To hear the public press tell the story, things always used to be better. Music was better, movies were better, TV was better.

This is almost never true, for all sorts of reasons. One is the selectivity of history. It’s easy to think that every movie made in the 1940s was superior because every ’40s flick you see is a stunner. That’s because you’re only watching 20 or 30 films from the era–the ones that people still want to see today.

The flipside of that is neglecting to mention the bad stuff. When CDs came in, paeans to the LP were heard everywhere (and still are). One thing you didn’t hear is that response on an LP plummeted as the needle headed toward the center of the disc; that’s why so many album sides begins with loud rockin’ tracks and end with softer ones. Isn’t that an unforgivable technical compromise?

Anyway, Lee Gomes in the WSJ ($) tells us how mp3s are ruining music:

If it seems like you are listening to music more but enjoying it less, some people in the recording industry say they know why. They blame that iPod that you can’t live without, along with all the compressed MP3 music files you’ve loaded on it.

Those who work behind-the-mic in the music industry — producers, engineers, mixers and the like — say they increasingly assume their recordings will be heard as MP3s on an iPod music player. That combination is thus becoming the “reference platform” used as a test of how a track should sound.

Wasn’t it ever thus? Didn’t kids walk around with crummy little cassette Walkmans? (In the mid-1970s, I am embarrassed to recall, I had a funky little portable 8-track-tape player I lugged around.) And what about AM car radios? Isn’t it pop lore that Motown producers carefully listened to their productions through tinny car speakers?

But now all of a sudden the iPod is ruining fine music:

All these engineers tend to be audiophiles, the sort who would fuss over a track to make it perfect. But they’re beginning to wonder if they should bother.

“I care about quality, even though the kid on the street might like what he hears on MySpace, which is even worse than an MP3,” said Stuart Brawley, an L.A. engineer who has recorded Cher and Michael Jackson. “We try to make the best quality sound we can, but we increasingly have to be realistic about how much time we can spend doing it.”

Howard Benson, who has done work for Santana and Chris Daughtry, says members of a studio recording crew will sometimes complain after a session, “I just spent all this time getting the greatest guitar and drums solo, and it ends up as an MP3.”

Sigh. Gomes is a smart guy, and notes a lot of caveats at the end of his column, but his thoughts are ill-timed. The fact is, as I noted below, the compressed mp3 sound will be an evanescent phenomenon. Already the new 160-gig iPod will hold 9,000 or 10,000 songs, or the entire CD collection of most music fans, in the Apple Lossless format, which promises full CD-quality sound.

The story ends with this indefensible quote from studio owner Skip Saylor, nostalgia-monger extraordinaire:

Still, engineers experience some nostalgia about earlier technologies. Says Mr. Saylor, “What we’ve lost with this new era of massive compression and low fidelity are the records that sounds so good that you get lost in them. “Dark Side of the Moon” — records like that just aren’t being made today.”