Will Mowat, ex-Snap producent:
"More and more artists are engineering themselves — and the technical expectations have become lower, even though we've never had access to such high-quality audio technology! You can get away with recording a number one hit in your bedroom on a Minidisc, so I find it hard to come to terms with this split between SACD and all the other esoteric formats at one end of the scale and the MP3 culture at the other.
Most people listen on crap systems, maybe on MP3s, maybe on a hi-fi where one speaker is out of phase and facing the wrong way on a shelf — the other speaker is on the floor and has got a biro stuck through it! Or they're listening in the car where the first 200Hz are dominated by the engine noise, or on cheap headphones.
It just doesn't make sense. There seems to be a schizophrenic approach by the recording technology industry — it's not driven by the needs of the marketplace. On one hand the industry encourages us to think we need high-end tools to achieve the best quality. On the other, the audience doesn't want to pay for the music, and anyway is willing to sacrifice quality in the interests of getting it cheap or free.
The market needs fairly traded, accessible music that people will want to pay for, and we're not going to achieve that by being distracted by the likes of 24-bit, 96kHz or surround sound. SACD? What SACD? Classical music sales have never been so low. Yes I appreciate if you A/B a 16-bit CD against one of these new high-end formats, there is a difference, but it really won't make your life any better and doesn't address the real problems.
I feel very strongly that the whole music technology industry is not coming to grips with its real structural problems and the labels are, at their peril, chasing the fast buck and neglecting the long-term health of the market. I think surround sound is a red herring, a complete irrelevance to our end of the market where music is made on minimal budgets. Our concern is whether we can sell the CD, let alone a DVD!
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