Pandora is a great idea...

...but the sound quality SUCKS. Can you hear me, Pandora, over your shitty sound quality???

For those of you who don't keep up with these things (and you wouldn't be here if you didn't), Pandora is a great service that allows you to build stations around a music theme, group, artist, genre. You name it, it designs a station based on their theory of the Music Genome, as they call it. Great idea in theory, but they only broadcast in 128 kbps mp3, which can be bettered by simply playing a CD! Sucks royally in practice, not to mention the useless commercials you're forced to endure. There are also rules about how many times you can skip a song you don't like, as part of the licensing agreement between Pandora and the record companies. I personally think it's a Pandora thing that gives them a bit of leverage when offering benefits of subscribing over free play, myself. I'm getting pretty jaded over the whole idea of Pandora myself. The record companies should see it as a means to promote their music products without taxing the consumer in the stinking process...

Subscription Pandora raises the bar to 192 kbps (no forced commercializing as well), but that's barely listenable to boot. They pay too much for licensing, obviously, otherwise they could offer better quality. They seem to be going on the theory that we as consumers don't know the difference, but we know that the consumer is getting smarter every day, and most, if not all peole know the difference between mp3 and lossless audio quality. If record companies would get on board with lossless we'd all be better off, having a choice at least. They leave no alternative but to seek out alternative resources. This alone is killing the industry as we knew it. And no one seems to care...

There's a mentality that people have about mp3 that lets the quality slide for the increased portability convenience and additional room on hard drives that mp3 provides, and many refuse to relinquish the space necessary for flac or wav. The latter can easily be used on ipods and portable devices, it just takes up more space. I for one would rather have one good file versus five bad ones! I for one of many would use a player that decoded flac vs. mp3, if in-ears could replicate good speaker audio...

Back to record companies: the more I think of this the more I want to get a posse together and get to lynchin' some of those bastids...They are more concerned with quantity than quality, and they are running the music business into the ground by denying the importance of lossless digital music and the vast improvement it makes on the sound quality. See, we're not all 13-year-old girls who wear their ipods as a fashion statement or a sign of feigned hipness, there are still real audio freaks in this world, and we're not all old bearded tube audio professors smoking a pipe as we listen to classical.

I get really frustrated at the shape of things as we approach 50 years into this hobby since music got really hip, to be honest. I'm sure I'm not alone. There are some who won't touch digital with a twenty foot pole, who only listen to vinyl as the original high-def source, and rightly so. Almost all digital sucks compared to a well-pressed, well-recorded album, and the sheer size makes sense, to admire and appreciate the artists' vision and concepts concerning cover art and lyrics. It only makes sense to have these essential elements represented in proper size perspective to fully enjoy the listening experience as it was originally intended. There's simply no substitute for Sgt. Pepper's with the inserts or DSOTM with full-size posters and stickers.

Personally speaking, I have no need for portability with regards to music, I would rather have a comfortable chair and a beverage to assuage myself while listening than to jog with crappy in-ears while trying to avoid getting hit by a car in traffic. I don't know, maybe I'm funny that way. I like to give the music my undivided attention, and rightly so. That's why I never have car stereos, I'd be diverting my attention from important things like making sure I didn't cause an accident because I wasn't looking. Doesn't something as important as music deserve that, at the very least? Whatever happened to safety first??? There was a recent news story about a local middle-school student who got hit by a train while walking down railroad tracks with ear buds...this was totally avoidable!!!

Rant over. Keep your tubes hot and your antenna up! See you tomorrow. Avoid those trains!!!