On the road to instant music downloading, more legal than not these days, something was lost in the shuffle; the sound quality.

Everyone just loves downloading music. It’s easy, and usually only a few mouse clicks away. However, that ease of use has brought with it a problem: the sound quality is poor compared with uncompressed CD recordings.

Rin Tin Tin-Ear

Many people will tell you that you can’t tell unless you have a good ear, good equipment, or are a downright audio nut. But that’s not the point. We are losing quality. Sure, some of it’s due to limitations in bandwidth and the speed of our connections. It’s easier selling an album that takes five minutes to download rather than one hour.

Digital What?

But the other part comes on behalf of the music industry. They just don’t want CD quality, uncompressed music available for download. They feel that once you get the pure sound of the uncompressed CD, you then have the total power to do whatever you want. They fail to realize that the kids stealing music today don’t even factor in quality, as they aren’t used to the high quality of uncompressed music anyway, as they don’t pay for their music, they download 128 Kbps MP3s off the internet.

I am a huge fan of high quality sound. Just because I may have a hard time distinguishing MP3 from AAC, or AAC to AIFF, doesn’t mean I don’t deserve the highest quality, especially when I’m paying Apple good money for legal music.

When The Music’s Over

Having said that, I will never purchase music from the iTunes music store, or any on-line seller for that matter. When I buy music and rip it, I want to own it fully. I want complete control. If Apple stopped supporting their DRM, my music wouldn’t be worth its size in bytes. Plus, as larger storage media is available at cheaper costs, I can eventually import all my CDs uncompressed, to get the true sound of the disc.

In short, I have far more options buying the actual CD. With Amazon.com Prime, and free 2-day shipping, it’s a no brainer to stick with Amazon.com and drop Apple. I still love iTunes, but I will no longer buy inferior quality music.