In today’s New Yorker, Trent Reznor complains to Sasha Frere-Jones about consumers’ appalling tolerance for low-quality audio: “Walk into a Best Buy and everyone’s obsessed with the highest possible resolution for their TVs … yet everyone still walks around with those terrible quality white iPod earbuds.” Funny enough, just last week Jones heard the opposite argument from Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood: “We had a few complaints that the MP3s of our last record wasn’t encoded at a high enough rate. Some even suggested we should have used FLACs, but if you even know what one of those is, and have strong opinions on them, you’re already lost to the world of high fidelity and have probably spent far too much money on your speaker-stands.” And if Trent hears what Jonny said about signal purity and oxygen-free cables, he is going to explode. [NYer, NYer]
