The first time I heard an MP3 I was completely unimpressed. I had received a CD of tracks from a new, hopeful digital music web site (now long gone) at a music conference tradeshow. Hillary Johnson and I sat down and listened to some of the tracks, presumably converted from original 44.1 CDs to MP3 encoding and then back to CD. The songs sounded grainy, flat and worse than cassettes to us.
Recently I was visiting New Orleans and hanging with John Fischbach of Piety Street Studios when John told me how he had hooked up the new Apple iTunes service and was buying songs over the Internet for 99 cents each. In my mind I had relegated the world of music downloading to college kids and bored slackers, so this revelation from a man a few years my senior made me feel like I was possibly writing something off that I should be paying attention to.
I bought an Apple iBook soon after, to help me with editing Tape Op, and while preparing to go on a short business trip wondered if I could load CDs into the MP3 player and avoid carrying a bunch of albums with me. I skeptically opened up iTunes and loaded in the new Radiohead album and some Pink Floyd. Upon playback, I was surprised. The songs didn't sound totally ruined, and how convenient to have tunes loaded in my computer for travel. I burned another bunch of CDs in for the trip (Dead Can Dance, Floyd, Eno, Guided By Voices, Joy Division, King Tubby, The Beatles, etc.) and got excited about being able to listen to all of this stuff. I even bought a $19 speaker set with baby subwoofer that I could carry in my luggage (didn't sound half bad either) and threw in a pair of Ultrasone Trackmaster headphones (which I can't recommend highly enough).