EMILY LAZAR is aware of higher than most how nice music can sound. At her New York mastering studio, the Lodge, the Grammy-winning engineer places the ending touches on songs by the likes of the Foo Fighters, Haim and the Rolling Stones. Her job is to make sure that each concord, cymbal crash and energy chord sounds precisely because the artists supposed them to when their albums exit into the world.
When she performs those self same songs off a typical streaming service, nonetheless, what she hears is something however what the artists supposed. Imagine, she mentioned, going to the Louvre to see “The Mona Lisa,” solely to discover on the wall “a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy of the painting, shrunken down to a postage-stamp size, and then photocopied again.” She’s describing, in impact, what occurs when the gargantuan, detail-rich music information she works with get shrunken down—or compressed—for streaming.
An total era of listeners have grown up with streaming.
