Monday, April 25, 2005
Conservative Audiophile Alert
Tom Bozzo is testing my allegiances: the GOP or high-fidelity:
This… goes out to Joe Malchow.Touché.PRESIDENT BUSH: Offering young workers a 1930’s-era retirement system is like trying to persuade them that vinyl LPs are better than iPods.
One thing that confuses me about the new “modernization” label for Social Security privatization… is that I’d think conservative audiences would be particularly attuned to the issue that newer is not necessarily better.
I hold that purists who claim that vinyl is inherently better than the compact disc are dead wrong. Newer is better, there. I am an audio liberal: I admit it.
But here’s the rub: to bring iPod into the discussion isn’t fair.
A 56kbps MP3 file on an iPod will sound as good as an LP- with, I think, comparable bandwidth and dynamic range. A 256kbps MP3 file on an iPod will sound almost as good as a CD, with all the attendant digital niceties. On an iPod, it is all about choice. The consumer gets to determine whether he wants to sacrifice the storage possibilities and load up pristine recordings, or whether he wants to be a bit more traditional and save his hard-drive space by using low or medium-fidelity files. Modernity has brought us that freedom of choice in the musical domain. Shouldn’t it do the same for retirement savings?
Posted on April 25, 2005 04:02 PM. Permalink 