The Week in Review

Lenovo’s IdeaPad could spell more trouble for Music Traditionalists

by Ryal2

The News & Observer published a piece today announcing that Lenovo, the Chinese-American computer maker, is preparing to launch an entirely new product line of laptops. Dubbed IdeaPads, these laptops will target gamers and home users, and be available later this month at a start price at $799. With machines featuring emphasized color, design and multimedia, you’d assume everyone would be pumped. Well, everyone save the music traditionalists – people like sound enthusiast Robert Levine of Rolling Stone Magazine. People like me.

Now you see, Levine has no real beef with IdeaPads. IdeaPads actually make an attempt at boosting sound quality. Instead, his problem is with the sub-par sound quality being heard in today’s music. Two things seemingly unrelated, right? Wrong.

How do you Take Your Music?

Today, people by the millions are accessing their music – not from a state-of-the-art stereo system or a live concert – but instead from a tiny laptop (like an IdeaPad) or small set of sub-par-quality headphones hooked into a tiny laptop (or an iPod, Nano, Creative Zen, Zune, etc). Not to be left out on the fun (or the money) the new IdeaPad Y710 has four built-in speakers and a subwoofer. Not the most evil of giants compared to other laptops, but still, not the ideal way to enjoy music in its natural form. The greatest evil is that the IdeaPads probably won’t sound all that bad. Thereby, encouraging countless other laptops to make the same effort, many which will surely try and fail.

An Ugly Trade

The music industry has taken notice and responded with what Levine refers to in his published piece “Death of High Fidelity” as a decade-and-a-half revolution to destroy the pure and originally-intended sound of music. Led by labels, engineers and producers, the music industry is sacrificing sound for convenience, quality for cash.

This revolution, Levine claims, has changed the way albums are produced, mixed and mastered. To please the emerging Mp3 audience, labels, engineers and producers are actually creating a sound best fit for a computer! Forget how great Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde sounded on vinyl, the times they are a changing – and not for the better.

The Degradation of Sound

Levine’s beef doesn’t stop with volume. He also takes a shot a the industry’s fake sound. Computer programs like ProTools appear to be the most obvious guilty party. This program allows audio engineers to manipulate sound comparable to the way a word processor edits text. Manipulated sound = unnaturally perfect sound = the end of real music as we know it.

So where do we go from here? Joe Levy, Executive Editor for Rolling Stone, offers up The Mp3 Challenge . Great read if you have 2 minutes. As far as the IdeaPad goes. Well, it sounds like a promising product, one that will surely play its own little part in the continued degradation of music’s overall quality of sound.

“God is in the details. But there are no details anymore” – Steely Dan’s Donald Fagen.

Photo Credit: Rolling Stone Magazine

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