Automatic transcript by Descript.com.

Hello, and welcome to the three techs. I’m your host, Tony Tang. And I’m joined by the other two techs tonight. Bob Fairburn. Hey Bob and Steven Branson. Hey Steven, Bob recently, I was exploring some different music streaming services and specifically high definition streaming services. And I wanted to compare what the difference was, whether or not I could hear the difference of high definition versus regular streaming.

Tony Tang: And it brought up a bigger question in my mind, which is how are people listening to music these days? And how does that differ from say before? And. Are most people missing a lot of stuff in the way that they’re listening to music and consuming it, like through standard streaming services and just through headphones or Bluetooth speakers and not having that traditional Hi-Fi setup.

Cause it seems like that’s kind of died, you know, in the recent decades with MP3s and streaming and all that kind of stuff. So I know you’re really into high fidelity music. And so I thought maybe we could talk about that tonight and get your thoughts on that. So what do you think in general though, like with how people are consuming and listening to music today, what do you think about that?

Bob: Well, the first thing is I’m really glad that people are still listening to music because I feel it’s really important, but I’m, I’m re also saddened by the fact that they, they don’t get the experience of good live concerts. They don’t get the experience of what a home sound system can deliver in emotion and feeling.

And all of the wonderful sounds that are recorded in say a classical recording or a, or a live concert or whatever it happens to be. So they’re, they’re missing so much, but without the experience, number one, they don’t know it. And number two, they don’t have the desire because they haven’t had the experience to go try and improve that.

And that kind of saddens me.

Tony Tang: Yeah, I think that a lot of people, they probably don’t know what they’re missing. Right in the recorded material and how good the music can actually sound when you hear the uncompressed version of it on a really good playback system.

Bob: that’s, that’s part of it, but they also, I don’t think they have the understanding of what good. They don’t have an understanding of what the difference is to know that they’re missing that experience. And we kind of hide that away in the simplicity of a smart speaker or Bluetooth head phones or whatever, listening out of the little tiny speaker in the bottom of your cell phone or the tinny speakers in a laptop, that kind of stuff.

People just don’t know what they’re missing.

Tony Tang: Yeah. And Stephen, I want to get your perspective on this because I think maybe of the three of us, maybe you’re not as much invested into, you know, high fidelity music playback. Can you tell us a bit about how you listen to your music?

Steven: Yeah, I mean, it’s, it’s varied over time. I think I’m more interested in the, in the performance than in the fidelity of the playback. So it depends on the circumstances. So I used to have a. A nice setup with just a modestly priced CD player. And I would play CDs on that. And they went into a pack of Roland speaker amplifiers, which were just astonishingly wonderful.

When I bought them, they just knocked my socks off,