Content over quality?

摘要

Sometimes I wish I had been born earlier. A child of the late '70s, my tastes in music were naturally moulded by the artists of the '80s, a decade in which the idea of recording rock and pop music while paying any sort' of attention to sound quality was largely thrown out of the studio window. Spin forward 30-odd years, and I now find myself becoming increasingly annoyed by the fact that my favourite legacy tracks sound... well, awful. Some will argue this is punishment for having a penchant for hard rock and heavy metal. And that would be fair to a point - the average four-piece guitar combo is never going to sound as tonally varied and nuanced as a full orchestra. But this is less about the compositions, more about their conception. You will all know how hi-fi demos usually work. The music selected to show off the performance capabilities of a speaker or amplifier is chosen with care, which is the reason why you're likely to have heard The Eagles' wonderfully recorded and mixed 'Hotel California' more than once - okay, more than more than once - at any UK audio show. What you'll hear much less of is music from the mid 1980s, when the digital recording boom, allied to many producers losing the plot entirely, saw music being stripped of bass weight and midrange drive, while the treble dominated.