The death of high fidelity
Musical high fidelity is dead according to Robert Levine. I think he is on to something that until this year I had not fully realized. I remember in my high school years in the Baltimore, MD suburb of Columbia I would frequent this great record trader store up
Reisterstown Rd in Owings Mills. it is there I secured my first Half Speed LP The Dark Side of the Moon. I thought I would wear the groves out of that album but I never did. I had a ham friend (actually several) who worked at Bendix in Columbia (my back yard because I lived near Thunderhill Rd.). He had access to expensive test equipment like spectrum analyzers (this was in 1975 before the days of Fourier transform equations were widely prevalent. This was a Hewlett Packard sweep resolution analyzer (half a million dollars in those days). One day we got the idea to measure the dynamic range of my DSotM album. I don’t remember which song it was now (probably Money) but he was astonished at the range in the song. My turn table at the time was a pretty high end Marantz that I had on loan from another friend. We sampled other albums I had but none compared to that Half-Speed. I was hooked and soon blew all my money on records. When you compare today mp3’s made from a compact disc with their album counterparts you can definitely tell the difference even with cheaper equipment. I think our younger inexperienced audiences have become used to this compressed expended digital music world but old timer audiophiles like myself are still kickin it old skewl.