in the early eighties, Sony’s 1979 invention, the Walkman, was flying off the shelves like so much volleyball. The portable audio revolution was taken a step further into personal portable audio. The only problem was that it was terribly difficult to break dance with headphones on.

The “Big Bang” of digital audio took place in 1983, when Philips introduced the compact disc. Suddenly, as a consumer, you could have it all: inexpensive, compact and portable media with flawless, truly digital audio quality. While many folks still hold dear to their boxes of vinyl Dylan albums, the compact disc was the high mark of audio fidelity.

We find ourselves currently in the midst of another audio revolution, and it’s no surprise it’s related to computers. MP3 is an audio compression format, known as “lossy compression,” which allows the large “WAV” tracks of a compact disc to be compressed at about 10:1 without losing significant audio quality. This medium became greatly popularized with the transmission of data over the Internet, allowing people to rip, store, trade and play audio files over their limited bandwidth. According to Wikipedia, the sound quality of MP3 can be described thusly:

[MP3] provides a representation of pulse-code modulation-encoded (PCM) audio data in a much smaller size by discarding portions that are considered "less important" to human hearing.

It is here, in the gap between CD and MP3, in the concept of “less important to human hearing” that the debate occurs. As MP3 technology grows more and more standardized, as more and more people rip their audio CDs into MP3, or simply download them from the internet onto their iPods and other devices, will audio quality standards drop as well? Will anyone ever come to know the rich, full, dense sound that can only be achieved on a vinyl recording? If the CD is the benchmark, are the differences between CD and MP3 so great, that audio recordings at large will suffer because someone has deemed huge sections of data “unimportant to human hearing?”

Until now, every worthwhile revolution in audio technology has been in the arena of better quality, less degradation, smaller media and more portable technology. MP3 seems to be an exception because, even to an untrained ear, the quality of an CD significantly outpaces that of MP3, but the MP3 format grows each and every day, backed up by the smallest, coolest and best technology available on the market.

Will there be a time when a young music aficionado will have gone his whole life without ever setting his ears to a compact disc, much as many our age have never heard a vinyl record? Will MP3 destroy not just music industry, but music fidelity as well?