Craig Anderton’s Open Channel: The Price of Pursuing Perfection

“Perfect sound forever.” Well, that’s what marketing departments said, yet the CD wasn’t perfect, or forever. We know that. But what did “sound” mean? If something was on a CD, was the recording itself inherently perfect? Were the drums miked perfectly? Would the playback system also be perfect? “Perfection” matters to our studio world in diverse ways, such as…

The Studio Itself: Recently, I heard superbly recorded music at Blackbird Studio, and the sound quality was as close to perfection as the state of the art allows. However, that only underscored the cruel reality that my studio, like most others, doesn’t sound as good. For studio gear, the price of pursuing perfection is steep. It’s a truism that a $500 speaker is 10 times better than a $50 speaker, but a $5,000 speaker isn’t 10 times better than a $500 speaker—and a $50,000 speaker isn’t 10 times better than a $5,000 speaker.

And expenses escalate. Better mics. Better converters. Recording at 64-bit float. Faster computers. Of course, cynics say the music ends up being heard mostly by people listening to data-compressed files on earbuds or computer speakers anyway, but even over compromised playback systems, superb sound translates better. Also, it’s fair to remember that some listeners do prioritize quality over convenience and mirror a studio’s pursuit of perfection in their own systems.

The Artist: Every artist wants the perfect take, and every engineer wants to capture it perfectly. Although “time is money,” there’s not necessarily a direct monetary tie-in to pursuing this kind of perfection. The price of trying to attain artistic perfection can take a toll in various ways, whether it’s on the psyche because of self-doubt, not evolving due to being fixated on a project that stubbornly refuses to gel, going down endless rabbit holes in search of something “better” or letting one’s art stagnate because of needing to prioritize the marketing that’s so important in our “supply-ofmusic- exceeds-the-demand” world.

Besides, what is “perfection” when it comes to art? That debate will never end, whether it involves comping individual syllables, tuning every vocal or quantizing anything that has a rhythm. Some believe that human imperfections add interest, but are they really flaws, or are they conscious—or perhaps subconscious—decisions to color outside the lines? I tend to think the latter. At the very least, the “perfect take” requires the best balance of fixing “imperfections” that are unintentional, leaving the ones that aren’t unintentional alone, and recognizing the difference between the two.

The Sonic Character: Anyone working in a studio wants perfect sound quality…or do they? If the Snot Puppies are recording “Punk You, Evil Billionaires,” do they want transparently pristine sound? Maybe they want to sound like “Louie Louie,” not “Lewis Lewis.” Maybe perfection shows up as a filthy, distorted drum sound. The price of pursuing perfection now takes on a different meaning, because it can be more difficult to capture the perfection of raw, unfiltered emotion than it is to tinker with plug-ins while editing a sound to “perfection.”

The Playback System: “Hi-fi” used to be a big deal. Even if your friends couldn’t afford the best, they aspired to that goal with big speakers, precision turntables and power amps loud enough to frighten small animals. No, I’m not veering off into “the old days were better,” because there are still plenty of well-to-do people with beautiful home theaters and perfect-adjacent audio playback systems—but as with recording studios, the price of pursuing that level of perfection is steep. It’s not just about the gear, but having a house with enough space for decent acoustics.

So, where do these examples lead us? At best, perfection is elusive, costly or both, as embodied in another truism—“The perfect is the enemy of the good”—but perhaps music software tells us what we need to know about perfection: It’s a process, not a terminus.

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Today’s software evolves continuously. Version 1.0 is never perfect. Nor is version 1.1. Instead, software pursues perfection over time. It’s like calculus describing a ball bouncing halfway to a wall on each bounce: It never reaches the wall but keeps getting ever closer. I’ve adopted the same model for my tech eBooks, because download-only publications can be updated. It used to be that when printed books hit a store’s shelves, that was the end of their journey; now, books can evolve over time and follow the same process as software.

We’re seeing more artists and engineers doing remixes and remasters—a tacit admission that the original wasn’t perfect, at least to them. Films have updated “director’s cuts.” Cover songs revise classic music for modern tastes. I’d love to see YouTube make it possible to update videos without wiping comments and views. We have Peter Gabriel offering two different mixes of his new songs. So, which one is “perfect”? Both…and neither.

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The music you make, the recordings you engineer, the live mix at a concert, the software you use, the vocalist’s take? None of these will ever be “perfect”—but they don’t need to be. It certainly doesn’t mean that “good enough” is the goal; it means that pursuing perfection is the goal.

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Thinking you can attain perfection is a trap, because you’ll be forever chasing that which isn’t possible—but the chase can be a lot more fun when you control the chase, rather than having that chase control you.