I often find myself thinking about audio and audio equipment. This time it’s because I started watching the Swedish TV series “The Playlist.” I’ve only watched the first couple of episodes, but I find it intriguing. I love a good tech story about a small startup that ends up taking over the world. And “The Playlist” is about the founding of Spotify in Sweden and how it changed the modern landscape of music and the music industry.
Until I started watching the show, I must admit I knew nothing about Spotify. I’ve been outside of Canada for the entire period that Spotify grew and became a thing, and without an established homebase, I never got into the world of streaming. I remember that in my initial years living in Taiwan, downloading music through pirating was just becoming popular. I clearly remember the first time I saw someone doing that on their home computer, and I thought he was some kind of mad tech genius. I didn’t know that this was an ordinary thing that millions of people were doing around the world.
The series “The Playlist” is fascinating to me because it illustrates a shift in thinking. And this is harder to do than you might think. Spotify was something that the music industry executives just didn’t “get”. Today, the idea of just clicking on a digital file and having music instantly play is instinctive. It’s no big deal. And it’s hard to understand someone struggling with understanding the concept. Yet, when new technology is first introduced, it involves a shift in your worldview. And that doesn’t come easy.
There’s a great scene in “The Playlist” when the head of Sony Sweden, Per Sundin, is finally convinced to try out the Spotify beta app on a laptop. And coming from a world of physical media – of vinyl albums, tapes, and CDs – he had trouble grasping what was happening. He’d already struggled with the idea of Pirate Bay and how people were downloading digital copies of music. And now he was looking at a streaming platform, and his mind couldn’t fully process what that was. He asked questions like, “How do I download a song?” And the inventor of Spotify, Daniel Ek, told him to just hit the play button and the music would play. There was no “downloading” in the Pirate Bay sense involved. And Per Sundin still didn’t get it. But he clicked on the play button, and he was astonished when the music just started playing. And he asked questions like, “Where is the library? How do I select what I want to play?” And Daniel Ek would tell him to just type the name of the song in the search bar – any name, any song. And Per Sundin couldn’t grasp this either.
In the end, the only way Per Sundin could understand what was in front of him was to physically do it. (This happens to me ALL the time with technology now.) When he typed song names into the search bar and then clicked on them and the music played instantly, the light bulb finally went off. He finally “got it”. And then he went back to his rather nice home, and he went to a large jukebox in one of the rooms. And he made the mental connection: Spotify was essentially a jukebox, but a jukebox that was portable, instantaneous, digital, and essentially infinite. He finally understood what Spotify was and what its significance was.
I found everything in the show fascinating, but this morning, I was thinking in particular of the technology of music playing and what that means for the quality of the audio you’re listening to. For example, audiophiles will talk about a richness and warmth in the audio you get from a vinyl album played on a good turntable that you DON’T get from a digital streaming service. Sure, Spotify gives you instant access to every piece of music on the planet from every device you own, but how does it SOUND? Does the music sound the way the original artist intended? Does it sound GOOD?
And that train of thought brought me all the way back to my final years living in Taiwan. At that time, I found myself in a very strange place in my life in my many ways. I had, for example, a tiny, horrible television. I can’t even remember where it came from anymore. I think it was already in the tiny 6th-floor rooftop room that I rented. I lived in a remarkably small place, and there was a little square carved out of a wall, and in that square there was a tiny TV, purchased years ago for next to nothing and then forgotten and abandoned. And that is the TV to which I hooked up a DVD player and on which I played movies. Given my love of movies, you’d think I’d invest in a massive flat screen TV. Yet, I was content with that tiny TV. I love movies for the stories and the characters, not the special effects, and I don’t care about the visuals. While living in Thailand, I had only a smartphone for a long time, and I watched all my movies and TV shows holding my smartphone inches in front of my face. And I was happy with that, too. Story and characters come across just fine on tiny screens.
Audio, however, was a different beast. I love good audio, especially in a movie, and while I was living in Taiwan (and I had a real job and a monthly salary), I started experimenting with better audio. And after some months, I found myself with a pair of $300 Sennheiser headphones (a major purchase for me). And then I found myself going down the rabbit hole of dedicated headphone amplifiers. I bought one, and the pairing of those headphones with a good amplifier produced an audio quality that was mind blowing. I heard music and my favorite movies in a way that I didn’t know was possible. I was astonished at the difference between music played on my iPod with cheap earbuds and that same music delivered into my brain over Sennheiser headphones and driven by a powerful amplifier. I remember when I left from Taiwan, I really wanted to keep the headphones and the amplifier. In fact, it was what they called a portable amplifier designed to fit into a bag and be carried around. But there was no reasonable way to carry such bulky things around with me, and I had to part with them.
But from time to time, I think about what I’m missing. How nice would it be to have those headphones and that amplifier with me all the time? I realize that in listening to music or a movie over my laptop’s tinny speakers or over earphones, I’m probably hearing maybe 50% of the audio that’s actually there.