On recorded sound quality
Its no surprise to my family and friends that I am a stickler (perfectionist?) when it comes to the fidelity of recording and albums. It served me well working in a high-fidelity stereo shop for five years. I'm thankful that the internet revolution, especially in the music industry, now can deliver quality sound to our homes. I'm a subscribe to the B&W Society of Sound which sends better-than-CD-quality downloads each month. Linn Music out of the UK also offers HQ downloads. Stateside HDTracks has many quality recordings for download. Its great to see a producer and musician acknowledging this trend. Interview: Steven Wilson
Are you a musical perfectionist? You often release, for example, surround sound editions of the band's albums. For me, a perfectionist is someone that's never happy, someone who will spend ten years making one record, and as you see I'm quite prolific - I release two or three ablums a year and have already released a solo album this year – so a perfectionist would never be able to maintain that degree of output. But what I am is someone who loves good sounding records. I'm very much an advocate for sonic quality in recorded music. I grew up loving great producers who could make beautiful sounding records that you could just lose yourself in, with all their textures and the atmosphere, and MP3s unfortunately render that in some ways a lost art - MP3s are a very nasty sonic standard. But as time goes on, I think what we'll see is MP3s disappearing. The need to compress audio will disappear because as internet speeds get faster and hard disk capacities get bigger and bigger, the need to compress audio files will disappear, so people will have full resolution files on their iPods instead of these little horrible compressed MP3s. So I think in time that quality issue will become probably irrelevant, and so people like me who really care about audio quality and sonic superiority will hopefully not have as much to get concerned about.
