You know, we engineers spend ridiculous amounts of money on preamps, compressors, eq, etc., yet when all is said and done, the end result is compressed into some horrible sounding mp3 file and listened to on a pair of crappy earbuds. My friend Chad and I have discussed this ad nauseam. We even started Functional Equivalent Recordings so that we would have a place to not only release our music in the form we want it to be heard in, but also to express that we want higher fidelity in the recordings released by all artists, which we don’t find to be particularly ground-breaking and wonder why this isn’t the norm already.

I was reading the new Tapeop magazine a few days ago and loved the interview with T-bone Burnett. Apparently a team of engineers and himself have been working on a new release format called XO∆E (CODE). They say

creates high-definition audio files that are virtually indistinguishable from the original master tapes. The resonance, warmth and presence that has been realized with CODE is unprecedented in the digital era.

I can’t seem to find any other information about the format as he also stated in the Tapeop interview that there would be a higher quality downloadable format as well. Either way, I think this is a great idea, yet I will withhold judgement of the format until I hear it.

Also, I recently came across Bandcamp. It’s a great place for artists to upload their albums and have them transcoded to lots of different formats. They also make them available to buy either by a price you as the artist set or by letting the fan set their own price. Oh, it also sounds great! Give it try and see what you think.