The Death of High Fidelity

"I think there's been a huge shift in how people listen to music. They used to get as good a stereo as they could. Now they want an iPod. And the audiophiles have moved on to multimedia. But to get the content to people, you have to play by their rules."
— Matt Serletic, Matchbox Twenty and Collective Soul producer and former chief executive, Virgin Records

"A&R people like the compressed aesthetic because they can take it to the radio. They think if they want to have a hit record they have to spend a lot of money so they want to cover themselves. But if you think about the classic records, none of them are squashed."
— Mitchell Froom, producer of albums by Los Lobos, Elvis Costello and others

"I find it quite interesting, and I think its instructive, that if you focus on one area of the music business — you could generally call it music for people over twenty-four — and you look at the last ten years and look at records that have come out of nowhere, that no one's putting any money behind and have takes off, the two things that come to mind are the Buena Vista Social Club and Norah Jones. And those records were made in the most old-fashioned ways you can imagine." — Joe Boyd, producer of several Richard Thompson albums and R.E.M.'s Fables of the Reconstruction

"I cant tell you how many times someone comes in and plays me something he wants mastered and I'll say, 'Do you want to make it slamming loud or retain some of this great sound?' They'll say, 'We want to keep it really pristine.' Then the next day they'll call me and say, 'How come mine isn't as loud as so and so's?' "
— Bernie Grundman, mastering engineer

"With the Beatles or Rolling Stones, they'd be a little sharp or flat, but no one would care — that was rock. Now if someone's out of tune or out of time, they treat it as a mistake and correct it."
— Ted Jensen, mastering engineer

(On the next page: A look at what compressed waveforms look like. Plus: Links to loudness resources on the Web and a list of tracks where you can hear the difference for yourself.)

Want to continue the sound quality conversation? Click here to discuss this story in the comments section of our Rock & Roll Daily Blog.