By Devin Leonard on April 12, 2012
There are many people who say Apple saved the recording industry with the iTunes Music Store, the first successful digital music retailer. Audiophiles strongly disagree. They lament that by championing tightly compressed 128 kbps (kilobits per second) song files, Apple (AAPL) popularized a low-fi format that is vastly inferior to CDs, to say nothing of traditional vinyl LPs. Now Apple arguably is making amends by promoting albums under the banner of “Mastered for iTunes,” which have been sonically upgraded by recording engineers. Andy VanDette, chief mastering engineer for Masterdisk in New York, recently remastered 15 Rush albums for iTunes. He talked to Bloomberg Businessweek’s Devin Leonard about the process and how Mastered for iTunes could change the recording industry.
It’s the natural progression of what mastering has become. When I started 26 years ago, we were in the middle of the vinyl heyday. Everything was maximized for the vinyl medium. Of course, some clients would take that and try to put it on a cassette, and it wouldn’t work on a cassette. So then we ended up mastering a special version for the cassette. Then CDs came along. The first CDs were heavily criticized. Mainly, they were just digital transfers done while we were cutting vinyl. Then CDs gained momentum. People started listening to them and said: “What is this? This doesn’t sound like the music. I’m not getting that emotion, that feeling that I want.” Then the shift became mastering for CDs. It’s been that way for some 15, 20 years. Now that no one’s buying CDs, it’s only natural that mastering would start trying to maximize for the limitations of the new format—AAC (advanced audio coding, a lossy compression format).
Why now? MP3s have been around for more than a decade and a half.
Personally, I kind of ignored MP3s, AACs as long as possible. We’re all audio snobs here. So we were hoping the next progression of audio would be something high resolution. The kids reached out and embraced something lower resolution. For a long time, I tended to say: “They’re just going to take my CD master. They’re going to rip it, and they’re going to sell it. And however it sounds is however it sounds.”
Read More: Making Music Sound Better on iTunes
No comments:
Post a Comment