I'm not sure what demonstrates more Young's idealism in a crappy computer speaker iPod world: issuing AAA vinyl albums or trying to convince the record business and consumers to pay attention to sound. I have not heard the Blu-ray edition, nor do I know how Young thinks it compares to the AAA vinyl. Of course Young is a realist so the sessions were also recorded to ProTools at 192k/24 bit resolution for eventual distribution on the PONO master quality download system and website he's been developing for the last few years and trying to convince the record industry to support. On this sprawling three record, five side triple-gatefold AAA album, recorded through a vintage Universal Audio tube console and Neve BCM10 junior console to a Studer 2" eight track analog tape recorder, mixed to Ampex 1/4" tape, mastered by Chris Bellman from the analog master at Bernie Grundman's and pressed at Pallas in Diepolz, Germany, Young lays down the sonic challenge, saying in the sound and production, "Here it is, here's what we once had, here it is again, listen and tell me that any digital format can even remotely approach this, not just sonically, but emotionally". Yes, MP3's sound sucks, but worse, it filters out music's emotional meaning and erects a wall between artist and listener, which is why people in the MP3 world don't really listen to music as much as they consume it in a parasitic manner, while doing other "stuff" (cooking, cleaning, screwing, exercising). "You used to get it all/blocking out my anger/blocking out my thoughts." And that's the true crux of the problem. "When you hear my song now you only get 5%", he complains here, almost twenty years after his charge in that MTV News video, considered at the time to be outrageous. "We've lost the sound" Neil laments in the video-and that was before the scourge of MP3. Back in 1993 he appeared on an MTV News piece along with Peter Gabriel and me too. He was one of the first musicians to express serious reservations about digital recording and playback. Young's lifelong obsession with sound quality is well known and of course welcomed around here. "Don't want my MP3," Neil Young protests on side two's "Drifting Back (Part 2)".
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