Alan Ratcliffe wrote:
To be fair, there are extremes on both sides. There are the terrible "consumer" grade things that you mention, which do sound truly horrendous (I've got one, but heaven forbid I actually use it for music - or anything other than making movies louder). And don't get me started on badly ripped 128KB MP3s played on overpriced iPods... Or people who think that audio quality is measured solely by how much your windows rattle...
On the extreme end, way over on the other side, there's your marketing and pseudoscience driven purchaser who will "invest" tens of thousands in wooden knobs and directional AC power cables with flux capacitors to guide the midichlorians, simply because a glossy magazine ad or flash banner ad told him it will make everything sound that much better. The "listen with their wallet" types and the emperor's new clothes types...
But there's plenty of middle ground, ranging from good to "wow!". We do need something much better than MP3's on an iPod for the mass market too. Listening is a skill that gets better with practice and until the general public starts being exposed to better quality audio (and music), they are never going to know any better.
Sigh...I only started listening to music towards the end of highschool so I lost a few years of practice... lol...
So I often have conversations with our keyboard player where he is like "can you hear that electric guitar riff in there?" and I am like "uh... nope", then he'll hum/whistle it and then I can hear it... I can already hear a lot more detail than say 5 years ago... but I still need a lot of practice!
