Neil Young bemoans needle and the damage done to vinyl by MP3

OK, so Neil Young didn’t utter those exact words at The Wall Street Journal’s D: Dive Into Media conference Tuesday, but he might as well have.
The legendary rocker and longtime critic of the ubiquitous MP3 format was at again today, trashing the sound of today’s digital music files, which he says convey only a tiny fraction of the aural splendor conceived by musicians.
The Journal reports that Young, in an onstage interview at the conference in Dana Point, Calif., said the heavily compressed music files most of us listen to today capture only five percent of the sound created by musicians in the studio.
"This is the 21st century," said Young. "We have five percent of what we had in 1978."

Like many audiophiles, Young prefers vinyl records, which have a warm, natural sound that digital audio can’t match, according to vinyl fans.

Young proposed the creatino of a high quality digital format that captures all of the information squeezed out of compressed files, however file size would be an issue with any lossless format.

Young estimated each song would take about 30 minutes to download, and that digital players designed for his audio format would store roughly 30 albums, according to the Journal.

Young’s argument is undermnied by the availability of a number of lossless formats like FLAC, TTA, RealPlayer and Apple Lossless that have failed to become the norm owing to the convenience of AAC, MOP3 and Flash video.

This is not the first time Young has rounded on digital music. In the 1993 he came out against CDs on MTV’s Week in Rock along with fellow musician Peter Gabriel.

IDG News Service

IDG News Service

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