15 Years since Neil Young Blasted Digital

It's now 15 years since Neil Young blasted digital CDs in Guitar Player magazine. So I was a little surprised to see him giving exclusive content to iTunes recently, who only sell there music at a lousy 128 bit rate. Here is part of what Neil said 15 years ago.

Digital, CDs - I hate them. Digital is a disaster. This is the darkest age of musical sound. ... Digital is a huge rip-off. It's completely premature and completely wrong. It's a farce. Digital has to be taken three or four levels higher. Sampling rates have to quadruple - at least - to get to where analog was. And digital music has a very limited therapeutic effect, if any, whereas real music has an incredible effect for the calming of nerves. Any therapeutic application of sound HAS to be analog, or it won't get results. You can search around, but the sound isn't there. Let me use a window as an illustration. When you look thru the glass, imagine that's sound out there. And then look out thru the screen. See all the little squares in the screen? If you get right up on them, all different kinds of colors come thru the screen holes. Well, that has to be averaged out to only one color per hole for digital. That's all you get, the dominant one. They've got sampling enough now so that when you 1st start listening, you say, "Hey, that's music." But your brain and your heart are *starved* for a challenge. There's no challenge, there's no possibilities, there's no imagination. You're hearing a simulated music. Your brain is capable of taking on an incredible amount of information.... That's why these records have got to be remastered from the *analog* originals every time there's an improvement..... technology is just not there for that kind of sampling rate. It's a real shame, because music is not being captured. It's an insult to the brain & heart & feelings to have to listen to this and think it's music. I've been making records for 26 years, working in the studio... and I'm telling
you: From the early '80s up till now and probably for another 10 to 15 years is the darkest time for recorded music ever. We'll come out the other end and it'll be okay, but we'll look back and go, "Wow, that was the digital age. I wonder what it really sounded like? They were so carried away that they didn't really record it. They just made digital records of it." That's what people will say - MARK MY WORDS.

Now more than ever with people converting from CD to MP3 the analog digital divide is even greater. Neil is still right. About 10 years ago that I was in possession of both a decent turntable and a vinyl and CD copy of U2's the Joshua tree. I used to play them both simultaneously and see if people could pick the difference. Before playing them I explained that both vinyl and CD have imperfections. Vinyl is like looking at a painted picture of the Mona Lisa with a scratch on it. CD is like looking at a digital image on your computer. Which is fine from a distance but becomes pixelated and horrible when you start looking. Mostly they would look at me like I was born 20 years to late and that they would easily be able to pick the superior CD sound. Then as I played both formats every person who I played them too were amazed at the difference. The could hear the Edge's finger scrape across the strings they could hear Bono's breath. There was a beautiful presence that just wasn't there on CD.

Ten years later the difference between CD and MP3 is that the quality (like pixelation in a photo) is even worse. After listening to analog or even CDs MP3s just sound mushy. For example, it's hard to distinguish a strum on an acoustic guitar from the snare drum if they are happening at the same time. Recently I recorded myself in 24bit rather than the usual 16 bit the difference was huge there was a presence there that made is sound more like I was actually listening to someone speak rather than just listening to a recording. If only instead of going from 16 bit CD to MP3 we went to 24 bit or 32 bit CD. It's a real shame I think convenience is fine and I own an iPod with MP3s on it but in the same way you don't get rid of every restaurant and just have fast food joints. We should do all we can to preserve the beauty of the record. That is the record of the event of people playing music in a room.