and not a good one either.

If you know me or have ever talked to me for more than five minutes, then you are probably aware that I love music. I love music a lot. In particular, I love heavy metal and ****c rock. I steer off of these two genres with some other music as well. I like Johnny Cash and Skinny Puppy, for instance. Music is a huge part of who I am, and it is a pretty close race between that, baseball and video games for which one I love the most.

One thing that goes hand in hand with liking music, or should in my opinion, is love of good sound quality. I want my music, movies and video games to sound (and look in the case of movies and video games) as good as they possibly can. This is why I have pieced together a stereo over the years that sounds pretty damned amazing for how much I spent on it. I lucked into an outstanding head unit at a pawn shop, but I was still going for something that would sound good. I got something that sounds mind blowing, instead. I spent probably 500 bucks on my stereo alone. This does not include things such as my television or Playstation 3 (which doubles as an amazing CD, DVD and Blu Ray player). My set up cost me a lot of cash over the years.

One of the pieces of my home theater set up that gets quite a bit of use is my record player. I have a record player (Two actually, counting the stereo console that I found last week. That is a story for another time) specifically because I care about sound quality. CDs cannot produce the pure, beautiful sound that records can, which distresses me even further with the problem that I mentioned that I promise I am getting around to.

As I have said, I have noticed a trend in the music industry, and it is a negative one. The overall sound quality of music put on disc now days is dropping. I cannot be the only one that has noticed the decline in overall sound in more recent years. IF you listen to CDs from the early 2000's and CDs from now, chances are pretty good that the CDs from today are going to be lower quality than those made today.

Why is this? I think I have this answer. I think the rise of the MP3 is to blame. Completely digital music is on the rise, and has been ever since the rise of MP3 players. As a result of this, companies are making music to the standard of the MP3. They want to make it sound as good as it can be when in MP3 format. This is hurting the overall quality of sound. MP3s are not capable of playing the full range of sound that a CD is capable of, and record companies seem to be intentionally recording at a lower quality for digital distribution of music.

If you think about it, at the root of all of this is the iPod from Apple. It is at the center of the MP3 world. It is, far and away, the most popular MP3 player on the market, despite the fact that it is not the most advanced MP3 player on the market, nor is it the cheapest. There are cheaper MP3 players with better interfaces that are easier to work with and have more features than the iPod does, but that, again, is a discussion for another time. With the rise of the iPod comes the drop in sound quality.

Do not hear me saying that MP3 players are bad. I loved mine prior to accidentally stepping on it. I loved having all of my music in one place, but there is a reason that I still buy the music on CDs and records. I like to have a physical copy of it, and I like the better sound quality. The better sound quality is going away. Is the music industry trying to push us away from buying CDs and into buying digital music? I do not want that to happen. Ever. Give me my higher quality CDs and let me transfer them to my MP3 player. Don't give me lower quality CDs that will sound the same when in MP3 format. That's ****