Ears On

Why do tech critics and readers alike persist in saying "X is dead?" Do we have a morbid fascination with death, mirroring society at large? Or is it just that we never feel more powerful than when we are the arbiters of life and death, giving technology that is already moving along a certain trajectory a further push into oblivion? X, in this context, is a mature audio format or technology. (I won't address video or computer technology here. Death somehow seems more final in those categories.) A whole lot of Xes have been prematurely declared dead over the years. Maybe what "X is dead" really means is "X does not fit into my agenda."

The Perfect Sound Foreverists spent the 1980s trying to convince everyone that the LP was dead. They even had me convinced for a while. I couldn't afford to replace my entire LP collection at once, but I started letting go of a disc here, a disc there, until I stopped. At the time it was because I decided to quit using my limited resources to rebuy familiar material, acquiring new material instead. Nowadays I bitterly regret discarding, say, my mint-condition U.S. LP of Pink Floyd's Meddle. Of the several replacements I've bought since then, some are pristine, and some are vibrant, but none is both. On the bright side, I still have a substantial LP library and it's once again growing. I'm grooving on The Beatles in Mono Vinyl Box Set. Mono, a technology I had always assumed to be dead, now looks like a great new adventure waiting to be had. The demand for new vinyl has become so intense that new record presses, which haven't been manufactured in decades, are now coming to the rescue of LP manufacturers, who up to now have been frantically buying, repairing, and running old presses around the clock.

So the LP hasn't died after all. In fact, its sales have been rising for years, while sales of its putative replacement, the CD, have been plummeting for years. Does that mean the CD is dead too? Judging from my own buying habits, possibly not. Unless I can get something in a high-res digital format, I still buy CDs, and even play some of them with an antique Rotel Red Book CD player, while losslessly ripping others for consumption on my army of PCs, iPads, antique iPod nanos, and SanDisk Sansa players. Lately I've been working my way through King Crimson's Starless box set, which brings together 20 CDs with two DVD-Audio discs and two Blu-ray discs. And so a new format in its prime (BD) mingles with one reported dead (DVD-A) and another reported dying (CD). And the lion shall lay down with the lamb. No, the CD isn't a state-of-the-art digital format, but it is often an excellent value, as record companies try to wring a few more dollars out of it with vast wallet boxes. The CD isn't so much dead, or even dying, as just moving into a new phase of its life.

And that's what mature formats do. Their upward trajectories may not continue forever, and their downward trajectories can be impressively vertigo-inducing. But quite often new formats don't so much kill old formats as sneak in alongside them, nudging them off center stage without killing them entirely.

Of course, some technologies are not only really dead, but really most sincerely dead, as the Mayor of Munchkinville would have it. Some were stillborn: I'm lookin' at you, Digital Compact Cassette. Then there are the formats that blazed brightly for awhile but are now in a vegetative state, such as the Compact Cassette, a.k.a. the analog audio cassette. It was once the biggest-selling music format in the U.S., having ousted the LP before the CD came along. Now it isn't exactly booming. But with cassette decks still available from several manufacturers and some indie musicians experimenting with software releases, it isn't ready for its final dirt nap just yet. It's a very mature, almost post-mature, format. Hell, there are still people playing 78s. 8-track would be the exception that proves the rule.

In the audio/video realm, what defines a living format or a dead one? I'd argue that any format that has been supported with decades of software releases is nearly impossible to kill, or at least takes a long time to die. Our old friends and mutual antagonists, the LP and the CD, are the prime examples. Analog cassettes and 78s, while lying very still, aren't quite dead yet. Then there are the formats that never achieved mass-market dominance yet still persist with small streams of software releases. For example, SACDs never mustered the sales CDs and LPs both enjoyed for a time, yet the format still hangs on with fresh releases from small classical labels, making it a durable niche format. I've enthusiastically added to my small collections of both SACD and DVD-Audio in the last year or two. That includes Steven Wilson's 5.1 and stereo remixes of King Crimson, ELP, and XTC albums on DVD-Audio; and Janos Starker's still-in-print Mercury Living Presence recordings of cello concertos by Schumann, Lalo, and Saint-Saens on SACD.

I haven't neglected downloads. I buy some, get others as freebies thanks to my audio-critic credentials (thanks, HDtracks and Acoustic Sounds), and occasionally a friend shares some stuff that he probably hasn't paid for, though I've actually removed torrenting software from my music PC. I predict that in time, download pricing will ease off and provenance will get systematized so you'll be assured that what is labeled a high-res download will be truly high-res. Does that mean MP3 and other lossy formats are dead or dying? Nope, though I'd love to see them marginalized as much as possible, and lossy additions to my library are now rigorously limited to things I can't get in a lossless format.

Streaming—like mono!—is another new adventure waiting to be had and I admit I'm behind in this area. Every time I've tried lossy streaming, I've gotten bored and walked away. The sound quality just hasn't been good enough to capture my attention even when the music is worthy. But now Tidal is offering lossless 16-bit streaming. And a new technology by Meridian may, in time, bring lossless 24-bit streaming online. Streaming may push hard-copy formats toward obsolescence. But being obsolete is not the same as being dead.

Anyway, let's finally admit that "X is dead" is dead. It has always been a crude and misleading way to understand the way formats wax and wane, slipping into our lives, persisting for awhile, then shrinking to dots on the horizon. Instead, let those of us with large libraries in any format enjoy them without scorn, and let new generations of listeners buy The Dark Side of the Moon in any format they like.

Audio Editor Mark Fleischmann is the author of Practical Home Theater: A Guide to Video and Audio Systems.