High-Res audio can make you feel like you're sitting right in the tracking room as its being preformed. But what about MP3's? Russ weighs in on how people consume music in the age of streaming.

Well, I think...I mean the problem is, which is not necessarily a problem, it’s just the way technology has changed. I mean, people can do, people who aren’t “real engineers” can actually do a decent job recording too. I mean, and you don’t need to be able to uh...I mean when I got started, um, you, I had to be, to be a “legitimate engineer,” I had to be able to walk in to pretty much any studio in town and record efficiently and make sure everything sounds good and um… And whether it was a good studio or a bad studio, which is part of the reason I had two big racks worth of gear and I had cartage that came with me every time I did a session because I had gear that I knew inside out, that I was real quick with, and I could, even if, if the studio had some great stuff I might use it too, but I might only use my stuff because I knew how my stuff worked and how it sounded. And regardless of where I worked, people always got great sounding tracks. 

And, um, and now people rarely, even if they move around some, they only work at two or three different studios maybe so they don’t have to learn all that many different places and they have their own couple pieces of gear, so they may not even be that, a real engineer, but they could use their stuff, more than adequate enough to get good, quality recordings. So, I wouldn’t say that “good engineering,” I mean there’s not very many people though that could walk in and record a sixty piece orchestra. And, um, I mean there’s only a handful of people in town that could do that now but, um...And I don’t know who’s going to replace them because I don’t really know who’s learning that, learning that uh, skill on a day to day basis now because it’s not something that’s being done as often as it used to be, um...but, um...So, I think there’s some, there’s still people who can make quality, it’s possible for people to make good sounding records who aren’t engineers first is what I’m saying, um...but, uh…

People are consuming records totally different, you’re right there, and people, I mean, there’s not really record listening that I see very much like there used to be. I mean, when I was a kid, when I was a huge fan of music in high school and I’d get a new album, and I had the best stereo of all my friends, and I had, you know, there were three or four friends that would come over to my house. We would sit on my bed, put on the record, and we would pass the credits back and forth, and we would sit there and listen to the whole thing. We might say a couple of words when we were turning the thing over and then we would listen to the other side, and that was how we would listen to music. And when we would listen to music, that’s all we did was listen to music. But, um, we spent way less time listening to music total as people do now. Um, but when we would listen, we would really listen. Now people listen to music non-stop. I mean my son has his earbuds in more than he has a mouth and, um, and he’s constantly listening to it. But, it’s background, soundtrack music almost and, uh, it’s not something that he’s listening to the way we listened to it when I was young, um…

The mp3’s, I mean mp3’s are, the quality’s bad, but I think they get a worse “rap” then they deserve because I’ve, the algorithm’s that encode mp3’s are way better now than they were when mp3’s were released. And I’ve done multiple tests sitting down with some really good algorithms where it is really hard to tell the difference between the mp3 and the non-mp3 file. And, um, uh, when they’re encoded properly, which they often are not, but, I don’t think that that’s naturally a bad thing. I mean, I wouldn’t want that as my final copy, but the fact that it allows you to move music around so easy, I think’s a really a great, a great thing. So, I don’t, um, necessarily think, I mean I think hi-res audio’s a, I mean I love that, the idea of hi-res audio and, and hope that we move in that direction. But, but, I don’t discount the mp3 for what it does, I think it has some great advantages.