Which Audio Format is Best? - The Answer May Surprise You | MUSIC is not a GENRE - Season 3 Episode #1

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Before I started podcasting, I was blogging weekly for a long while. I started with my cassette collection. When I finished with those and got ready to transition to vinyl, I took a pause to discuss the history of music formats, from as far back as late 19th century cylinders all the way up to present day streaming. (COOL LINK ABOVE)

As I transition from vinyl to CDs, we’re going to do something different. Let’s talk about what the best format is for music listening. Rather than discuss all of the 50 or so options, we’ll limit it to those formats most widely in use in the last 60 years. Namely, vinyl, cassettes, CDs and digital files (principally mp3s, wavs, and cloud-based streaming). Each of these formats has its fans:

VINYL warm, crackly romantics

CASSETTE tight, sizzly utilitarians

CD techno- audio- philes

DIGITAL FILE stone colder listeners

Yes, there are drawbacks to each. Vinyl and cassettes - the analog formats - warp and break easily. They’re harder to transport, store and play. Sonic quality tends to deteriorate over time. You can only capture a certain amount of the original sound production. These formats color the sonic output in ways that weren’t intended by the artist.

CDs and files - the digital formats - can sound “cold” and thin. Like the analog formats, CDs are also harder to transport & store, and to a lesser extent can degrade & suffer other damage. Digital files are harder to catalog and keep track of, and lack a tremendous amount of the other formats’ visual & textual representations. Their sound quality varies greatly, and the most compressed files (low end mp3s) sound as bad as an old tape on a crappy one-speaker boom box. Plus, while digital sound captures a much larger swath of the sonic spectrum in both breadth and depth, it misses the connective tissue that analog captures by default. The spaces between the ones & zeros.

So what’s the best format??

When I was young I had only vinyl, and I loved it. When cassettes came, I flipped. I could take them anywhere, even record vinyl onto blank ones and take THEM too. When CDs came, I couldn’t believe the sound quality. I couldn’t take them everywhere because portable players were scarce, so I got around that by recording them onto cassettes. When cars started including CD players standard, I left cassettes behind. It took me a loooong time to stop buying CDs, a good 15 years into the mp3/streaming age. I didn’t like having to download files & then either rip them onto a CD or upload them to a player. At the same time I was collecting them at a rate I could never have afforded otherwise. Once I got familiar with a streaming service I liked, I stopped buying CDs altogether, and have almost completely stopped downloading files too.

Which leads FINALLY to an answer. The most important aspect of ALL of the above IS ... the MUSIC. The experience of listening to, absorbing, getting lost in the sounds & the words & the world the artists create. It doesn’t matter which format you prefer, as long as it gets you to the music you want. Debate the pros and cons. Make your case for your favorite. NONE of them are “the best”. What only ever matters is the music.

This is my band REC’s magnum opus, a minute chunk of the music I’ve created to be experienced:

https://www.nickdematteo.com/rectheweirdobjective

What’s your history with music formats? What’s your favorite? Discuss dammit!

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