Tuesday, March 22, 2005
Classical Music On The iPod
Tom Bozzo notes the tribulations inherent in building an iPod-based classical music collection.
I have run into these myself and ended up scrapping the whole endeavor. I am an audio purist, you see. While some might take ‘purist’ to mean ‘pompous fool’ (and they’d be entirely correct) it actually implies an unwavering commitment to the music. Classical music, with the exception of all that modernist tripe, is discursive in nature. Even if there is no story, no narrative, and no program, it tells us something. It requires not only undivided attention, but unbroken attention. One should hesitate to pause a symphony. The iPod psychologically facilitates pausing, fast-forwarding and rewinding, and I think that hinders the classical music experience.
Tom also notes that the iPod is better than compact discs for opera. I strongly disagree. Since its release, the iPod has had a fatal flaw that has caused classical music lovers to run for the hills at the prospect of sitting through a scene of Tristan with that little white prism in hand. There is a 1-second pause between tracks. No matter what. Even if the next track is already loaded in RAM, there is a pause. And it is a nasty little thing, too. No fade out to ease the pain; it is sharp and drastic. While this posses little problem for some symphonies and most concertos, where tracks end in silence, it is a death knell for opera on the iPod.
The biggest problem is, of course, sound quality. I appreciate MP3 as much as the next technophile. But there is significant degradation in sound, especially with music as delicate and carefully engineered (both during sound and during silence) as classical. Now, listening over those little white earbuds (which no one should do) this is scarcely a problem: you can’t hear anything at all, let alone digital artifacts from an imperfect CODEC. But a moderate to good set of cans (I use Sennheiser HD595) reveals sound issues that just ruin the milieu of being virtually there.
I purchase all of my classical music on compact disc. I appreciate the liner notes, the perfect reproduction, and the joy of taking out a disc and putting it in my CD player. That simple act makes it an occasion, which is exactly what classical music should be. A classical recording, unlike CDs in any other genre, is a reproduction of a performance. The idea is to feel like you are there. Too many problems with the iPod sully that suspension of disbelief which audio engineers have come so close to creating over the years.
UPDATE: Tom responds via e-mail and an update to the above-linked post:
I was mainly intending to refer to the annoyance of swapping discs on the go for those of us with single-disc car players. I noted to a commenter that lossless codecs are a partial solution to compression-related quality problems when disk usage is not an issue; since my main constraint is actually disk space on my PowerBook, I compromise by using a modestly higher-than-default AAC encoding rate for my own purposes.Switching CDs in the car is certainly a problem. I have a single-slot as well (though I actually prefer that to magazines) but I’ve never run into Tom’s problem on a large scale. I might in a week, when I drive up to Dartmouth alone for the first time.
Posted on March 22, 2005 10:36 AM. Permalink 