WNYC’s Soundcheck talks to T-Bone Burnett, who waxes nostalgic about audio quality:

BURNETT: Between 1949 and 1952 […] the sound organizations finally published the RIAA equalization curve, which equalized all recorded music. […] Before that, every manufacturer had its own set of standards, so broadcasters and listeners were constantly having to adjust their sets to try to guess what the artist intended. And from about 1950 until the mid 1980s, everybody was speaking the same language. The audience and the artists were speaking the same language. And this extraordinary musical culture developed out of it—Elvis Presley came very shortly after that and the Beatles and on and on.

INTERVIEWER: So literally the sound of the industry was standardized.

BURNETT: That’s right. So everyone had two speakers and a turntable and an amplifier and we were all plugged in, we were all together. With the advent of digital sound all those standards were thrown out the window.

And the inertia from those old days, of making things louder to get over surface noise and brighter to mitigate the effects of the characteristics of tape or vinyl, caused people to make things brighter and louder and brighter and louder and more compressed until music’s gotten to a place where a lot of records are hard to listen to more than a song or two.

And from then, it’s step down and stepped down from tape to digital to compressed digital till now people are listening to a Xerox of a Polaroid of a photograph of a painting.

[…]

I got to the point where I did not want to put records around anymore in the way they were being put out because they didn’t represent what I wanted to hear. So I solved the problem for myself.

And the way I solved this problem for myself […] is to release all our records multi format. So that we’ll put on DVD and on the DVD will be a version that you can just put in a DVD and play on a DVD and there will also be WAV files […] that you can download on your computer. There’ll also be AAC files and MP3 files  We’re gonna sell people multiple formats for the same price as whatever people are paying now.

(Link via Cnet.)

This is all interesting, and Burnett is obviously a sophisticated guy, but isn’t a lot of this hooey? Sound quality (and, incidentally, the quality of playback equipment) has improved imeasurably for decades, with only occasional slight steps back. (The cassette era, for example.) The MP3 era that we’re in is arguably another step back, but it’s plain that it’s just temporary. Burnett’s idea about using DVD audio isn’t new or radical or anything else; it’s just the logical extension of the power of the digital convergence.

Listening to him talk confirms for me the impression of him as a nostalgist, with all the accompanying tics, the world-weariness, the wacky historiography. (”The RIAA published a paper and then … the Beatles appeared!”) Radios have static. Car radios had tinny speakers. Forty-five players sucked. Vinyl was just so-so for the vast majority of its audience and had inherent sound reproduction limitations brought on by its design as the needle moved to the center of the turntable. And then came cassettes and 8-tracks! (And he’s concerned about generation loss in the digital age?!)

Things are far better today, with CD quality being the standard and pretty good, after a few years where engineers learned to deal with the form. You can make an MP3 ripped from a CD sound slightly less good if you save it at 128kbs, or just about fine if you go to 160 or 192. And the vast increases of storage space means we’ll all soon be using the equivalent of full CD-quality WAV files in any case, with even better quality coming.

Burnett is saying that the world is about to change, again, for the better. So why does he sound so mopey and defensive?
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There’s even an upside in all this for the industry, as I wrote some time ago:

The good news for Apple and the music companies is that now they can embark on a new campaign, telling us that all our digital music just isn’t up to audio snuff—but fortunately we can now rectify it by buying from the fabulous new “Lossless Store” on iTunes!

In a few years, mp3s will be the 78s of the digital age. The genius of this is that the music industry has made a big chunk of its money the last few decades reselling us music we already have. But how can they resell us digital tracks? This is one answer. And they might even get some money back from the poor souls who digitized their CD collections into mp3s and sold off their discs; they can be guilt-tripped into buying some of it back once again.