I equate this to the woe I feel for my young children who will be growing up in a society that only knows fear-ridden security, reduced civil freedoms, and 2-hour waits at the airport. At least we can fondly remember a time that was. But I digress. This isn’t the Association for Depressed Melancholy.

Now onto my would-be article:
“Quality peaked with the compact disc”
Okay, I know … it’s a strange title for my first ADM blog post. What the heck does it mean? For the last many years, I’ve been a torn by the advent of fast, convenient content delivery (YouTube, podcasting, iPods, PDAs, cell phones). Sure, they’re super-cool and tech must-haves, but when these new media delivery methods came along in the late 1990s, actual content quality started to decline.

Let me explain … Back when phonograph recordings were made (I know at least some of you had LPs?) they were meticulously pressed in near-perfect analog audio quality from analog 24-track masters. For the home market, that migrated to 45s, reel-to-reels, 8-track tapes, and then audiocassettes. Along the way, the content was stored in an uncompressed (and really good quality) analog audio format. The one problem was physical degradation of the media. Along came compact discs in the 1980s, and it solved that problem. And with CDs the content was, for the first time, compressed. Mind you, it was a fairly nominal compression at around a 1.2 mbps data rate and 44.1 kHz sample rate.

Then along came the Fraunhofer Society, and in 1991 the MP3 (MPEG-1, layer 3) format was born. It marked a significant and steady change in how content is delivered and stored. Great was the push for smaller files sizes while sacrificing quality. 14400 baud modems are to blame, really. Since the bandwidth was small, the answer was compression. These compression schema did help the flood of media onto the Internet, but it also created a little-known (or cared about) effect of lower quality. If you were to listen to the same song on a record album and as an MP3, you would notice the huge difference in quality. Problem is, who has record players anymore? They’re cumbersome, expensive, and hard to convert into that “Walkman” form factor. Imagine the iLP? Sorry, no. And the even stranger thing is, the vast majority of consumers don’t care about the lower audio quality. They want convenience over quality. Broadcast TV stations must adhere to strict quality standards set by the FCC, and yet popular YouTube videos have views into the tens of millions.

Now, this would be fine, if it weren’t for the fact that an entire generation of global consumers are only ever going to consume their media via iPods, cell phones, and computers. They will never know the true joy of listening to Queen’s “A Night at the Opera” on an LP. It’s truly a transcendental experience that I have only in memory. Does this mean I’ll stop my subscription to Ask a Ninja? Of course not.