Hasta La Gadget!

Technology always helped bring the listener closer to the music. Progressing from wax tubes, to records, to cassettes, to CDs, each jump has benefited the music fan. But maybe it’s gone a bit too far.

The History

Admittedly, new music formats have always changed the way we listen to music. However, I don’t think any have had such an effect over the last 60 years as the move to MP3 and other digital file formats. The advent of the 45 RPM single in the 50s is arguably the first big shift in the way popular music was consumed. Records went from longer-playing 78s and 33s, to the cheaper 45 format, which carried two or three songs on a disc, and became much more accessible for mass consumption. Soon, every big pop artist was releasing their big hits on 45s, and this became the main mode of consumption.

Then came cassettes, which shrank down the record onto magnetic film and brought the long-playing album back into vogue. Cassingles also remained popular among consumers, but the idea of the album as the main purchase was gaining steam again because tapes were more durable and easier to store. It also made it possible for people to record their own mixes very easily.

But the problem with all these analog formats is that they wore down and degraded over time. Vinyl lost it’s sound quality the more you played it, scratched easily, and storing it in the wrong place climate would warp it’s shape. Tapes would sound muffled over time, and the actual tape could easily be spooled out from the cassette.

Enter the Compact Disc. Created as a way to prevent the degradation of sound over time, the compact disc ushered in the digital era of music, but it wasn’t without complaints. Audiophiles said the sound was cold and sterile, and purists worried about the idea you could skip around the album order so easily, that albums were meant to be listened to sequentially, and not on one-track repeat for hits. It also wasn’t impervious, still liable to scratching and subsequent choppy playback. Still, it was the best available option to get music to consumers, until the MP3.

Too Much Music

Sometimes, I feel the rise of MP3s made music too easy to obtain. Instead of taking time to appreciate good work, we now devour as much music as we possibly can. My music collection feels increasingly impersonal, to the point that I have albums I’ve forgot I downloaded. Sometimes I’ll listen to an album I like just once, and never touch it again. Why?

Because at any given time, I have about 10-20 other new albums I’m wanting to check out. There’s just not enough time to give every album the same attention, and when you try to really get into a handful of albums, you miss out on 100 other new releases.

The MP3 era is enabling the music junkie’s futile quest to stay up on all music, at all times.

But that’s not to say it’s all bad. Albums that used to take me months to track down in the past can be found with a few minutes of google ingenuity. I’ve been able to listen to artists I might have only known by name in the past, and not have to wait for corporate America to make their music accessible to the masses.

Narrowing Tastes

Despite the greatly enhanced variety of music available to the average music listener, I feel like people’s tastes are actually narrowing, more than they’re branching out. Sure, the hardcore music fan will go out and dig out obscure artists in 20 different genres. But for the casual indie rock fan, it’s just as easy to go out and find 20 other bands who sound just like Sigur Ros.

As a result, you find people digging deeper into genres that they really like, while ignoring the access they have to so many other great genres. The rise of internet forums and communities based around certain kinds of music have only helped listeners to identify with other like-minded individuals and firmly entrench themselves.

However, the rise of unclassifiable, genre-free music this decade would seem to go against my notion of narrowing tastes. Fans have embraced musicians who pull from a variety of seemingly unrelated influences, and reassemble the parts into a whole new beast.

Artists as big as Timbaland, as small as the Avalanches, as weird as Flying Lotus, or as colorful as M.I.A have all made a name for themselves by consciously ignoring the boundaries of genre. And as a result, I’ve seen myself and many of my friends digging into genres, past and present, they previously had ignored. We’re better music fans because of this.

The Death of the Album, The Rise of Musical A.D.D.

I blame the iPod. Before MP3s, when you wanted to listen to something, you at least had to insert a complete album, or at least take the time to piece together a mixtape. Tracklists meant more back then, because it was more difficult to rearrange the order (save for the skip/shuffle functions).

These days, you can crap out whatever you want into an unfocused playlist and take it on the go. Add or subtract songs in a matter of seconds, it’s a thought-free process. There’s no need to give a whole album the time of day anymore when you can just add your favorite. We all have Musical A.D.D.

But the truth is, I’m just being a paranoid purist. When CDs first came out, vinyl purists lamented how too many tracks were packed into the 74-minute capacity discs, and how easily people could just switch from track to track. Before that, the entire pop music culture was formed around 45 RPM singles in the 50s and 60s.

So while the crotchety old man in me wants to say that we need to preserve the complete album, the truth is that it’s significance among music fans has always changed and evolved.

As much I want to say MP3s have ruined all our listening habits, the truth is, they’ve just pushed us into the next wave of music culture. Maybe it means the album tracklist really is dead. Maybe I’ll only listen to a complete album once or twice from here on out. Or maybe it just means people need to start making more interesting albums worthy of such attention.

So this is pretty out-of-the-ordinary looking. LEGO‘s recently-announced MP3 player — produced through a partnership with Digital Blue — fits in nicely with the rest of the company’s kiddie gadget offerings, though we’ll admit that this is probably the first one we’re truly tempted to check out for ourselves. These bad boys have 2GB of storage, LCD displays, and unlimited attitude. It’s got that sweet brick shape that brings to mind memories of our olden days while staying on top of the latest tech that kids today demand… you know, MP3s of Miley Cyrus and stuff. Right? The MP3 players — in multi-color and pinkish (for girls) — will be available sometime this summer for $39.99

LEGO MP3 player: another brick in your kid’s wall of sound originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 17 Apr 2009 14:12:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Beatles’ record producer and arranger George Martin—the Fifth Beatle—once said: “You’ve never really heard Sgt Pepper until you’ve heard it in mono.” As it turned out after hours of listening tests, it’s completely true.

The first article I ever got published was an opinion piece on Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. I was 16 at the time and, needless to say, quite naive. I wasn’t very much into non-Beatles music at that age, mainly because I didn’t have much access to it. It wasn’t until the next year that I was able to buy music regularly, having at last my own stereo system. But back then, my music world was all about the Beatles—and crap 90s radio pop. My dad had Sgt Pepper along with the rest of the Beatles’ records and some compilations of classic rock, from Chuck Berry to bloody Kansas, so that was my music world.

I couldn’t stop listening to Sgt Pepper. Non stop, I played it and played it until my ears bleed and then I played it some more. It was the stereo version, not the mono mix, and it has lived with me ever since. Then, a few months ago I read in The Word—a very good British music magazine—that the Beatles in mono are—like George Martin implied—better than the Beatles in stereo. Apparently, the Beatles didn’t give a damn about the stereo mix, only about the mono. In fact, they cared so little that they passed on the stereo mixing sessions: Once the mono was done, they left the building.

So I started looking for them. Finding the actual mono mix in the market was impossible. Not to talk about the fact that I don’t have a turntable anymore. For some reason, the Beatles company didn’t have the mono mixes of the Beatles’ albums available either—they are going to re-release them now, it seems, remastered—so I got into Torrent to hunt them down. I couldn’t find them in the first try. I found a couple of MP3 rips, but I wanted to have FLAC rips of the original vinyls. After some time I gave up, forgetting about the mono Beatles until the Gizmodo’s audio week.

I thought trying it would be interesting for a feature, so I started looking for them again and got 192kbps MP3s, which I compared to the stereo version at the same bit rate. Since Sgt Pepper was my album, I started to listen to its songs in pairs, with my earmuff headphones on.

I was blown away. George Martin was oh so right: The songs do sound different. I was so surprised, that at the beginning I freaked out. “What? What? How? What the fuck?” was in my mind all the time.

When Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band came up, my first impression was that the sound had more thump than the stereo mix. A lot more thump, for a lack of a better word. It was like someone was beating me with a hammer. It was kind of noisy, but it filled my head and pushed me in a way the stereo version didn’t.

Then good old Ringo—my favorite Beatle—came up singing With A Little Help From My Friends. Same effect. It felt weird, but so much better. I kept coming back to the stereo versions for comparison and, before I noticed, I was thinking: “These sounds a lot weaker. These sound artificial.” Gone was the separation of instruments in the right and left channel too, which now feels so artificial. It was artificial, since stereo was a novelty back then: Most people still listened to music in mono and stereo was the “new thing.” As a result, producers overused it, just for the sake of it, like when 3D cinema came out and everything was an excuse to fire arrows and rocks and monsters at the public.

I definitely liked the way the mono version sounded—a lot more, even while I knew the stereo version till the last beat and note. LSD came up: same result. The sound is crisper and nearer. The bass a lot better. Again that special thump, even while this is such a delicate song. Getting Better gets better, and so does the rest, Fixing a Hole, She’s Leaving Home, Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite… I just couldn’t have enough.

But that wasn’t all. In the mono version you can hear stuff that is not in the stereo version. And not just bits, but quite a lot of things. Instruments, notes, even lyrics. Take the reprise version of Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band: It is full of shouting—Lennon going bananas at the end, and other bits at the beginning—that is not in the stereo mix.

Maybe it’s the novelty of listening to a “new” take on something that I know by heart, but I doubt it. As an experience, I like it a lot better. So much that I’m dying to get FLAC versions of good vinyl rips—or the remastered mono versions, as soon as they come out. And while your taste may be different, from now on this is the version I’m keeping in my iPod.

Listening Test: It’s music tech week at Gizmodo.

A speaker system can cost as little as $35. Or as much as $350,000. As a normal person, you probably have just one question about speakers that cost as much a Ferrari: What. The. Hell.

How Speakers Work
Especially when you consider just how simple the overall mechanism behind a standard speaker is: It moves air. Essentially, what happens in a speaker—loudspeaker, to be technical—is that the alternating current from an amplifier runs to the speaker and through the voice coil (which is just, wait for it, a coil of wire) turning the coil into an electromagnet. That, in turns, creates a magnetic field between it and the permanent magnet in the driver. As the current alternates between positive and negative, the magnets are attracted and repulsed, moving the cone back and forth. Voila, it emits the soothing sounds of Bach or Korn. (Driver diagram from Wikipedia’s unusually exceptional loudspeaker article.)

But that’s probably not quite what you think of when you hear “speaker.” You’re probably thinking of a box with a circle thing and maybe a hole in it. That’s actually a loudspeaker system, and it actually has more than one kind of speaker inside of it, called drivers. That’s because the driver tuned to deliver high frequencies—a tweeter—ain’t so good at delivering bass, which is why you need a woofer or subwoofer (low and lower). And then you’ve got mid-range speakers—for mid-range sounds—in higher-end systems. Your average GENERIC SPEAKER COMPANY set skips this middleman. So generally two or more drivers are stuffed in a box or cabinet, called an enclosure.

Lovely, but that doesn’t explain what separates these $107,000 YG Acoustics Anat Reference II speakers from the $50 Logitech Z-2300s on my desk—which are even THX certified. So, we enlisted some help: Cnet’s Audiophiliac Steve Guttenberg, who lives and breathes speakers ranging from the sensible to the ludicrous, and Paul DiComo and Matt Lyons, speaker guys who came from Polk and are now at Definitive Technology.

If you read our profile of Audiophile Maximo Michael Fremer “Why We Need Audiophiles,” it probably won’t surprise that when initially asked simply, “What the difference between ten dollar speakers and ten thousand dollar speakers?” the Definitive guys’ initial answer was, “Well, it ought to be that they sound better.” Even Steve told us, “You can’t apply a Consumer Reports kind of index to something that’s as subjective as audio quality.”

No, but seriously.

The Goal of a Loudspeaker
A speaker’s ultimate goal is “to sound like reality”—the elusive dragon that every audiophile chases—so on a broad, not-very-useful level, how close it comes to matching that reality is the difference between good and bad, expensive and cheap speakers. To be slightly more technical, the “spec” is clarity: The lower the distortion of the original sound it recreates, the better the speaker. In fact, basically every other spec, every confusing number you read on the side of a box is actually totally meaningless, according to both Steve and the Definitive guys. Steve singles out watts as “one of the more useless specifications ever created.” If you have to look for a number when buying speakers, Steve said one that’s “kind of useful” is sensitivity/efficiency, which would be something like 90dB @ 1 watt, which relates how loud a speaker will play at a given power level.

Three Characteristics
But when pressed, there are a few qualities Paul and Matt from Definitive singled out in amazing speakers—what they call the big three:
• More dynamic range, or simply the ability to play louder without sounding like trash as you crank the volume. With good speakers, you want to keep cranking it up, like accelerating a fast car.
• Better bass. That doesn’t mean louder, “but better.” It’s more melodic, and not muddy—you can actually hear individual notes, an upright acoustic bass being plucked.
• “A very natural timbre.” Timbre is the “tone color” or how natural the sound is—if you played the voice of someone you know on a speaker with excellent timbre, it would sound exactly like them. Or if two different instruments play the same note, you’d be able to tell them apart very easily and cleanly.

Beyond that, what audiophiles are looking for—which Mahoney alludes to in the audiophile profile—is a speaker’s ability to create an image, the picture. That is, its ability to create a sense of three-dimensional sound. The defining problem of designing speakers, say the guys from Definitive, is that “physics is dogmatic.” So every speaker is built around a set of compromises.

Size
To put that in some concrete—rather than seemingly religious—terms, you can’t have a small speaker that sounds good. So one defining quality of six-figure speakers is that they are large. They have bigger woofers and tweeters. More surface area means better sound. There are also simply more drivers—every driver you add is like when you add another string to a guitar, to create a better-nuanced sound. So, for instance, a $300 speaker from a “quality manufacturer” you’ll get a 5 1/4-inch woofer and a 1-inch tweeter. A $3000 pair of speakers might have two 5 1/4 mid-range drivers and then a 10-inch woofer.

Build Quality
Build quality is the other thing. A “dead box,” or an enclosure that doesn’t create any sounds of its own—since that’s distortion—is key and something that costs a lot of money. You just want sound from the drivers themselves. The quality of the woofer and tweeter themselves, obviously, comes into play—their ability to handle more power, since that’s what translates into volume.

At the extreme end, Steve says, they can just handle more power without breaking—as the copper wire inside heats up, it can deform or melt, and the driver gets messed up. Pricey speakers don’t do that. In terms of exotic materials or construction, Steve mentioned ribbon tweeters, which are only in the highest-end speaker systems—they’re “literally a piece of aluminum foil that’s suspended between magnets that vibrates back and forth” producing excellent clarity. Better speakers also have intricate dividing networks to make sure the right signals go to the right place—they get more complicated as the price goes up.

Dollar Figures
So how much do you have to spend to get a good system in the eyes (ears?) of an audiophile? Definitive recommends $1000 for a home-theater component setup. (In other words, don’t buy a home theater in a box.) You can also get a pretty decent pair of “neutral, natural sounding” speakers for $300—they “won’t knock your ass” and won’t be great as some things, but they’ll be alright. There’s no magic one-size-fits-all speaker system, however. It depends on the room and the situation. (If your couch is against a wall, skip the 7.1 surround, says Steve.) Heavier speakers tend to sound better than lighter ones, though that’s not an absolute.

But what’s the upper limit? Well, there isn’t any. Paul from Definitive said he heard these $65,000 Krell Modulari Duo last month and “was mezmerized.” It’s like wine to oenophiles, Paul said. As Steve puts it most simply: “To people who are into it, it’s worth it.”

Still something you still wanna know? Send any questions about speakers, KoRn or John Mahoney’s secret Britney shame to tips@gizmodo.com, with “Giz Explains” in the subject line. Big thanks to Steve from Cnet and Paul and Matt from Definitive Technology!

Listening Test: It’s music tech week at Gizmodo.

MTV doesn’t play music videos. Magazines are dying. Radio is all about the $$$. It’s no secret the old modes of music discovery have been thrown out the window. Thankfully, new music-finders are here:

I think anyone reading this understands that the internet is the new trading post for artists, listeners, critics and salesmen. It’s impossible to avoid some of the marketing campaigns carried out on MySpace and YouTube, but mostly music’s move to the internet gives listeners more power to develop their own tastes, for better or for worse. You can turn to MP3 stores, recommendation services, internet radio and podcasts, MySpace—and even personal music blogs and forums that’ll help you “sample” pirated music. Here’s my take on each method of discovery and the relevance it has to listeners:

Recommendation Services

The Pandoras, Rhapsodys and Last.fms of the world are nice, because they do most of the discovery work for you, without pushing some corporate agenda on you behind the scenes (…ahem…Clear Channel). Even better, these services cater their first song selections around your initially revealed tastes, and as you give the software feedback as to what you like and don’t like, they continue to refine and improve their artist recommendations. Zune’s Mixview also provides a similar service, visually recommending similar artists and songs to those already in your library.

But my problem with a service like this is that you don’t necessarily get music that’s really new or groundbreaking. Sure, it might be new or exciting to the casual music fan, or just someone who spends all their time listening to these services, but for the true junkie—okay, maybe “music snob”—it’s hard to really be wowed by any of these services. We’ve seen and heard most of it before.

MP3 Stores

Sometimes looking for new music to actually buy is a great way to discover new stuff. Whenever I stop through the legendary Amoeba Records in SF to buy actual, real CDs and vinyl, half my stack is full of stuff I’m completely unfamiliar with. The same holds true with MP3 stores.

Whether it’s the monoliths like the iTunes and Amazon mp3 stores, or smaller music peddlers like Boomkat, Bleep, Beatport or Juno, most these stores not only let you click through and listen to all the 30-clips you can handle, but they have tons of recommendations in the sidebars, allowing you to explore similar artists and sounds. The only problem with this? If you don’t want to buy all these tracks, hunting them down again is a drag. And in the case of some of the more obscure stores, you might not find the songs anywhere else.

Internet Radio and Podcasts
The beautiful thing about radio in its prime was that, top hits and genres-aside, you never knew what you were going to hear at any specific moment. That unpredictability has an addictive quality to it, and internet radio preserves that spirit to a degree. Though not as popular in the era of the iPod, I still tune in to internet radio stations when I’m feeling bored with my music collection.

Two of my personal favorites are KCRW out of LA, which sticks to indie and the non-top-40 pop hits, and Rinse FM out of London, which has a current rotation of DJs spinning Grime, Dubstep, House and whatever other electronic genres are currently bubbling over there. My favorite thing about these two stations are that they put the content above all else—playing music they like, and not necessarily music that will sell. (On perhaps the complete other end of the music spectrum, Wilson recommends similarly free-minded stations WFUV in New York, and KEXP in Seattle.)

The risk you run in your path of discovery, however, is that if your ears are at the mercy of the DJ you’re listening to on internet radio, and if you don’t like their taste, hard luck.

MySpace and Twitter

This is what I sort of view as the great democratic project in music. The complaint while the internet was in its infancy was that big media and big corporations had too much influence over what music made it, and what didn’t. Obviously that’s all changed, in large part to MySpace.

As a social media service at large, MySpace is an eyesore and an abomination. But as a place to discover new music, believe it or not, it’s an invaluable goldmine. Big artists, small artists, fat artists, skinny artists—hell, your mom—all have the same basic framework at their dispersal to reach the masses when they’re using MySpace. Here you can find your favorite established artists sneaking new tracks up on their page, you can find work from newer artists who have no official releases out, or you can stumble upon that completely random, brilliant band of 17-year-olds from Pawnee, Oklahoma throwing out avant-garde acid pop.

But the best part, is that you can click around their grid of friends, who most of the time are other musicians, and you can get lost in musical worlds you didn’t know existed. I spent eight hours doing this one night last winter, and found enough new artists and styles that kept me interested for the rest of the year.

On the Twitter side, it’s mostly just good for gathering names and news, but the fact that more musicians, writers and other people of interest are using the service to jot down thoughts means you get to see what they’re into at any given moment. People ranging from The Root’s ?uestlove, to The New Yorker’s music writer Sasha Frere-Jones, to Diplo all twitter frequently about the new music they’re digging at the time.

The Online Music Media

The big music magazines, like Rolling Stone and The Source, went from influential and respected in their prime for their great taste and writing, to walking punchlines later on for their willingness to make a buck at the cost of content. What this did was open the door for music blogs to jump in and give readers a new place to figure out what’s new and good in the world of tunes.

Most of the bigger/more general music blogs (Pitchfork, Stereogum, Gorilla vs Bear) will never be the first ones to break a new artist, but they will be quick to tell you when known artists have new works available or coming out soon. Smaller, niche blogs (The Fader, Xlr8r, Valerie), however, will cultivate their sites like boutiques of taste, and always look for what’s next in music, as opposed to what’s now.

Filtering through sites like this takes a decent amount of work, however, and is for the dedicated music fan. Lesser enthusiasts need not apply.

“Sampling”

The Somali method is for the most hardcore of the hardcore. People who don’t want to wait for the media to tell them what’s what, and would rather just “sample” it for themselves, hit the internet hard and heavy for albums that leak weeks, sometimes months, ahead of their release.

“Sampling” these albums is not for the faint of heart. It takes a general sense of music knowledge, music news, ability to follow the right websites and some technical know how. Bittorrent (and once upon a time, Oink…RIP) is a hotbed for many music leaks as they hit, but since it’s tough to mask your IP address if you’re not in a private community, it’s easier to “sample” the same album using RapidShare, MegaUpload or Mediafire. (In case you’re wondering, avoid RapidShare at all costs, use Mediafire whenever possible…you’ll save like 5 years of your life).

Generally the best place to “sample” these links to new album leaks are in the threads music-related forums. This could be a forum for an artist, a record label, a genre, or just music in general, but people always start an upload thread full of links for you to troll.

There are also blogs and sites that keep track of the latest leaks. Bolachas Gratis is probably the most famous of the bunch, famously hopping from blog service to blog service, finding a new home to post links to albums for you to “sample.” Nodata.tv aims to do something similar, while there’s another site, Did It Leak, that just lists albums it’s seen floating around the internet. They even have a Twitter feed.

These days, once you have an album title, its as simple as visiting Google Blog Search, MAYBE typing an album name in the search bar in quotes, and MAYBE adding a 2009 and “+rar” or “+zip” to the search string (NO IDEA what those mean!). Search around for a few bit blogs that may have a link, and bam—new music to “sample”.

This is undoubtedly the best method for pure discovery, because it lets you chase down the latest and greatest in music without being tainted by anyone else’s opinion or tastes. But it also requires an obsessive, nerdish approach to music fandom that may have ramifications on your social life. Not to mention a total disregard for the economics of the music business, and for the needs of artists to be remunerated for their work. So, you know, proceed with caution.

Listening Test: It’s music tech week at Gizmodo.