Ian Anderson 2006 Sound&Vision
30 Minutes With Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull
From the S&V archives: The mad minstrel shares his feelings on stereo, quad, and surround sound.
by Mike Mettler
July/August 2006
Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull is quite animated when discussing the current and future state of recorded music. Back in the early months of 2000, Anderson and I sat down in a hotel restaurant in New York City to discuss similar topics. It's interesting to see how things have progressed since then — or not...
So: Surround sound or stereo?
Two channels seems to be just right. We've got two eyes, two ears, two nostrils — we're binary creatures by nature, so stereo sound works for me.
You were among the pioneers of recording in quadraphonic sound.
That's right. By 1975, I was recording in dedicated four-track — two front and two rear channels — but I came very rapidly to the conclusion that the only way to do that correctly was to use the rear channels for live-performance ambience. That meant carrying only 60% of the room sound in the back speakers in order to give the idea of music being performed in an acoustic space. But that's kind of underutilizing the rear channels, isn't it, if that's all they do?
What do you think about recording in surround sound now?
Well, you don't want me sitting on your shoulder breathing on the back of your ear. That's not going to make the music sound any better. It's going to be disconcerting. What works best is when you very gently suggest being in an environment with the artist, but he's still a performer and stays on his side of the footlights. This may be an old-fashioned point of view, but I think it's important not to cross that strange borderline between the performer and the listener. That would be like going to the art gallery and stepping through the frame and being a part of a Turner painting.
I think there are some fundamental truths in terms of presenting entertainment and art. If it's sheer entertainment, by all means, have multichannel sound and be surrounded by the Arnold Schwarzenegger experience: total absorption, total immersion. But if I want to listen to Beethoven's Ninth Symphony or a great piece of pop or rock music, I'd rather sit on this side of the footlights and have it presented to me so I feel I'm in a natural acoustic space with only some of the information coming from around me. Frankly, you don't need multichannel discrete audio to do that.
Analog or digital?
I hate — hate — analog! And I hate vinyl! If I have to choose, I'll go for the CD every time. Most irritating to me is the turntable rumble, the scratches, the general noise. There is no such thing as a great-sounding vinyl record. It's impossible. You try scratching a wiggly groove in a piece of lacquer with a sharp needle and tell me that's art — forget it. That's just making the best of the available technology. It's a helluva compromise. And besides, now comes the next 15 years worth of hi-fi quality: SACD, DVD-Audio, and beyond.
But we're not allowed to switch to it just yet — not until the Pioneers and the Sonys and everybody else have emptied their warehouses of all the VCRs, CD players, and cassette players. The technology exists, but we consumers cannot take advantage of it because the political and economic realities dictate that things have to take their time getting through the system until we're allowed to have the new toys.
You probably don't care too much for MP3.
MP3 is of absolutely no interest to me whatsoever. Musically, it's a highly compressed audio file. It still takes way too long to download. And we're still a matter of years away — not too many, but, still, a few years away — from any kind of universality of technological download for most people on earth to download something with some semblance of musical quality. But it's not going to be quick and it's not going to be universal overnight.
Modem speeds at the moment? I mean, just forget it. It takes hours to download an album. And if you do do it, well, you've got a lot more time in your life than I do.
I know I used to enjoy making compilation tapes, back when I had the time to do them.
When home taping first came around with the advent of the cassette, the artist and the record company all got fearfully worried that this would result in a huge amount of pirating of music, that it would spell the end of the music industry — and, of course, it didn't happen, because all of us who made our little tapes all recognized the trade-offs in terms of quality. The hassle factor of copying — even in real-time, 1-to-1 — it's a dreary job. And we tend to go into the record store and buy the CD, anyway.
Downloading has got to be really quick — a matter of seconds — to make it worth it to go to that extreme. What's going to make it worthwhile, in my humble opinion, is that the cheap and cheerful end of the glitzy pop charts will be highly compressed audio that will be downloadable onto a static format like a memory chip, smart-media card, or whatever. It'll need 100 MB to make it worth the hassle. But the advantages are that you'll have a very small player that's jog-proof so you can take it running, go to the gym, or put it in your car — it's a convenience. But it's not even going to have the quality of CD...
That's my problem with it. If it's not going to have the quality level of CD, why bother?
The answer is convenience. It's speed of download time if you're taking it off the Net — legally, we hope — or whether you're just copying it from your friends. People who enjoy music and want to enjoy the quality of the original analog recordings — then you need a minimum of 24 bits — which doesn't sound like a whole lot more than the 16 we're used to with the CD, but it's a logarithmic progression. 24 bits, to all intents and purposes to the human ear, has the smoothness of the dynamic response we associate with analog recording.
I can't quite put my finger on it, but I've never felt comfortable with the quality of sound of CDs. It's always sounded edgy, harsh, and, above all, fatiguing.
Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull on the Future of Recorded Music
The lay of the land from the outspoken front man/flutist for the perennial British rock vanguards, currently out on the boards here and abroad supporting Aqualung Live (RandM) and Plays the Orchestral Jethro Tull (Benz Street).
by Mike Mettler
July/August 2006
What do you think of downloading?
In the days when I grew up, you really had to work hard just to find music. Besides the obvious pop that was being played on the one or two channels playing it, there wasn't much access to jazz or blues or any other "minority" music that could be arrived at short of listening to live music or going to specialty shops that stocked that sort of thing. I was quite lucky that there was a shop in the town I grew up in that stocked jazz and blues records. As a teenager, I wasn't listening to pop and rock; I was listening to jazz and blues, primarily. Some of those specialty shops exist today selling physical product, be it vinyl or CD, and for those people who want to sift through racks of records, that's fine. But those of us who perhaps don't have the fortune to live near those stores rely on postal deliveries of physical product from people like Amazon who pretty much have anything on current release. And, of course, the great advantage is that you can listen to streaming excerpts of a wide variety of music on the Web and find out more about it.
With digital delivery available at virtually every fingertip hovering over a keyboard, is the physical product being threatened? Are we at the point that CDs could disappear?
I don't think most people believe that's true. But CDs have overstayed their welcome in the sense that the 16-bit musical format has been around for about 25 years. That's a long time. Back in '74 or '75, I was in JVC's studios in Los Angeles cutting some of the first quadraphonic discs. It was the beginning of a new age. But of course quad never really caught on at the time, and that technology that was used back then was being reconfigured for the laserdisc. JVC and Philips pioneered these things back then, giving rise almost accidentally to the CD. I can remember going to speak to the folks at our record company: "Imagine that you could put all of this stuff on a videodisc, but forget about the video. Just concentrate on the sound. You can probably get a whole record on something the size of a single." And they said, "Hmm, yeah, that's very interesting." And they didn't think too much about it. But then a few years later, that became commonplace and the face of audio music.
Really, the fidelity of audio CDs has been in question from the beginning. It's amazing that people have stuck with them, and that, in this day and age, sub-CD quality seems to be the order of the day since most of the people experiencing the joys of downloading just aren't aware how limited the audio quality is of what they're paying for. The MP3 is universal, regardless of where you send it to and what people have on the other end to play it.
Sooner or later there will be a successor to the CD that will make sense for the audiophile, whether it's going to be like a CD or some kind of solid-state storage device that hold large file sizes. Whatever succeeds the CD, it probably won't be round. It'll probably be square. [laughs]
Surround Sound in the Gallery
About six years ago, you and I talked about music being remixed in surround sound, a concept then in the embryonic stages. What do you think about it now?
I think that surround sound is most intelligently used in audio when you use the rear channels simply to provide the ambience and the specific nature of the listening space, be it a concert hall or a club. With live albums, you have audience sounds coming mostly from the back rather than the front. But it's not really exciting compared to the use of surround sound in a Star Wars movie, or whatever, where big and dramatic things happen all around you in the audio spectrum. Listening to music isn't really like that. It's a much more subtle experience. I would think that a lot of people buying surround sound equipment are enjoying it the most primarily by watching a movie.
When music DVDs first came out, they were pretty popular. People looked forward to the idea that that there was actually something they could play on the shiny new DVD players that they'd spent a few hundred dollars on. But music DVD sales have dropped dramatically around the world, and movies go to DVD very often within a very short space of time. They last in the movie theaters for 6 weeks and they're on the racks just a few weeks later. The reality is, most people are not watching music — most people are listening to music. That's really the whole point of it. You may buy the DVD and watch it once — or twice, if even that. But music, you may listen to that your whole life — a couple hundred times, or more. How many hundreds of times have people heard The Dark Side of the Moon, or Sgt. Pepper, or whatever? They're pieces of music that not only will be enjoyed over hundreds of listenings, but they may never really fade away at all. Watching the experience doesn't really cut it for most people.
People listen to music when they're doing something else. It's part of the soundtrack that makes the day go by. People are listening to music when they're driving their car, or sitting at their office desks. I guess many people, me included, are doing office work while connected to broadband Internet and are streaming live music from a favorite radio station. That's what radio is also about these days.
Speaking of digital delivery, do you have an iPod?
I'm on my third iPod now, but I'm not one of those crazy people who have to have everything that has an Apple logo on it. I think there are some things that Apple does very well. Their venture into iTunes and downloading music is really to support the profit they make on the hardware. As a business model, they're really creating demand for a physical product that has a cachet attached to it. It's a standard by which other digital audio players are measured, and iTunes has a workable, operable system that's at least as good as and better than most. It really is the easiest to operate that I've come across, and iTunes, when it comes to ease of downloading, is pretty sophisticated. It doesn't search or give you as many genre options as certain others, but it's still pretty good.
And now there's pressure from the record companies on Apple to drop the price per track below its current level. I think where the price is pitched at the moment is just right. How many cappuccinos with all the trimmings can you buy for the price of one CD these days? Three? Not very many. [chuckles] When you price an entire classic CD — whether it's rock, pop, blues, or classical —as throwaway as two and a half cups of coffee at Starbucks, very enjoyable though they may be, they won't be with you a few hours later. We don't seem to value the music we listen to very highly these days, when you compare it to other disposable products that we seem to guzzle without thinking. I think music, arguably, is already underpriced, and those who think it should become cheaper, or even free, are talking out of their bottoms. Music is not valued the way it should be, and I would be very disappointed if the price came down.
But we have to remember that the future of music depends on new artists, and new people getting infused about new music, new people working at record companies and publishing and the recording industries and the marketing and promotional parts of the whole business. And if people aren't able to do that properly, there will be no new music. You can't expect there to be the investment in the artists of tomorrow unless the whole business of recording, marketing, and promoting music is going to be profitable for the many, many people involved in that process.
That's why most artists may be prepared to give away music on their websites as a promotional tool. It's the same way that record companies traditionally have given away 20 percent of the records for free for marketing purposes. That's happened. That's the real world. That's the way it goes. We can be pretty sure that artists giving away their records have to think about giving away records for the rest of their lives to stir enough interest for people to go out and actually buy them.
Are we at a critical point? Is there any turning back, or any solution in your mind?
It's about managing the system for the benefit of who comes next — managing the system so that we're going to see profitable and healthy companies. We should expect that people can make reasonable levels of profit so they can invest wisely in the music of tomorrow, whatever that might be. Whether we like it or not based on our ideas of musical merit isn't the point, it's about giving future artists the opportunity to do what's been done in the last 40 or 50 years of commercial music. It's about as cheap as it can be.
Of course there are people out there who feel that music should cost next to nothing or simply be absolutely free. I hope they don't get their way. Otherwise, there will be no meaningful music. The reality is, even if you're just talking about making music available on the Internet, nothing is for nothing. There are discernible costs attached. You have to get people's attention and get your product noticed. Then you have to find other ways to market and promote that, via the Internet or other traditional media in order to get people to go to the right website on the Internet to go download your music. There are still going to be costs attached to the delivery of any kind of music anytime anywhere. Those costs are just a part of the healthy democracy in which we'd like the Iraqis to live. If a lot more people had had iPods, we may not have had the Spanish Inquisition or the troubles in Ireland or the former Yugoslavia. We may have been able to soothe some troubled souls.
iPods, MP3, and Beyond
As someone interest in sound quality, how do you wrestle with what you have to do to get songs on your iPod? Do you go lossless?
Well, I'm usually like everyone else — I'm in a hurry. Over here [in England] we pay 79 pence for a track, which is probably about $1.20, a little more than you pay in the USA. But it seems to me to be a reasonable deal. Some tracks are 5, 6, 7 minutes long, which doesn't seem bad to pay for something you'll listen to many times, usually while you're doing other stuff, or you're in your car with road noise, engine noise, wind rumble — arguably, it really doesn't matter whether you're listening to 24-bit/96k or higher model of audio quality as opposed to some highly compressed MP3. That doesn't make much of a difference to most people most of the time. I could sit and listen to music on high-performance headphones in a room with great speakers and a great sound system, and there is a world of difference. I sometimes feel sad that, for many an audiophile, there aren't that many easy options. I don't think that, given the file sizes that I've had to move around for professional purposes, I wouldn't want to be doing that to listen to things recreationally. I'm in too much of a hurry. I don't want to spend that kind of time downloading really, really big files. But most people don't have to worry about that. They just take whatever bit rate iTunes gives them.
I'm also torn as an audiophile pressed for time but wanting a lot of songs with me on my primary iPod, which is at about 13,800 at the moment. I like having that as an option. If it's at 128, so be it.
One way or another, whether you've downloaded from iTunes or burned from CDs that you've bought or been given, that constitutes a considerable financial investment on your part. If you think of somebody having 20,000 tracks on their iPod, that's a lot of money, isn't it? It's a couple thousand dollars worth of records, essentially.
How many songs do you have on yours?
I don't use my iPod for listening to music recreationally. I use it as a storage tool for my own records, stuff I have to learn from other artists, and live recordings for future reference. I use it more as a professional notebook rather than a means to listen recreationally. Usually when I'm doing that, I'm listening to classical music streaming down from my computer or my digital radio sitting at the side of my office desk. I'm not very fond of listening to music when I'm on an airplane because the amount of noise going on is horrendous. And the regulation headphones are rarely satisfying because they make your ears sore and they're artificial-sounding. I don't listen to music a great deal when I'm traveling because I don't like noise in the background interfering with what I'm listening to. I'm probably not a typical listener from any standpoint. The kind of music I listen to is not pop and rock. It's usually classical or world music. And I like to listen to it with a clean ambient environment, in a room where people are not making noises, no contradiction in musical terms with what I'm listening to.
One of the obvious reasons that radio stations compress their signals is if you're listening to quiet passages in your car, there are bits that you just don't hear above all the noise. [chuckles] I'm just amazed people turn their radio on instinctively when they get into their cars. There are these tinny little things happening in the background, like a hint of some programmed drum machine or something. It's just a habitual comfort thing to hear some little rippling kind of noise that breaks up the tedium of wind, engine, and road noise. It's very weird. I think those people, when they sit down in a quiet room to listen to music, would find it a very difficult experience. They need to have records that have wind, engine, and car noise on them for them to be able to enjoy the music. [laughs]
I like to do appointment listening where I sit down at home and not do anything else for an hour or so.
From a technical point of view, those of us who make the music have to make sure it sounds okay across a variety of listening experiences on a variety of equipment, so the compromises we make to make things as compatible as possible perhaps render the music something less than what we'd hoped it to be. That's just one of the things you have to do. And you'd do things differently if you were mastering for a vinyl record as opposed to a CD.
It's surprising how long the MP3 has been around. There are many other compressed digital-delivery formats, but the MP3 is kind of universal, regardless of where you send it to and what people have on the other end to play that. In some ways, it's the devil you know, and it's not a bad one. It's kind of okay. It's definitely preferable to cassettes and vinyl.
