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Originally Posted by AllHandsOnTheBigOne
Sonic Youth can't control every single aspect of my listening conditions, even if I purchase the album. Maybe I have a really shitty stereo while someone else has top of the line audio equipment. I guess their experience of that music is closer to the artist's intentions than mine. But either way, Sonic Youth have no control over it.
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It's ridiculous to posit the notion that Sonic Youth even would
want to "control every single aspect" of one's listening conditions. That's not the issue at hand. The issue at hand is the quality of the actual media. I perhaps used the wrong word when I said "fidelity." What I meant was the quality of the medium -- and I don't think it's too crazy for an artist to want to be able to control that sort of thing. Mp3s are inescapably the medium of choice these days, but from what I understand,
Rather Ripped is going around at 96kbps or 128kbps? There's no way that's a quality representation of the music.
Years ago, an artist wouldn't have to worry about this sort of thing. I guess that's just a symptom of the age in which we live -- we're all so willing to accept degraded quality as long as our immediate concerns are addressed. Luckily, digital compression is getting better and better, so the quality degradation is decreasing, but I seriously doubt that a 128kbps mp3 rip of anything sounds that good. And so the art suffers, whether its being played on a tinny boombox or a Dolby 7.1 Stereo Surround System. So after six months of recording, mixing, sequencing, and mastering, the currently-most-heard version of
Rather Ripped is the quality-degraded version.