Sound Quality Today

With the CES going on in Vegas this week we've been seeing and reading all the reports of new tech. The tiny/slim new LCD TV, HD Radio, and all kinds of new devices.

One thing that we didn't hear much about was 'sound quality.' In today's world it doesn't seem to matter. We listen to music on the tiny and tinny speakers in our laptops, our I-Pods have little ear buds that really don't sound very good in the end, we plug in tiny speakers, and now we even listen to music on our cell phone speakers. I wonder what the frequency response is on these systems - maybe 5 or 6K. That's about as good as the old AM radio.

It seems like no one cares about sound quality anymore. We have digital music files that are super compressed and sound pretty bad in the end. I can remember guys hauling up speakers as big as a small dresser to their dorm rooms in college. Systems that looked more like this and of course we also had a full wall of 'albums' to play on them.

There was hardly room in the dorm for the bed - but it clearly sounded GREAT.

Is your station keeping up with the down trend in sound quality. First, you shouldn't give up and forget about quality. There will be a return to a trend towards higher quality and there will also be innovations to make smaller devices have higher quality. Also the quality could soon be a much stronger selling point for radio. It could even be now if we took the time to sell it more on the air.

But, you should make sure your processing and files sound good on any system. As much as you can. It may take some sacrifices but it's worth the effort.