If MP3s Could Kill They Probably Will

NCPR's Sound-Daddy #1, Joel Hurd (cool video, Joel!), is going to hate this post.

I'm the anti-sound geek. If it sounds good enough to not bother or distract me, I'm fine. This is probably the product of the "get-the-news-to-air" mentality of reporting. I occasionally use cell phone interviews in my news stories, record my voice tracks in my echoey kitchen late at night, use sound stuttered with blowing wind -- if it'll help me tell the story and get it out quickly to listeners. I try my best to get good sound, but hey, sometimes you just gotta deal. On the Beat Authority, I use my iPod to play lots of songs - can you tell the difference between that and a CD? Joel and Radio Bob say they can.

Peter Gabriel, who, aside from his own musical credentials, owns the groundbreaking world music label Real World, is not happy with the MP3 downloadable world. From an e-newsletter he sent out:

One of the things that's frustrating about the digital revolution of which I am a huge fan is that the audio quality has taken a giant step backwards. A lot of what we hear on iPods and so on is super-compressed and people have got used to this. For those of us who have really worked hard to get things to sound good and full and rich and build landscapes out of sound, it's very frustrating, so I'm very happy that with these Music Club releases are going to be without compression and full quality." Peter Gabriel

He's talking about a collaboration between Real World and B&W Music Club to distribute loss-less audio files of his releases.

Apple launched a similar effort to release higher quality audio files awhile back, too.

Are you an audiophile? A technophile or -phobe? In the digital age, do you care about the quality of your music files? What will your iPod songs sound like 20 years from now? Peter Gabriel's betting you care.