Neil Young's Long Fight to Restore the Quality of Music

Neil Young has been disappointed by the sound of his own music for more than 30 years.

Back in 1982, Young listened to some of his songs on a CD for the first time and couldn't help but "question what had happened" to the sound quality. CDs had just come to market that year and some, like Young, believed there was a noticeable drop in quality from vinyl and certainly from what was heard in the recording studio. That fidelity only worsened in the years that followed as the industry shifted to mp3 downloads and streaming music. The evolution, or devolution, of music formats weighed on him.

"I felt really guilty about selling mp3s," Young told Mashable in an interview earlier this month. "People were paying for this thing that was only a fraction of what I created... It sounds so compromised that you really don't get the feeling of the music. You don't get into the depth of the music and get the soul of it because there's not enough of it there." Read more...