More Classical MP3ness – What ACD Actually Meant
Ah-ha! Now I understand more fully what ACD at Sounds and Fury intended in his recent post about bloggers and iPod playlists. What he really didn’t like was the emphasis of the MP3 player as a means to listen to classical music, because he feels it is way down at the low end of the fidelity-of-experience spectrum. The primary point is that any recording of a piece – whether it’s as high-range as studio DAT tapes played back on a $100,000 stereo, or as low as a VHS recording of a concert – is an inherently different and imperfect experience than is being there while the music is actually performed, live and in your face.
The way I initially read it (and I read it about five times – it wasn’t nearly as much of a knee-jerk reaction as the one he is suspicious of, honest!) was: since iPods are basically pretty crappy at reproducing music, people shouldn’t post iPod playlists, as this might encourage people to use them to listen to classical music. I then defended this by arguing it was not necessarily such an awful experience as he thought it was. Besides, anything which encourages people to listen to classical is (almost certainly probably) a good thing.
I still don’t think that putting up a specifically iPod playlist is really a big deal; but maybe that’s because my eyes kind of blank out the iPod in the sentence. I spend so much time listening to music in-ear that it seems completely natural to bias a weekly selection of pieces toward that particular listening method, instead of just calling it a neutral “playlist.” If I didn’t spend so much time with my earbuds plugged in I guess all the ipodification could well get irritating. I suspect that most iPod playlist-putter-uppers who specify the “iPod” bit are thinking in a similar way – they aren’t putting that particular noun in there deliberately, it just comes out like that.
Maybe the most important thing is simply for people to be aware of the limitations of the method which they are using to listen to their music. As JonJ pointed out in a comment, basically what it comes down to is that one needs to be satisfied with the quality of the stuff you’re pumping into your ears, but it’s also important to be aware of that quality. I suspect quite a few (for example, someone who gets almost everything off of iTunes instead of ripping from CDs) people haven’t had the benefit of experiencing just how bad a piece sounds on a low quality system when compared to a high quality one, and how poor both are when compared to the real thing.
