So, what went wrong? In a word (or two) compact disc. Don’t read this as some analogue-extremist backlash against digital sound. In fact, when CD first arrived it stimulated audio sales significantly, simply because it was a box that none of the spent up, die-hard audio consumers already owned. Along came this new ‘thing’ that everybody had to have, along with the various extras to go with it and make it work (new cables, a bigger rack, tweaky feet, lens and disc cleaners etc. etc. etc…) But it wasn’t long before the downsides started to bite. Firstly, unlike a turntable, a CD player needs no dealer set-up. For the first time in audio sales history, it became perfectly acceptable to take the money and simply hand over sealed boxes. First dealers stepped back from set-up and then, pretty soon after, set-up skills became a thing of the past. Likewise, two-way, stand-mount speakers, with their fundamentally sound approach and musical benefits, all but disappeared from the market – because floorstanders at the same price were so much prettier. That, despite the considerable issues with trying to build larger cabinets down to a/the same price.
But the other major market problem was the PPSE message. Pure Perfect Sound Forever suggested (or was understood by the public to mean) that if you had a CD player you were at or near the top of the audio tree. Which was fine – until CD transports started to appear in ghetto blasters. Slowly but surely, the whole premise of high-performance audio was undermined – a process that coincided with the dawning realization of CD’s performance short-comings. Starter systems built around an affordable CD player (and remember, back in the day, a Dual 505-1 only cost around £120 while even basic CD players started at twice that) were simply failing to deliver the same engaging, involving sound that could be had from vinyl.
With the benefits of 20-20 hind-sight it’s not hard to figure out why. There’s a simple, unavoidable difference between vinyl and CD (or other digital media): in a record, time and amplitude information is co-encoded in a single groove – in a digital data stream, it isn’t. The amplitude information is stored in terms of bits, but the timing information depends on the clocking accuracy. In an analogue system, the fundamental relationship that makes noise into music is joined at the hip, inherent to the format. Digital replay has to reassemble it and, all too often, struggles to do so. This is the fissure in the bedrock that should be musical coherence: It’s not about how much information there is, but how much sense that information makes. The super high-res, ultra-transparency trend that dominated the high-end around the turn of the century produced huge quantities of detail, but failed to preserve the relationships between all that ‘information’. The result was sterile and uninvolving sound, rich in impressive sonic attributes, bereft of musical or emotional communication. It’s an easy trap to fall into – which explains why the industry and its customers keep tumbling down the same, ever deeper hole. Accept digital replay in all its forms, as a de facto fait accompli and you risk undermining any system from the get go. Hang ever bigger and more complex speakers on the end and you risk undoing everything you’ve achieved. Start cramming more and more facilities into single-box solutions, especially those that mix digital and analogue functionality and you risk creating a barrier to success.
