Inflatable Sheep

Santa was good to me this year. One gift I received was a USB turntable. I have two large boxes of my own records and my parents records that go back to the 30's out in the garage, so I was really happy to be able to hear through my computer the Christmas songs of my childhood on Christmas Eve.

The turntable came with the open source ap, Audacity (for both Macs and PCs). I successfully recorded Jeff Beck's Gets Us All in the End and converted it to an mp3. Then I played it on iTunes. Yuck!

Was it just that recording? I got out REO Speedwagon's You Can Tune a Piano But You Can't Tuna Fish and recorded the ever-yearning ballad, “Sing to Me.”. I played the exported mp3…yuck. I played the version I downloaded from iTunes last year. I played the Audacity .aup file. So, even with all the snap, crackle and pop, the .aup version was better than the other two. For one thing, there were highs and lows.

I need to do the same thing with an album vs. a CD, but I suspect it will be the same deterioration. I'm no audiophile, but this is crap. I've gotten so used to crap that until I played my records (and that's through computer speakers as opposed to a whole stereo system), I didn't know what I was missing.

Then I read The Death of High Fidelity and now I know the technical reasons why the degradation.

And I thought the death of the guitar solo sad.