Newsweek Calls Out R.E.M.'s "iPod Ready" Fables Reissue

I was very surprised to see the so-called "loudness war" get a mention in Newsweek, where Seth Colter Walls criticizes the recent 25th Anniversary deluxe reissue of Fables Of the Reconstruction for having been mastered too loud (Shiny Happy Remaster?). Colter Walls rightly points out that the atmospheric Fables is not the sort of album that particularly lends itself to today's pumped up, super-compressed mastering aesthetic.

Having compared the remaster to my original LP, I agree that the remastering was louder than it should have been, and I definitely preferred the sound of the original LP. (I have never heard the original CD, so I can't offer any insight on that). That said, I also thought the differences I heard were more subtle than is often the case with contemporary remasters, and this album is far from the worst remaster I have heard. As I noted in my original post, "I suspect only the very pickiest of audiophiles would seriously object to the sound quality of the remaster." It seems I was wrong about that, as Colter Walls clearly does not consider himself an audiophile but nonetheless had serious issues with the sound quality of the reissue.

There are a couple things I would take issue with in the article. First, I disagree with the author's contention that recently remastered CDs are typically the safest bet when looking for good sound, and Fables represents something of a special case exception. In general, I have found that the more recent the remaster, the more likely it is to sound bad, although there are enough exceptions that I would hesitate to take things on anything other than a case-by-case basis. Second, I'm not so sure that the increasing loudness of CDs can be so tidily pinned on the iPod. After all, the iPod does feature a "sound check" function that normalizes the volume of all songs on it without effecting dynamic range (although I have no idea how many people use it). Beyond that, the movement toward louder CDs predates the iPod, it's just that we've seen a steadily escalating situation.

For what it's worth, here is my take on why we are seeing louder and louder remasters: There is a strong incentive for labels to produce remasters that sound "different" from what has come before. And making a release 6 or 7 dB louder than previous CD issues will give a lot of people an initial "wow" factor if they don't understand the need to carefully match volume levels in order to make a valid comparison. If you compare the exact same track but only turn the volume up, 9 out of 10 people will immediately say the louder version sounds "better" even if there is no difference at all. So a louder remaster can initially "grab" the listener and give him or her a false sense that what they are hearing is "better," when really it is just louder.

With careful work and using the best current analog-to-digital converters and other equipment it is certainly possible for today's mastering engineers to create remastered CDs that surpass the sound quality of CDs produced ten or twenty years ago. However, if the original CD was well done (not a safe assumption) the improvement in sound tends to be subtle, and not the type that will hit you in the face immediately. To hear the improvement you'll need a decent stereo system and have to know what to listen for. But let's face it, that describes a tiny percentage of the possible market for a reissue like this. It's so much easier for a record company to just to make a remaster louder. Most people (music critics included) will hear that difference instantly and assume it is a change for the better.

In other words, you can fool most of the people all of the time, and the the rest will just complain about it endlessly on blogs and internet discussion boards in such an arrogant and dismissive manner that the rest of the world will assume they are the equivalent of coffee connoisseurs who will only partake of coffee beans that have been crapped out by animals.

That's the unfortunate reality, and I don't see any way around it. I try to educate on my site, but I think that can only help at the margins, and maybe help people who already understand these things to make an informed purchasing decision. So it's good to see the problem being addressed by someone outside the confines of blogs and audio discussion boards, and I hope Colter Walls continues to listen carefully and draw attention to this problem.

It has come to the point with CD reissues where I pretty much just ask myself if I am willing to pay the price of admission for the bonus tracks, because I assume in the end I will not like the remastered sound as much as what came before, especially if I have a decent copy on LP already. The 25th Anniversary reissue of Fables of the Reconstruction is hardly the worst offender in the ongoing loudness war, but there is no doubt in my mind that it would have sounded better had the mastering engineer applied less compression than he did. Perhaps with journalists like Seth Colter Walls drawing more attention to the problem we can have reason to hope for a better sounding deluxe reissue of Lifes Rich Pageant.

Public Image Ltd. "album"

I've updated Public Image Ltd.'s 1986 album artwork especially for your iPod or other portable player. This seems appropriate since the collection of songs known as "album" on LP, "cassette" on cassette, or "compact disc" on CD is currently available as an mp3 download, but appears to be out-of-print on CD. Rhino recently reissued album on LP and did quite a nice job of it to my ears. Elektra's vinyl tended to be quite noisy toward the end of the LP era, so it is good to finally have a really nice sounding copy of this on LP.

I think this is the only album I own that features Steve Vai on guitar, and I still find it really weird that Lydon played with Ginger Baker, considering that in 1981 NME published an "April fool" announcement that Baker had joined PiL. Despite the strange (one could argue inappropriate) cast of musicians producer Bill Laswell chose to surround Lydon, album holds up. No, it's not as adventurous as Metal Box or Flowers Of Romance, but it is a strong set of songs and nice time capsule of the sound of "alternative rock" circa 1986.

Of course it's well known that John Lydon nicked the concept of a "generic" album from Flipper, whose 1982 debut was called Generic Flipper (or possibly Album or Album Generic Flipper).


Anyway, while Flipper obviously did it first, it should be pointed out that from a design and conceptual standpoint, Lydon did it better. And Flipper did get some measure of revenge by titling a later release Public Flipper Ltd.

The Problem With Today's Record Store

I wanted to relay a recent bad experience I had with my local record store owner. Maybe some of you have had something similar happen in the past. I guess I'm just venting really, but hopefully this can serve as a cautionary tale for others about the things that can go horribly wrong between a customer and merchant.

I've been shopping at this particular store for the past 6 years or so. I haven't bought a lot of stuff there, but I still like to think of myself as a good customer. Mostly, I've picked up albums from the likes of Belle and Sebastian, Iron & Wine, Robyn Hitchcock and Luna. I've also picked up the occasional movie or TV show, and sometimes a random single by The Mills Brothers, Quincy Jones or Beck. The owner knows a bit about my tastes because I've actually told him quite a lot about my music preferences over the years. Like any good record store owner with a long-term customer, he's made some recommendations for me. I always found his suggestions rather prosaic and predictable, but basically on target. It was at least nice to know he was was trying to get to know me and my preferences.

I thought everything was fine until one day I had my credit card stolen. The joker who stole my card waltzed into this record shop and charged up almost a thousand dollars worth of stuff over the course of a single day. He told the owner he was buying the stuff for me. I would have thought the owner would know better because most of the stuff this joker bought was not to my taste at all. Without casting aspersions on anyone else's taste, I'm just not a Miley Cyrus and Glee kind of guy, and anyone who knows anything about my taste in music should know that. Weirder still, the joker also bought a bunch of 8-track tapes, even though the owner knows I don't own an 8-track player. But he never asked a single question, and just went ahead and charged the stuff. I guess he was happy to have the business. I know times are tough in the music retail biz, but I was under the impression that he was actually managing to do pretty well.

So anyway, my credit card company spots that there's something unusual going on, and I get a call from their fraud detection unit the very same day. I told them I had not authorized any of those purchases, and they disputed the charges for me.

Here's where things start to get really weird. After I disputed the charges, I guess the owner got pissed off at me or something (although the situation was obviously not my fault, and frankly he should have known something fishy was going on). In retribution, the record store owner breaks into my house and steals back a bunch of the music and all of the movies and TV shows I had bought from him in the past. Even more bizarre is that fact that he chooses to just steal the records, CDs and DVDs themselves, but leaves all the covers and album art in place so I don't even realize anything is missing until I decide I want to play one of the albums. So now a lot of the stuff I've bought over the years is gone, and as far as I can tell I have no way to get it back.

I've tried contacting the record store owner to resolve the issue, but he doesn't take my phone calls and won't answer my emails. When I show up at his store, the door is locked for me, even though everybody else can still come and go as they please. It's like I've been dropped into some weird record collector geek version of The Twilight Zone.

About now you're probably thinking I'm either pulling your leg or I've lost touch with reality because nothing so bizarre could possibly happen in the real world, right? Well, yes and no. You see, if you replace the words "record store owner" with "Apple iTunes" this is almost exactly what happened to me. Back when people primarily bought physical products from brick and mortar stores the kind of incident I describe would have been unthinkable. But as we move towards a virtual goods/e-tailer model, equivalent incidents are becoming more and more common.

Here is what really happened. Someone got access to my iTunes account, changed my account name and password, and proceeded to charge almost a thousand dollars worth of merchandise in a single day. They bought stuff I would never buy like Veggie Tales videos (a Christian themed children's cartoon) and Celine Dion albums. They also bought a number of iPhone apps, even though I don't own an iPhone (a fact that Apple knows better than anybody). My credit card company contacted me about the suspicious charges, and disputed them for me. When I contacted Apple about what happened they were totally unhelpful. Now they seem to have closed my iTunes account entirely, and I can no longer access any of the protected AAC music files, television shows or movies that I "purchased" from iTunes in the past. They are as good as gone. iTunes customer service does not respond to my emails inquiring about how to get my account reactivated. I cannot get through to anyone via phone, I just get a message directing me to their customer service website, and I can't really use that because as far as Apple is concerned, I don't have an account with them anymore.

As far as I have been able to gather, this is a widespread problem, so much so that Japanese Government has made an official inquiry with Apple about its billing practices. According to a story from MyFox New York, this a scam that is being used to funnel cash into a PayPal account or to a credit card (yeah, I don't know how that would work either, but then I'm not a genius cyber-criminal). However the scam works, it is apparently quite common, and suggests that there is a huge hole in Apple's security. In preparing this post I came across hundreds and hundreds of similar complaints from iTunes users who have had their accounts compromised. In fact, I found so many complaints from people who had the exact same thing happen to them that I had to stop looking, or I would have spent the rest of my life reading nearly identical tales of futility and frustration. Suffice to say my experience is not unique, and the problem is widespread.

Based on my experience, and what I have learned in its aftermath, I would strongly urge anyone with an iTunes account to remove their credit card information from their Apple iTunes account immediately. If you want to continue to do business with iTunes I recommend using pre-paid iTunes cards to fund your purchases, at least until Apple gets its security issues resolved. At the moment Apple does not admit there is a problem. In fact, the one person I managed to get on the phone at Apple informed me that iTunes was so ultra-super-secure that if my account was hacked it would be the first time it ever happened to anyone. The conversation reminded me of listening to one of those old Politburo spokesmen in 1982 saying "Premier Brezhnev is a healthy and vital Russian man and could never be ill," or Iranian President Ahmadinejad saying "there are no homosexuals in Iran," or, well you get the idea.

Fortunately, I only ever bought a relatively small amount of DRM protected iTunes tracks, and I upgraded many of the ones I did buy to DRM free iTunes plus tracks, which I can still access. I don't really care about the TV shows, and the movies were all downloads that came with DVD or Blu-Ray purchases, and I was unlikely to watch them on my iPod anyway. Nevertheless, I always felt like those things were "mine" when in fact they belonged to Apple all along and I was only allowed to play them at the pleasure of the corporation. I'm certainly glad that I'm not someone who downloaded a lot of music and movies from iTunes, or bought an Apple TV and elected to give Apple total control over my home entertainment experience. For me this incident has been little more than a minor inconvenience (albeit one that has been going on for three months now with no resolution in site), but I can imagine it being much worse for a different kind of media consumer.

Update: As of 06/16/10 my iTunes account appears to be fully functional again.

iTunes Goes DRM Free

I never found Apple's DRM (digital rights management) on iTunes downloads overly restrictive, and in retrospect it was essential in getting the major labels to commit to legal downloads. I've yet to bump up against the DRM copy protection ceiling. Nevertheless, DRM always bugged me, and I'm glad to see it go the way of the dodo.

But DRM aside, there is more good news in Apple's recent announcement of upcoming changes to their iTunes store.

First, in addition to being stripped of DRM, all songs on iTunes will now be AAC encoded at 256kps. Previously, some songs were available without DRM and at 256kps (designated as iTunes+), but until now the only major label that had agreed to sell their music in this format was EMI. By the end of March, everything on iTunes will be available exclusively in this higher bit rate format and much of their catalog has already been upgraded.

Many audiophiles would probably argue this point, but in my experience, digital files ripped using AAC encoding at 256kps sound very good (nearly indistinguishable from uncompressed CD-resolution files). Files that have been encoded using lossy compression algorithms like AAC or MP3 are not the same as uncompressed files (information has been lost) but they do have the potential to sound very good if the sampling rate is sufficiently high. In my experience with AAC encoding, 256kps is high enough to sound excellent in most cases, while 128kps (the previous iTunes standard) is generally not.

iTunes users will be able to upgrade their library of previously purchased music at the cost of 30 cents per song or 30% of the original purchase price. Many will (justifiably) complain about having to pay for this upgrade. It is particularly irksome that you cannot choose which songs you want to upgrade individually (it's all or nothing). If you've downloaded a lot of music from iTunes, this could end up being a costly upgrade and not worth the expense. Welcome to the real world where it rarely pays to be an early adopter.

The second change at first glance also appears to be a mixed bag for the consumer. Apple plans to introduce variable pricing, something the music industry has been requesting demanding for a long time. Downloads of individual songs will now cost either 69 cents, 99 cents or $1.29. On the whole I think this is both a smart move for Apple, and on balance will be good for consumers as well: the most sought after tracks will be priced a little higher, while most songs will end up costing less. Honestly, it never made much sense to price the latest single by Rihanna the same as "Apes-Ma," the 39 second track from Captain Beefheart's Shiny Beast (Bat Chain Puller) (even though I would personally prefer the later to the former).

These changes make purchasing music from iTunes a much more compelling option moving forward. The iTunes store remains the gold-standard in terms of ease of use, but it had been losing ground to the competition in terms of sound quality and pricing. These changes reverse that trend and will force other music download providers to improve their services or go the way of DRM.

It All Started With A Mixtape...

My wife just got her first iPod, and a couple days ago she asked me if I could re-create the first mixtape I gave her in an iTunes playlist. Could I recreate a mixtape I had made nearly thirteen years ago for her iPod? Yeah, I could do that. If she had asked me to do something simple like change a diaper or take out the garbage, I probably would have said "in a minute," then promptly forgotten about it. But creating a playlist for my wife was something I was willing to get to work on immediately.

The timing of her request was fortuitous because today happens to be our tenth wedding anniversary, and re-compiling that first mixtape provided a good opportunity for a trip down memory lane. To make a long story short, I am a lucky guy. Very lucky.

Beyond my eternal eagerness to fuss with my music, I was touched by the sentiment behind my wife's request. It showed me that after all this time (though I shouldn't need reminding) that she still thinks of me as something more than the father of her children and husband (not that those are unimportant things). Even though she knows me so well now, she still thinks of me as an interesting person, someone whose ideas and passions are worth exploring. I find this thought comforting because I know I feel the same way about her.

It didn't take me very long to put the playlist together because I had already loaded most of the tracks onto my own iPod. I exported tracks from my iTunes library and imported them into hers. Then I purchased the one track I didn't already have on my iPod from the iTunes store rather than rip it from vinyl. Next I scanned the original cassette cover, cleaned the image up a bit in Photoshop, then pasted the picture to the tracks' meta-data to replace the original artwork. Viola! A perfect digital simulacrum of an analog cassette mixtape (minus the added analog hiss and plus some artifacts from lossy compression).

The speed and ease with which I was able to complete the playlist was somewhat disturbing. I remember the amount of time it took me to create the original tape. Back then I had to do everything in real-time. I couldn't just drag, drop and be done with it. I had to listen. I had to give things some thought. I had to carefully match the sound level of each track, making sure the volume never peaked too high on my cassette deck's VU meter, all the while maintaining a relatively consistent volume level.

Today iTunes makes everything a little too easy. If two tracks don't flow together properly, there's no need to rewind and erase, just move the offending track elsewhere in the mix. iTunes also automatically normalizes the volume of the mix with its "sound check" feature (though, it must be said, not as well as a skilled mixtape wizard would have). And of course there's no need to actually listen to the thing (if indeed you can still call it a "thing") before you finish it.

Back in the day, putting together a good mixtape was hard work. Some might call it a lost artform. I wonder what a young man seeking to impress a special lady does these days without the mixtape as an ally? Do they loan their potential sweetie a flash drive or email them a Rapidshare link? The RIAA might have something to say about that. Do they gift some very special tracks via the iTunes store? That could get expensive fast (90 minutes of music would cost considerably more than a good blank type II audio cassette). And besides, what if that special somebody you have your eye on has already downloaded the She & Him track you just know will win her heart? You just wasted 99 cents buddy. Cripes, what if she owns a Zune instead of an iPod? Life today is complicated. I'm glad I did my romancing during a simpler era. I wasn't very good at it then, but I don't think I would have the skills needed to pass along my genetic code in the brave new world of digital media.

Listening to the simulated mixtape on my own iPod, it is clear to me that I gave this tape some serious thought. However, it's not always clear to me exactly what I was thinking. Flying Saucer Attack? Spectrum? I could have easily given my future wife the (entirely unfounded) impression that I was a frequent recreational user of prescription cough-syrup. Knowing what I now know about Marjorie's attitude toward drug abuse, that could have been a fatal mistake. What if this mix had given her the wrong idea about me? My mind spins toward all sorts of invariably-unpleasant alternate realities (most of them involving permanent bachelorhood and my parents' basement). I get a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach and I have to shake myself back to reality. Mercifully, I'm not living in some alternate universe where an ill-considered mixtape cut short a promising romance. I can hear Marjorie and our two children quietly breathing as they sleep. I'm not sure how I ended up living in this the best of all possible worlds, but one thought is inescapable: I am a lucky guy.

I find it slightly embarrassing to remember that Marjorie was not the first woman for whom I had made a mixtape. As best I can recall, before Marjorie these tapes were almost never warmly received. I strongly suspect most of them were discarded before they were even listened to (I could almost see the the silent thought bubbles these tapes would engender: "What no Peter Cetera? What kind of freak is this guy?"). Einstein once defined insanity as "doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." So why did I keep doing it? Why did I make a mixtape for Marjorie when I should have known it was most likely a waste of a perfectly good type II cassette? Because I hoped things would turn out different this time. Because I wanted her to like me. And by that I mean I wanted her to like me, Pete Bilderback, the kind of doofus who thinks it's a good idea to put a cheesy instrumental produced by Joe Meek or a song warbled by Will Oldham on a mixtape for a woman he's trying to impress. Miraculously, she did!

Somehow it worked. I don't know how. I don't know why. But it worked. She liked the guy who made her the mixtape. A few years later she agreed to marry him. A few years after that she gave him a perfect son, then a perfect daughter. Maybe it didn't really start with the mixtape, but not a day has gone by since we got married ten years ago that I haven't counted myself lucky. Every day I have spent with this marvelous woman has been a gift and I want to thank her for everything she's given me. Thank you.

Non-Dairy Tape
Side one:
Air Miami - "I Hate Milk"
Number One Cup - "Divebomb"
The Tornados - "Telstar"
Love - "Stephanie Knows Who"
Barbara Manning - "[Untitled]"
Stereolab - "Doubt"
Kendra Smith - "Stars Are In Your Eyes"
Flying Saucer Attack - "In The Light Of Time"
Spectrum - "Undo The Taboo"
Yo La Tengo - "Flying Lesson (Hot Chicken #1)"
Cardinal - "Silver Machines"
The Moles - "Already In Black"
The Velvet Underground - "Sweet Jane"

Side two:
Son Volt - "Windfall"
Palace Music - "New Partner"
The International Submarine Band - "Blue Eyes"
The Byrds - "Reputation"
Camper Van Beethoven - "Heart"
Fairport Convention - "Si Tu Dois Partir" and "Matty Groves"
The Magick Heads - "Standing At The Edge"
The S.F. Seals - "Joed Out"
Sally Timms - "Half Past France"
Buffalo Springfield - "Flying On The Ground Is Wrong"
Opal - "Fell From The Sun"
The Bats - "The Other Side Of You"
Barbara Manning - "B4 We Go Under"

Headphones

With gas prices being what they are I've been taking the bus to work more and more often. It's not that I suddenly can't afford to drive to work, but the higher gas prices have forced me to think more about the impact of my actions on the planet. I've always considered myself an environmentalist, but it's time to put my money where my mouth is, so I'm taking public transportation as often as I can.

Obviously, the bus is the perfect place to enjoy my iPod. But with the noisy environment the bus provides I find myself in need of a pair of in-ear headphones to block out external noises. I'm hoping to get a recommendation for a decent pair of in-ear headphones (the kind you insert in your ear canal to reduce the volume of external sounds).

I currently use a pair over-the-ear style iGrado headhones with my iPod. I love the sound of these. They have a rich, well-balanced sound with a bit of sparkle in the treble, but they don't sound harsh or spitty. Unfortunately, they can't block out enough of the outside world to be used on a bus. Buses are loud, and to hear my music I have to crank the Grados loud enough to cause hearing damage and annoy my fellow passengers. I also have a pair of Grado SR-80s, which sound even better, but are too bulky for portable use and wouldn't reject external sounds any better.

If Grado made a pair of in-ear headphones I would buy them in a second. If Grado made a toaster or a bird-bath I would buy them too. Every product I've ever heard by Grado--whether it's a phono cartridge, pre-amp or headphone--excels at it's price point. Maybe it's because Grado is a family-owned, artisanal business--most of their products are hand-made in Brooklyn--but invariably Grados got soul.

Unfortunately, Grado doesn't make an in-ear headphone, and my experience with headphones outside of Grados has not been good. I had a pair of Sennheiser earbuds that fell apart within weeks after I purchased them. They sounded okay, but they didn't have soul. Then I tried a pair of Apple in-ear headphones. I can't really tell you how they sounded because they never stayed in my ears long enough to form an opinion.

Then I was given a pair of inexpensive Skullcandy Ink'd in-ear headphones. They sounded somewhat tinny and hollow with a sucked out midrange and little bass, but at least they stayed in my ears. So when I saw a pair of top-of-the-line Skullcandy FMJs marked down to $25, I took a chance on them. They look kinda cool, even if they are a little too "skate-punk" for a gentleman of my age and social standing. But I figured if they gave me a better balanced version of what the Ink'd phones offered they'd be good enough for the bus. Certainly they are impressively constructed with their molded aluminum enclosures and laser-etched logos. And they stay in my ears comfortably. And they sound...hideous. The FMJ's definitely don't got soul. They don't even got treble. They barely got midrange. They got bass though; lots and lots of tubby, exaggerated, undefined bass. The cheap-o buds that came free with my iPod sound considerably better. I feel really sorry for anyone who paid the $60 MSRP for these aluminum clad turds. Mine are for sale on Amazon's Marketplace if you want to experience their earth-shattering awfulness for yourself.

So maybe one of my readers can help me out. I'm looking for a pair of in-ear headphones that are relatively cheap and sound good. They don't have to have soul like the Grados do, but they shouldn't make me want to set my ears on fire to make the pain stop either. I know that Shure and others make supposedly good sounding in-ear models, but I won't spend that much on portable headphones. I'm looking for something with a MSRP of $50 or less (hopefully with a significantly lower street-price). They should be relatively durable and be able to fit in my smallish ear canals. Any ideas? I've read some good things about JVC's cheap in-ears, but I'm looking for personal recommendations.

Happy Birthday iPod

Apparently the iPod turns five today. So happy birthday iPod. It may well be true that as Farhad Manjoo writes in Salon the iPod and digitization of music have "altered how we experience music more fundamentally than any technology since the advent of audio recording."

Manjoo points out how complicated our relationship to the iPod tends to be. Though he loves his iPod, he says he sometimes wishes it had never been invented...It's great to have so much music at your fingertips, but doesn't the iPod tend to foster a kind of musical ADD in which you skip from song to song without ever truly soaking in anything? Does walking around with headphones all the time cut you off from the rest of the world? Etc., etc.

What Manjoo misses, I think, is that these are the kind of questions that come with the introduction of any new technology, and the more revolutionary the technology, the greater the anxiety about change. Take a look at debates that raged about the train, the automobile, and even the typewriter when they were introduced if you don't believe me. One would be hard pressed to find any technology, no matter how helpful, no matter how much it enriched our lives, that wasn’t met with some level of ambivalence and resistance. Though there are no records to document this, I expect the first humans to take to cave dwelling complained that it had cut them off from the "authenticity" of their nomadic experience as hunters and gathers.

Such fears tend to fade over time. I remember in the early-eighties predictions that the advent of "test tube babies" would have a radical effect on our lives and that the technology was moving forward before we had time for adequate debate on the pros and cons of the procedure. Some worried the test tube baby would mean we would cease to be human (again, if you don't believe me take a look at the debates from the time). Who worries about that now?

The same people today claim we're not ready for BioNanotechnology because we haven't pondered all the moral implications long enough. To hell with them, I want to be turned into an invincible nonobot-cyborg that can lift cars, see through buildings, shoot lazers out of my eyes, and has an iPod that knows what I want to listen to before I do implanted in my brain as soon as possible. Sign me up. I'll let others wring their hands and worry about what it means to be human. If we ever listened to these kinds of people no new technology would ever go anywhere because we'd be stuck debating its merits ad infinitum. We'd still be living in caves debating whether fire was on balance good or bad for humanity.

I think Manjoo also misses the fact that people tend to appropriate technologies in ways that work for them, and don't necessarily use them in a uniform manner. People find ways to personalize technology. Consider for example the plethora of aftermarket products that are available for the iPod. This is actually a sign of a robust and healthy technology, not a flawed or incomplete one. No one argues that there is some basic problem with the automobile because people customize it. The very fact that people want to customize it merely indicates that they want to personalize their relationship to to the technology, and by extension that it is important to them.

For instance, I only rarely listen to my iPod through headphones, but it has made my daily commute much more pleasant with the added accessory of a radio transmitter. What could possibly be wrong with listening to the music I want to hear in my car? When I do listen through headphones it is usually through a pair of Grado SR80 headphones (I never took the stock ones out of the box). And my iPod is clad in a fluorescent green silicon skin. It protects the iPod from scratches true, but it also personalizes it--makes it more uniquely mine.

I was surprised to see a couple of "audiophile" complaints about the iPod pop up in Manjoo's article, as these usually get passed over as applying only to nutcases. First, the complaint about compression of music (the reduction of dynamic range) is valid and real. But this has been an ongoing problem that started well before the advent of the iPod, and is probably more linked to the introduction of the CD changer than to the iPod. As for the digital compression process (reduction of file size), it is true that it reduces audio quality, especially at the frequency extremes. But in my experience this is not a problem in the high noise environment of the automobile or for casual listening, and I still have my turntable and a decent CD player for those times when I want to relax and really sink into the music. And if you insist on audiophile quality from your iPod you can use Apple Lossless compression, get a good pair of Grado headphones, and buy an audiophile quality headphone preamp. Your life will be a little bulkier, but the point is it's your life and your iPod and you can use it however you want to.