Forget CD quality, give us studio quality
Friday, December 6th, 2002I just read Dave’s How to Revive AOL scenario, which hinges on making Time Warner’s entire music catalog available to AOL subscribers via a Napster-like system. It brought back memories: The week after Napster got slapped with an injunction, Wired editor Adam Fisher tried to get Courtney Love to propose this exact same scenario in a Dear Steve Case letter for our P2P cover story, as a next step after her famous speech about the financial math of the music biz. Courtney was busy, but maybe they’ll listen to Dave.
I’m waiting for the major labels to get past the whole CD-vs-MPEG thing and start selling me the same 24 bit, 96 or 192 Khz files created by musicians in the recording studio. “CD quality” is a term audio engineers use sarcastically. The format was defined more than twenty years ago, and now seems as chunky as Yul Brynner’s digitized android eyesight in WestWorld. I’m expecting Steve Jobs to unveil Macs and iPods with 24 bit audio support any day now. Hey, I’d buy one. Especially if I could also pay to find and download new studio-quality music files directly through iTunes.
