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Bluetooth Speakers Are Ruining Music

The Atlantic
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78% Informative

The engine of this musical era is access to access, says Julian Zelizer .

Zelizer: We hold the divine power instead to summon any song we can think of almost anywhere.

He says people wear $ 500 headphones on the subway; they fork out the GDP of East Timor to see Taylor Swift .

Music is different now, but how we listen has shrunk, Zelizer says.

The advent of stereo sound, with separated left and right channels, was an economic engine for makers of both recordings and equipment.

The musical space had always been monolithic, with players and listeners sharing it for the fleeting moment of performance.

It was akin to shooting a studio film with a handheld camera, reworking the whole relationship of perceiver to perceived.

The first time since the arrival of hi-fi almost a century ago that we’ve so widely acceded to making the music in our lives smaller.

Solitary speakers tend to be additive, showing up in places you wouldn’t think to rig for the best sound: in the dining room, on the deck, at the beach.