Last night on CBC, grumpy old guitarist Lou Reed was grumbling about the state of sound. Digital sound, specifically. He hates MP3s and iPods and the whole post-vinyl audio universe. He complained you can’t even tell what instrument is playing, there’s so little audio information in digital file. CBC then segued to a recording of Lou and the Velvet Underground performing “Waiting for My Man”, which sounded as though it had been recorded in a public toilet next to a particularly busy subway.

Lou was endorsed in his view by fellow paleorocker Neil Young, who complained in an interview last month that listening to digital music was like looking at a painting through a screen.

It should be noted that these gentlemen were responsible for inflicting two of the most awful collages of interminable, dissonant, arhythmic, non-melodic guitar feedback in the history of recorded sound on their unwitting fans (ncluding me, and I still haven’t forgiven them.)

While Lou and Neil’s concern with the quality of sound may have more than a little to do with the state of their hearing after too many years onstage, there’s no doubt that dissatisfaction with the quality of downloadable sound is a fashionable topic among audiophiles, who now bemoan the failure of new technology to deliver downloadable CD quality sound. These are, of course, the same folks who some years ago lamented the demise of vinyl, and complained that CDs lacked the “warmth” and “depth” of a good old record. The fact that they also lacked the hiss, pops, skips, and scratches of a good old record was seldom discussed.

Audio snobs have always been part of the landscape, and it’s nice that the manufacturors of high end equipment can still flog fabulously expensive audio toys that deliver frequencies audible only to bats and seismographs. But this preoccupation with minute degrees of sound quality is making a fetish of one of the least important aspects of music.

Bessie Smith, Enrico Caruso, Seamus Ennis, Robert Johnson, John McCormack, Michael Coleman, Nellie Melba…all we get to hear of them is scratchy recordings pulled from wax cylinder originals or field tape recordings. The quality of sound is dreadful, but within seconds you’re pulled into the performance. The narrow frequence range and crackle don’t matter - unless, of course, you’re one of the acoustically constipated for whom the sound matters more than the music. Such people exist: I once loaned a friend some early Uillean pipe recordings by master piper Leo Rowsome. He returned them within a day: he “couldn’t listen to them” because “the sound was so bad”. Ponder that, if you will - he was unable to appreciate the talent of an authentic musical genius because the quality of sound recording seventy years ago didn’t meet the exacting standards of his sensitive, spoiled ears.

Adding to the silliness of this sound fetish is the fact that these precious audiophiles are conditioning themselves to standards that will themselves become obsolete in just a few years. The “Phase Four Quadraphonic Hi Fidelity Red Label Recordings” that represented that absolute summit of recording technology to the Sophisticated Listener of the late 1960s would now, I suppose, be unlistenable to the Sophisticated Listener of today. The composition, performance, lyrics, and virtuosity would, of course be exactly the same.

So I’ll stick with my ipod, my downloads, and the digitized version of my CD and album collection. If genes do what genes are supposed to, I’ll be deaf in a few years anyway - in the meantime, hearing ninety-nine percent of the sound will do just fine.

And Lou…get over it. It’s nice that you can afford a zillion dollar sound system. But my scratchy old field recorded Robert Johnson albums…or for that matter, my copy of “Berlin”, recorded thirty five years ago - probably sound pretty much same on my system as yours. It’s the singer and the song, Lou - not the sound.