The Death of Quality

In 1927 everyone was still making films with absolutely no sound; unless of course you include the poor person at the front of the cinema tinkering on a piano for over an hour in between the news reels.
Then ‘The Jazz Singer’ exploded onto the Hollywood scene and changed everyone’s lives for ever. OK, they (film-makers) had been dabbling with sound for years but this was the first full-length film to have pre-recorded sound synchronised with the picture. It was amazing.

Charles Chaplin held out for another thirteen years before he made a film with synchronised dialogue (although all films he made after ‘The Circus’ (1928) had synchronised music), so you could say he was not keeping up with what was new and fashionable. And as much as I love and admire Chaplin, he was showing his age. He also refused to move over to colour films until, shock horror, 1967 when he made ‘A Countess from Hong Kong’. He was not a man to budge on his vision and I totally respect him for that. Black & White silent films was what he did and he was going to keep making them for as long as possible. He is my hero.

What he did not realise was that the technology he was so dependent on was old hat and had been replaced.

I use Chaplin as an example because I know how he feels somewhat when it comes to CDs and other physical digital media. I was one of the first kids at school whose parents had a CD player and as a nine year old I was stunned by the quality that a CD offered. I also loved that I no longer had to turn a tape over, nor did I have to worry about the tape becoming mangled in the machine. Also gone was my arch nemesis ‘The Hiss’. Even Dolby wasn’t able to remove it completely.
CDs removed all of my gripes from listening to music. I collected music like it was going out of fashion and by the time I had my first job no record shop was safe. My main love of CDs (even above Vinyl) was the quality. I loved old LPs but they still had crackle on them which, although charming, used to really annoy me.

Then DVDs came along and I jumped on that too for the same reason that I loved CDs. Ten years after getting my first DVD I jumped over to Blu-Ray for precisely the same reasons; the quality is better.

And yet, despite the increases in Video technology, I am still buying CDs.
My wife bought me an iPod for Christmas when they were still new. I loved and still love it. It is full of every single CD, album, extended play or single I have ever owned – plus a few extras! I think that MP3s are one of the greatest inventions in the last twenty years. To be able to carry all of your music around with you on a small device still amazes me to this day.

For about six years, whenever a new album came out I would still purchase the CD out of habit but in order to listen to it I would immediately transfer it onto my iPod (reducing the quality) and hear it for the first time that way. I continued this way until my wife and I moved to the country to a smaller place and I couldn’t play my music through the amp any longer!

My first few listens of my old dusty CDs through headphones were uneventful until I went back to listening to the iPod and I noticed just how bad the MP3s sounded. It should be mentioned at this stage that the Apple codec is the one I used as a reference point. I flitted between CD and iPod on many different albums and the difference was staggering. I had forgotten just how much is lost in MP3s that is still preserved on the CD.

At this time I started to notice my friends houses; none of them had film or CD collections any more. No VHS, DVD, CD or Blu-Rays to be seen on any shelf. Some people don’t even have books. Audio is MP3, Video is MP4 or DivX AVI and books are PDF.

What the hell is going on?

All of a sudden I saw that the rise of the digital age had always been about one thing; quality. Now, it seems, it only seems to be about ‘how much’ onto ‘how small’? And also, ‘what is the lowest acceptable amount of quality we can get away with?’ seems to be to slogan companies are using.

I downloaded Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross’s excellent ‘The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo’ soundtrack as an official MP3 and I had no end of issues with the second track and my iPod putting gaps between some (not all) of the tracks. I contacted Null and ultimately I got a new download which I still wasn’t happy with – because I’m an anal audio snob. I knew it was nothing to do with Trent or Atticus; it was all to do with MP3s and my bloody iPod. I also knew that purchasing the CD would get me the higher quality version with no issues between the tracks.

I’m sorry to use Trent and Atticus as examples as I worship them and this post is not questioning the quality of their work. However, it did get me thinking more about the question; is MP3 good enough? And the answer is ‘no’. Not for me anyway. It is fine for the car, for the Shuffle if you’re going for a run and if you are only going to listen to music through a dock.
However, what about those of us who still love to sit and ‘listen’ to music? And I’m not talking about wandering around the house cleaning, vacuuming etc, I mean actually absorbing the music. If the CD were to die out completely what the hell would I do? Would people follow Trent and Atticus’s lead by releasing ALL of their albums as 320kbps MP3s? I doubt it. And besides, that’s still not as good as a CD.

This brings me onto something else about CDs that they share with Vinyl. The packaging.
I realise that CDs are a lot smaller than LPs, but at least with CDs you can still see who played that awesome guitar solo on track 3, or played drums on track 7. I have yet to come across an MP3 that fully utilises the “extra text” feature to embed such information.

I love listening to an album and flicking through the sleeve to read who is playing what on each track. You can find some real gems in there. Even my wife, who just goes with the flow when it comes to music, was thrilled to accidentally discover one of her favourite musicians guest appearing on an album she was listening to. She only discovered this by reading the sleeve of the CD.

Sadly, I believe that the CD, along with it’s younger siblings the DVD and Blu-Ray, is the last ship in the fleet that defends the sea of quality. Like Chaplin in the 1930s, I realise that I sound old fashioned and out of touch, but believe me when I say that I love anything new in the world of technology. I always have to have the NEW everything (except Apple iPads…I’m still not sold!). But I do believe that quality is seriously suffering at the moment.

I grew up embracing the clear sound of the CD compared to the audio tape. I was encouraged to enjoy stereo as opposed to mono sound. I never take quality for granted. That is why I love Blu-Ray and do not download films from the internet. Why would I watch ‘Avatar’ as a 600mb DivX AVI file that is only in stereo when I could watch it in 5.1 DTS Master Audio?

Now, I realise that I’m coming across as a pompous toss-face, but I do strongly believe that quality is important. I also believe that if we forget about the CD and more importantly the quality it delivers then we will regret it. I do not think that the CD or Blu-Ray is the future but I still think that physical media is still the best we’ve got at this moment in time.

David Bowie, another genius I love, was quoted in an interview about ten years ago (2002) saying that he believed that the future of music was in streaming. That we would no longer carry around mini hard drives with our music on but that it would be stored centrally and that we would have access to it. Amazingly here we are in 2012 with The Cloud hovering over us. But, as much as I marvel at the impressiveness of The Cloud, I am also sad that such a thing as ‘a music collection’ will be a thing of the past and only present in people’s favourites or playlists on their portable devices.

One day the CD will die, but so will MP3 and hope that whatever replaces them will be a combination of the two.

I collect CDs and my wife collects books. I hope that one day our children won’t ask ‘what are these?’.

Surprisingly motivating…

Honda TV Ad

I have a weakness for TV ads like this. I love the style, the sound, the movement.
I don’t want to buy a Honda…I just think this ad is awesome.

Cloudy with a chance for Tesla

My better half and I recently had the pleasure of seeing the animated film ‘Cloudy with a chance of Meatballs’ (2009) a few weeks ago. Aside from being fantastic fun and a film that doesn’t take itself too seriously (a growing problem with Disney/Pixar), it is noted as the first film aimed at children that I have seen that features the great Nikola Tesla as a ‘hero’.

In the film, Tesla is one of the famous inventors depicted in posters on the young Flint Lockwood’s wall. In fact, out of all of the inventors (Edison and Einstein being among them) Tesla’s poster is the one on which Flint draws the most inspiration.

Tesla's depiction in 'Meatballs'

Now, I know what you’re probably thinking – this is going to be one of those preachy blogs where someone goes on and on about their heroes! Maybe, but I’m hoping it won’t be. Please read on…

In my opinion, Tesla is a tragic example of genuine and compassionate innovation taken down by corporate greed and the matter of money over progress. I strongly believe that if we had taken on more of his ideas and inventions the world would not be in such a mess right now and we certainly would not have had that giant oil spill recently that BP are desperately trying to brush under the rug.

Tesla’s inventions and theories behind wireless electricity into our homes is in evidence today with rechargeable toothbrushes that require no physical connection and recently I noticed in The Carphone Warehouse that a new form of phone-charger has been developed whereby you simply place the phone on the ‘pad’ and it charges the phone without having to plug anything in. Purely wireless.

So, with technology like this in existence and Tesla himself having run tests to prove their safety and reliability a hundred years ago – why are we still using cable to transmit everything? This is also briefly touched upon in another film that I was impressed with, ‘The Prestige’ (2006), in which David Bowie plays Tesla with understated dignity.

With Edison doing his best to put his rival out of business, it was just a matter of time before the government and the banks realised that Tesla’s inventions had no money making potential. How could you charge people for using electricity that came freely from the air?

And this brings me back to the subtle brilliance behind ‘Cloudy with a chance of Meatballs’. Our protagonist Flint Lockwood invents a way of producing any ready-made food to order using a machine that turns water from the air into food particles.

The machine is a huge success as hamburgers, fried eggs and bacon fall like rain from the sky. There is never at any time a mention from the powers-that-be about making money from selling the food. This is dealt with by using the mountains of free food as a tourist attraction which, of course, goes disastrously wrong.

The food falling from the sky is still free. This is exactly the sort of invention that Nikola Tesla was working on a hundred years ago and the reason why this film gets me very excited. With oil being spilled into our oceans and our governments invading other countries simply to obtain more of the precious liquid – is it time we gave Tesla a posthumous second chance? Is it time we moved everything over to wireless? We can do it with mobile phones, the internet, battery powered toothbrushes and the like…so why not electricity?

If we started taking electricity from the air – as Flint takes water from the air to make his food – we could power our homes, cars, computers, hospitals. The list would be endless and the Earth has enough power for everyone.

Now, I know that this post isn’t technically about art – but at the same time it may be thanks to recent films such as ‘The Prestige’ and ‘Cloudy with a chance of Meatballs’ (both based on books, by the way) that our future gets the saviour it so desperately needs – from the past.