My sonic youth

WHEN LARS ULRICH, drummer for Metallica, opined a few years ago that the appearance of the Sony Walkman or ``personal stereo" in 1979 was a significant event in human history, how resoundingly and heavy-metallically right he was. Can you remember the first song you heard through Walkman headphones? I can. It was ``Walking On The Moon" by The Police, from 1979's ``Regatta de Blanc." It gave me, quite literally, a sensation of space: With the first notes-Sting's astro-booted bass line, Andy Summers's plangent guitar reverbed out into the lunar darkness, Stewart Copeland's hi-hat hissing like the fires of a nearby star-I could feel a new and very potent vacancy expanding in a corona around my head. I'd used headphones before, but this was different-a brighter and more immediate galaxy, me-centric. It moved when I moved. My life had changed.

Marketed as a groovy distraction, with its toy name (it was nearly called the Sound Walky) and frivolous orange headset, the Walkman seemed an unlikely harbinger for a revolution in consciousness. Nonetheless, things would never be the same. The capacity to give oneself a private soundtrack, to transmogrify the experience of walking down the street by mixing it with, say, a Pink Floyd album, had previously been reserved for the users of mind-altering drugs. Now the common human realm of traffic noise, chit-chat, and barking dogs was abruptly populated by silent, entranced people, walking with a strange spring in their step or nodding rhythmically on the bus: Walkman users, each snug in the bulb of his or her music.

Technologically, we of the Walkman generation were not yet completely insulated. There was the periodic need to change the tape, for example, or the batteries-to crack the Walkman open, fuss over its innards, and briefly participate in the random non-Walkman world. With the advent of the slender and ubiquitous iPod these clumsy connectors to ordinariness have been removed. The iPod experience is a smooth ride, as sleek and impervious as the minicomputer itself-set it to shuffle and you're sealed up in a dream machine, a twinkling drift through your own forgotten highlights.

But for the Gen X-ers among us there's a problem. The signal squeezed through an iPod's white earbuds is not the warm and spacious headphone mindblow of old; to me it sounds bruisingly compressed, stripped of nuance, all bunched up in the midrange. Increasing the volume only distorts the bass and produces a nasty precipitation of treble, as if the drummer is flogging his cymbals with bicycle chains. The more raucous and unkempt the original music, the worse it sounds. An old punk record like The Damned's ``New Rose," for example, is nearly unlistenable on an iPod.

There are technical reasons for this, to do with the shaving of the upper and lower ranges necessary to convert a piece of music into something that is storable and playable on an iPod: The MP3 is known as a ``lossy compression format," meaning that-like a JPEG image-it is essentially a degraded simulacrum, sacrificing detail and tone for an overall likeness. Perhaps this is the Faustian trade-off we make in return for having it all at our fingertips: Treating music as information, the actual presence in a musical performance, the grain of it, the soul even-hands on strings, feet on drum pedals-is vitiated.

In a recent and much-discussed article in Stylus magazine, titled ``Imperfect Sound Forever," music writer Nick Southall took his profession to task for its vagaries in this area. ``I think music journalists have a responsibility," he wrote, ``to listen to records on at least half-decent equipment-film critics wouldn't (I hope) review a film based on viewing it on an iPod Video during a train journey, and film studios would be aghast if they did....I know more than a few people who've reviewed albums based solely on MP3s-I've done it myself in the past, to my shame."

Southall's article also goes into what is known as the Loudness War: the process whereby recorded music is ``compressed" at the mastering stage-long before it is turned into an MP3, in other words-to make it louder and more urgent in your speakers (or earbuds). Done to excess, this practice results not in vitality but in an assaultive deadness. And the trend seems to be toward excess; Southall produces in evidence the appalling fact that the 2004 album ``Hopes And Fears" by Brit softies Keane is twice as loud as Nirvana's 1991 ``Nevermind."

Compression upon compression: As headphone size has contracted, as the monster cans of the `70s, holding the cranium in their cushioned pincer-grip, narrowed first to the orange headphones and then to the tiny white earbuds, so has the range of our sonic enjoyment. None of this is to lament the rise of the iPod. I love my iPod; you won't catch me riding the T without it. It just doesn't make me walk on the moon.

James Parker's column appears biweekly in Ideas. E-mail cultural.studies@globe.com.