It’s the time of year for saving money!
One thing that boggles my mind about audiophiles is how the hobby tends to support old technologies over new ones. You can see this reflected in the fact that streaming HD files is somehow seen as not as good as crappy vinyl by some (although certainly not all) of the old guard. I’ve said it many times before, but vinyl mostly sucks. Yes, it is cheap. Yes, it is analog. Yes, it is how the artist/producer/engineer wanted us to listen to the album. Those are all good arguments.
But if you want to hear the music as it was likely recorded, whether on two-inch analog master tape or straight to a disc, you want to listen to it on digital HD formats. Almost nobody has access to first-generation analog master tape, nor do they have the tape machines to play back the now-degrading magnetic tape. That is just fact for a post-factual world. Moreover, going analog in terms of vinyl leaves you with at best 65 dB of dynamic range, which is half of what you would need to faithfully reproduce, say, the snap of a hard-hit snare drum.
Beyond dynamics, you have the issue of that “warmth,” which is just a euphemism for harmonic distortion. Why did you just invest $10,000 in that Audio Research or Mark Levinson stereo preamp then feed it a high distortion source? It’s like fueling your new Ferrari 812 with 50 octane fuel. But then again, you’ve likely heard all of these arguments already from me.
Qobuz, Tidal, and now Amazon Music all offer, for about the price of one new Compact Disc, access to damn-near every album ever recorded. Many of these recordings stream into your high-performance audiophile system at such a low cost, yet at such a high level of fidelity, that you really have the musical world as your oyster. Shouldn’t this transformational access to music lure new music lovers to the world of high-performance music as the iPod did years ago thanks to the incredible convenience and portability?
Not really, it turns out. This brings me to Pandora. Pandora was recently bought by the parent of Sirius-XM radio, basically off the junk heap. They were led to the altar of high-resolution audio but insiders tell me they simply blew the opportunity. So, why should audiophiles take Pandora seriously? One reason and one reason alone: Pandora’s algorithm is simply better than any other streaming platform. Let’s say your favorite song is “Super Freak” by Rick James and you like “Kiss” by Prince. With that little metadata Pandora can, unlike Amazon, Spotify, and so many others, create a playlist for you that is remarkably in tune.
Call it artificial intelligence or just good programming, but the concept that you can, with the press of the + or – button, build an entire, bespoke playlist that can open you up to new music is nothing short of amazing. The quality of these playlists is far better than I ever dreamed possible. You don’t have to be part of the process, but if you are the playlist gets better and better all the time. You can explore wild musical ideas and find songs and/or artists that you may have never known existed but you really dig.
Pandora’s weakness is their MP3-like, low resolution delivery. It was supposed to be upgraded to HD, but I’ve been told that this plan got foiled, which is truly a shame. Music in HD is something to behold. Giving a true, digital facsimile of the analog master tape to your 300-watt amp, 32-bit DAC, killer floorstanding speakers, and beefy subwoofer is the direct route to musical heaven. The cost of getting there and the volume of access to songs and albums at this level have never been better, and I encourage you to enjoy your system this way as much as humanly possible.
With that said, don’t dismiss Pandora because of its low resolution. Pandora’s superior ability to seek out new music is next-level. Pandora’s ability to help you find new music can replace the long-gone-out-of-business record store that you and I miss so badly. If you have never done it, give Pandora a quick try. I think you can do it without a subscription, but it has ads. Getting rid of the ads doesn’t cost very much and is well worth your investment. Before you call me a lover of “low resolution,” take a quick tour and play around with their technology. I think you will become a fan quickly, and let’s all hope that Pandora, with new backers behind it, will get the memo on music in HD, as that would make it a must-have streaming source for all music-lovers worldwide.
What is your experience with Pandora? Do you use AI to build playlists to help you find new music? Would you? Comment below, as we love to hear from you.
keep up the old tired rant about crappy sucky vinyl, jerry. it still sounds better than digital, all other things being equal. (by “equal”, i mean quality of recording, quality of playback gear.)
digital may sound closer to how the recording sounds, but if you want to hear the music as close as possible to how it sounds if it were live instead of recorded, you want to listen to vinyl. crazy argument, i know… 😉
doug s.
Just admit that you love distortion and be done. How in the world can compression of dynamics make it sound as if it was live? Maybe if you have one of those old dbx expanders but when’s the last time you saw one of those.
when’s the last time i saw one of those dbx expanders? last night. 😁 and, it’s far more useful for compressed digital recordings than it is for vinyl. 😉
and sorry – if it sounds closer to live, then it’s not distorted. compression of dynamics is only one aspect of how recorded music sounds, and there’s actually a lot of compression happening in digital recordings.
I think upgrading his victrola may change his mind.
jllaudio, sorry, i don’t think anything will change jerry’s mind – he’s only interested in facts that support his view. facts that don’t support his view, or how something might actually sound, are irrelevant. jerry reminds me of donald trump in some ways… 😉
Doug, you make some good points, but if we wanted to listen to music as close as possible to how it sounds if it were live we would all be buying rigs full of Crown, JBL and Peavey and hiring (or self employing) a drunken sound guy. Then we would put that all in concrete boxes full of noise. All things that are fun, but not HiFi. The magic of live, and to some degree vinyl, is all in the experience. Good Listening Gents!
zach, if i go to a jazz club, or a concert hall, i’m not hearing crown, jbl, peavey, and it’s not being mixed by a drunken sound guy.
now, if i’m listening to electronic amplified music, and i want it to sound as close to live as possible – in my listening room – jbl might be an option, as some of their speakers are awesome, (for listening to unamplified music as well). crown is nice for subwoofers, but it’s not what i want for anything over 100hz. not sure i want peavey for anything in my listening room.
in other words, your analogy isn’t appropriate, imo. the magic of vinyl is it’s extremely hifi. if it weren’t, it would not still be popular. because, compared to digital formats, it’s a total pita for the user interface.
doug s.
Can you explain what you mean by “live”? Live music has two things going for it: virtually unlimited frequency response and dynamic range (limited only by our ears and the musicians’ abilities). By all accounts, we can hear ~20Hz – 20kHz (obviously deteriorating as we age) and can hear 140dB of dynamic range. How does vinyl get closer to that than other formats?
vinyl easily does 20hz-20khz. and well done recordings on vinyl have all the dynamic range needed to sound real. if a digital recording actually used all the dynamic range it was capable of, it wouldn’t be listenable in a home system because the loud passages would blow you out of the room if you had it turned up loud enough to hear the soft passages.
vinyl gets closer to what sounds real, based on the biology of how human beings hear. can you measure that?
look, i understand many people prefer digital. i myself listen to a lot of digital, and i happen to like it a lot. what i don’t like is the mindless bashing of a quality format for no good reason. if you want mindless bashing, go over to the bose thread – at least there’s a good reason to bash bose – its snake-oil marketing sells home audio systems that sound like dookie, and are extremely over-priced for what they offer, regardless of whether you listen to digital or analog. 😜
doug s.,
who bought into the bose marketing hype as a kid back in 1969, w/my purchase of 901’s… 😃
main problem with Pandora is that when you choose a new genre of music it will play a couple of new songs and then resort back to my liked songs that are not even the same type of music. too repetitive. for discovering new music, I’ll stick to Spotify
I’ve had the same experience with Pandora over the years – it’s great for exploring new genres of music, but once you’re there, making radio stations based on artists within the genres produces a very repetitive batch of songs being selected…a set of about 50 or so tracks in heavy rotation with a few others thrown in. Pandora’s algorithm is very specific and it can be a negative, in the sense that it identifies a single track on an album and keeps going back to it, instead of selecting others which may have similar sound. I don’t use the “like” function often but even then, on certain stations the same tracks keep coming up, sometimes even in the same sequence. I think it also depends on your music of choice. There are genres which just aren’t represented well within Pandora’s library, which based on my experience suggests that it’s much smaller than those of Tidal, Amazon and Spotify. Still, for what I pay (less than $7 a month I think) relative to the hundreds of hours of listening enjoyment we get from it, it’s a bargain and definitely worth having.
Created close to 40 Pandora stations on my Squeezebox. Select Quickmix and i never know what will play next. Excellent clarity and tone, the sound punches out.
No discussion of vinyl is complete without a mention of slowing groove velocity from outer edge to lead out groove. Wavelength gets shorter and high frequencies easily become more distorted. There are many thing to dislike and overcome that forced us to be better engineers..
Nick Colleran
I have used Pandora for a few years now still no problem.
Amen! I could have written every word of your article. I love Pandora but hate it’s low resolution format. I was a paying Pandora customer until Amazon launch their HD product.
Those HD file are stunning! Like you said, it’s like listening to the master tapes.
I’m amused by all the comments of people defending vinyl, those guys will never be convinced. It’s the audio equivalent of saying “I know she’s not much to look at but she’s got a great personality!” They always refer some quality that vinyl has that can’t be quantified. But that’s all that’s part of the fun of our hobby I guess so let them rage on.
I’m absolutely love Amazon’s hi-def music service but they’re streaming is crap compared to Pandora. If Pandora would launch a similar service I would switch back in a heartbeat.
Keep up the good work! Thanks.
Analog is MAGA. Albeit, in a watch, analog gives you a feeling on continuum, while digital is a static slice. Analog in sound is mellow, a blur, an impressionist emotion.
Parfumeur – you mean analog is like how people actually see and hear? on a continuum, not a static slice? 😉
doug s.
I’ve used Pandora for years. I’m not an audiophile so absolute perfection in audio isn’t my major concern. Pandora works wonderfully as described in this article. Very easy to use and doesn’t require much involvement if you don’t want to fine-tune things. Just pick an artist, musical style or song to seed a station with and it takes it from there. I’m not an expert on knowing specific artists or songs so I love the fact that I can start a channel based on something I know I like and have it pick other songs that are somewhat similar. I’ve never considered the output from Pandora ‘low resolution’. It always sounds great. Give it a shot… it’s free to try (with infrequent ads).
I couldn’t agree more. My girlfriend and I were having this exact conversation this last weekend.
Over the last 18 months I’ve used Pandora then switched to Spotify (it’s what all the cool kids are using) then switched to Amazon Music (as it turns out I’m not a cool kid) then just went back to Pandora this last weekend. While I did like the quality of the other services I just felt like I was missing something, I could never get my station dialed in. I like almost all genres of music but, like most people, not all artists in said genre and I felt that none of the other services understood that. If I liked a country song they would bombard me with country, even if I disliked an artist multiple times they didn’t seem to get the hint and still played that artist. With Pandora I feel it knows how to take a hint and build a station accordingly.
As far as quality goes, it’s good enough for me in most scenarios. I listen to it mostly in my car and while I have a nice aftermarket system it’s still a car. When I’m listening at home I’m mostly doing something else as well, likely cleaning, playing a video game or hanging out with friends. If I’m in a pure listening mood I’ll likely listen to something from my lossless FLAC collection, mostly classical.
I stream from the internet and I stream from the needle. Both are satisfying for differing reasons. One is a Seurat and the other a Van Gogh. If one were really overwhelmingly better the rants would end…perhaps. It is often about he providence and choices made at the mixing board. I am well aware that vinyl requires ritual and patience, traits that we don’t all share.
i think the rants take place because of misguided statements that are just plain ignorant. things like:
“…somehow seen as not as good as crappy vinyl…” and “I’ve said it many times before, but vinyl mostly sucks.”
i stream from relatively lo-rez internet fm, which i love. and which sounds pretty damned nice. but i’ve never heard any digital rig compete with an equivalent analog rig. can i enjoy digital? i can and i do. and i respect those who like digital better. but i don’t go on like a moronic broken record (no pun intended) bashing something that’s damned good, even if i think another format is better. i don’t bash digital, even tho i think vinyl is better.
ya know, i think audiophilereview.com is damned good. even tho i think its owner mostly sucks. he rants about the sorry state of the hi-end audiophile world, yet he bashes it every chance he gets, if it’s not what he thinks it should be. not very inclusive or conducive to growing the hobby.
doug s.
Like most things subjective it depends on your expectations. For lots of folks Pandora is fine. For those of us who stretch their budgets to get as close to the original as possible, Pandora doesn’t work. And, thankfully there are some great options! Not a complicated issue or question.
I’ve used Pandora for years. Great product. The stations can repeat songs if u dont keep adding favorites. I pay for the high quality feed with no commercials. I’ve wondered why it isn’t mentioned in streaming service articles. Thanks, Jerry!
It’s still amazing people would rather listen to snap crackle and pop God I hate vinyl , the worst words I can hear when I’m doing new audio systems in my clients houses is hey I’ve got an old turntable because I have like eight records stashed in the closet let’s hook that up to
yeah, i hear some snap crackle pop. but, on the ~200 cd’s i have, i hear etched treble, reduced soundstaging, and compressed dynamics quite a bit more frequently than the snap-crackle-pop i hear on my ~2000 lp’s.
ymmv,
doug s.
Pandora has turned me on to some of the best music I’ve ever heard that I would have never found what I’m pretty. I absolutely love this app and I cannot stand Spotify!!! Dude Spotify will sometimes only have 15 songs on my playlist! Pandora playlist have a plethora of music and now even on the free version you can’t listen to songs directly if you want to listen to one song in particular. And you can get more than six skips in an hour just by watching a short video or ad I should