"The Death of High Fidelity"

I read the above with fascination and some horror. I have some modern recordings that are highly distorted (almost anything by John Mayer) or shrill and flat sounding (almost anything I own from Sony Classical made in the last ten years), and some new recordings that are much better than decent (e.g. recordings by Bill Frisell, Janine Jensen, Aaron Neville). Some people still care, unfortunately artistic and production genius do not always line up. The old days were not always golden - I have some original issue LPs from the fifties, sixties and seventies that sound like crap, although the quality and production craft was routinely higher.

There seems to be a big problem with "Remastered" CD's that get released too.
I still enjoy my Duran Duran, and was recently excited to find one of my old vinyl favorites, "Seven & the Ragged Tiger" on CD. That excitement plumeted when I played it; it sounded so dull,flat and lifeless, not only compared with my memories of the LP, but even directly compared with their older original CD's (eg Notorious, The Wedding Album etc).
Why should "Remastered" mean "stuffed up"? Either sound engineers don't know what they're doing anymore, or else this whole Volume Wars thing has gone too far.

So in other words nothing beats an old yellow & black Prestige pressing from the late 50s' Long play, Deep Groove, High Fidelity, and don't forget Unbreakable. So go listen to your iPods, itunes, or i whatever, just have a good ear cleaning first.

Bongofury I thinky you're confusing the 2 types of compression. I think the Rolling Stone article deals with how engineer's go crazy with compressors in the studio robbing dynamic music of all its dynamics. You're talking about file compression(which still robs music of some of its fidelity but in a different way).

Both go hand in hand. With downloading now the dominant format, engineers are remixing tracks louder to compensate for the technical limitations of the newer formats.