Letters to the Editor
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http://www.austin360.com/music/content/music/stories/xl/2006/09/28cover.html
There was a fantastic article in the Austin American-Statesman a few months back, written by Joe Gross. It was concerned with the insane amounts of compression used for the last 20 years' worth of records. When Dylan said modern music sounds like shit, he meant the sound quality, not the compositions (although that's an argument in and of itself, I guess).
Instead of separation or dynamics, artists began clamoring for pure loudness - everything pushed to the center and shoved upwards. And part of the reason for that is the explosion in portable/personal listening systems. When you're on the highway or crossing a Chicago intersection, traditionally "good" sound isn't what you want; to hear everything in a sea of distractions, you need compression, y'know?
So now the radio only sounds good cranked up; low volume is a mess. iPod earphones are tiny and pump the sound in narrowly. Most computer speakers are shitty substitutes for even a cheap CD player. But this is how we consume music now; as an incremental activity. Vinyl offered a palette of sounds... there's a topography you can get from an analog source that digital find hard to match. I still buy 95% CDs for convenience, for what it's worth. I don't consider myself an audiophile (I use the computer, my car, a low-end record player & a 20-dollar CD player), but when I buy a song from iTunes I can almost always notice the loss in info. MP3s are a necessary evil; small enough to deal with/transfer, but not accurate enough to be an acceptable substitute.
I wanted to say hi-fi isn't going anywhere - and I feel like there's always going to be a swath of folks interested in timbre, range, and fidelity - but in an age when Akon writes hooks seemingly with ringtones in mind... well, these are scary times.