CD > Streaming, and other things.
The Financial Times' Sarah O'Connor decided to use her discman (a gift she received in 1997) in 2024. Unsurprisingly, she discovered that the sound of the CD is much better than the sound we're used to today on streaming platforms (apart, perhaps, from the likes of Apple Music, qobuz and Tidal, which offer HiFi audio; but those aren't as popular and aren't as cheap) such as Spotify.
My ears didn't deceive me. CDs have a bit rate of 1,411 kilo-bits per second, which is a measure of how much data is used to represent sound. Spotify Premium ranges from 24 kbps to 320 kbps, while Spotify's free listeners are limited to 160 kbps at best.
Theoretically, as she herself says, we've traded quality for convenience (this goes for films and series too) by embracing streaming platforms with their mega-compressed content. The problem, as she says again, is that we don't even remember what it sounded like when we still listened to CDs. She even coined (?) the word qualitynesia for this phenomenon.
Another quote:
This is nothing new. In 1937's The Road to Wigan Pier, George Orwell argued that a century of mechanisation had worsened the quality of food, furniture, houses, clothes and entertainment, but that most people didn't seem to mind. However, he blamed ‘the terrible debauchery of taste’ rather than collective amnesia. ‘Mechanisation leads to the decay of taste, the decay of taste leads to the demand for machine-made articles and thus to more mechanisation, and so a vicious circle sets in,’ he wrote.
And we're seeing this more and more, with MDF furniture, ultra-processed foods, modular homes with designs that don't take into account the climatic characteristics of each region, among others.
I don't think that, as she says, we've forgotten the sound quality of CDs. Or as Orwel said, we're slaves to the debauchery of taste. No. I think we've just become more detached from the production chain (alienated from how things are made) because of capitalism itself. We listen to music in the background to work. We eat in front of the TV because we work so much that, if it's not during meals, we can't have a moment's entertainment.
Today's society doesn't allow workers the luxury of spending three hours a day preparing a meal, eating it, digesting it and then tidying up and watching a bit of TV. Just as we are no longer allowed to sit down and listen to a complete album. We consume books standing up on the way to work; we work connected to podcasts and music (or noises) to help us concentrate on useless work. We eat quickly so that we can catch up on the new series, or watch the new film that's up for an Oscar. We slept on medication to rest (if we rested at all) so that we could wake up and work even harder the next day.
We've been denied any bit of pleasure, culture and peace. The proof of this is that we don't even remember what a CD or LP sounded like.
And the trend is getting worse as our entertainment is being produced with the help of AI.