Okay, I swore to a friend that I wouldn’t keep harping on about Neil Young. I have nothing against the guy; he made some great music back in the day, even though I’m not especially a fan of his music.
But this 68-year old musician, who suffers from tinnitus, and most likely some hearing loss, thinks he can tell everyone that only he knows how music should sound. I’ve written about Pono – his new high-res music service and player – and pointed out how some of the numbers cited are bogus. I’ve also explained why high-resolution music is a marketing ploy.
But today I read an interview with Neil Young which suggests that the guy really is confused. Speaking with Spin magazine, Young discussed his forthcoming album, A Letter Home:
Well, A Letter Home is going to be very confusing to people because it is retro-tech. Retro-tech means recorded in a 1940s recording booth. A phone booth. It’s all acoustic with a harmonica inside a closed space, with one mic to vinyl. Directly to vinyl.
An interesting approach, and one that a few other musicians have used in recent years. But here’s where Young seems to lose his grip on reality:
You can make a lo-fi, analog record, direct to vinyl, transfer it to 192 [kHz], and you have a high res copy of a lo-fi vinyl record.
There’s a word for this, Mr. Young: bullshit. Neil Young is suggesting that by up sampling a poor-quality recording, you can somehow magically transform it into high-resolution audio. Nope; that’s not how it works. In fact, that’s what audiophiles – the ones who believe there is a difference between CD-quality audio and high-resolution audio – are worried about. There have been many cases when retailers claimed they were selling recordings in high resolutions, yet these were simply upsampled from CD quality, or even worse.
To understand what this means, let me give you an easy-to-understand analogy. Unless you’re sitting far from your TV, you can see the difference between DVDs and HD videos. Imagine upsampling the DVD video from the DVD quality – 480 or 576 lines, depending on whether the DVD is in NTSC or PAL format – to 1080p, or HD. The video won’t look like it’s in HD; it will still look like a DVD (albeit a bit better). But with audio, it won’t sound any better at all; it’s simply using more bits for the same music.
If Neil Young thinks that’s how high resolution music works, he truly is confused.