My Thoughts on Music Delivery Formats and The Biggest Advance in HiFi – Twittering Machines

We’ve all heard about The Next Big Thing when it comes to music delivery formats. And with every Next Big Thing comes a promise of some kind of revelatory experience that more often than not is claimed to obsolete the current Big Thing.

It’s worth noting that every current Big Thing was, at one time, The Next Big Thing—LPs>78s, Stereo>Mono, Quadrophonic>Stereo, CDs>Vinyl, Multi-Channel>Stereo, CD-Quality>Lossy, High-Res>CD-Quality, DSD>PCM, MQA>High-Res, Dolby Atmos/Immersive Audio>Stereo, and so on. Concomitant with most Next Big Things comes the pitch that we need to re-buy our music and often times new hardware to play it to really hear music “as the artist intended” or some such empty marketing pitch.

The truth about every music delivery format is not a one has ever been, nor will one ever be, a guarantee of great sound quality. From a purely sound quality perspective, you can find glorious sounding music in every single music delivery format along with pure and utter shite. This truth we hold to be self-evident.

I’ve heard 78s played back on simple systems that offered among the most moving musical experiences I’ve had the pleasure of partaking in and I find no inherent shortcomings in vinyl playback or streaming lossless files that interferes with even my closest and most concentrated listening. Nothing about these experiences needs fixing or improvement in terms of the music delivery format and I spend most days discovering new music via streaming (Tidal, Qobuz, Bandcamp) and this experience is thrilling to no end. Thrilling to no end. The fact that I have, at my desk, through my main system, or on the go access to a limitless and ever-expanding resource of glorious music that can sound glorious is a dream I never dreamed come true.

I would rank lossless streaming as The Biggest Advance in HiFi in the past decade (or more) and because of it we are living in the Golden Age of Music Discovery.

And music discovery is the reason I love hifi. I love hifi for its ability to bring us closer to music, to offer the opportunity to better understand music, and to ideally grow, as human beings, because of it. Not to mention fun, joy, excitement, dancing, singing, and feeling part of something greater than I.

While I have reported on a few Next Big Things when it comes to music delivery formats, namely DSD and MQA back in their early days, my comments and enthusiasm about both were tempered by the same thing—show me the music. Advances in music delivery formats are all well and good but if there’s little music available I’m not interested. The last thing, the very last thing I ever want to do is re-purchase the same handful of audiophile chestnuts that get dusted off and repackaged with every Next Big Thing while spending multiples more on the new hardware I need to play ‘em. What’s even worse, to my mind, is having a music delivery format dictate the music I get excited about. If I were to picture an audiophile Hell, that’s exactly what it would look like.

Which explains my interest in, and chosen profession of, focusing on gear that works with the limitless music libraries that exist on vinyl, CD, and via lossless streaming (or serving from local sources).

The notion that a new music delivery format will change my life and make me never want to listen to stereo again, a quote from a recent article in the NY Times about Dolby Atmos, is beyond ridiculous. And it is beyond ridiculous because my overriding interest in music is not about how some recordings sound, my interests are in discovering music that speaks to me on a human level.

And I prefer to explore continents not puddles.

opening image: detail of The Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, Caspar David Friedrich (1818)