On my 13th birthday, my parents gave me a portable CD player and the masterpiece that was Fresh Hits 1997. Like more than 600mn other people, I have long since swapped my box of CDs for the Spotify app on my phone. But I found my old birthday present recently and discovered it still worked. Even using headphones from the 1990s, I was staggered by the richness of the sound.
My ears didn’t deceive me. CDs have a bit-rate of 1,411 kilobits per second, which is a measure of how much data is used to represent sound. Spotify Premium ranges from 24 kbps to 320 kbps, while free Spotify listeners are limited to 160 kbps at best. I realise this is hardly news to music aficionados. Neil Young, who grudgingly returned his music to Spotify this year after a spat involving Joe Rogan, complained, “There is so much tone missing that you can hardly feel the sensitivity.”
If hundreds of millions of normal music listeners (like me) have decided to trade audio quality for convenience and variety, then fair enough. But what disconcerted me is that I didn’t know that’s what I’d done. I had simply forgotten how much better music used to sound.