The auto market is one of the most competitive and low-margin. You need another example for your theorem. I can get a Versa for under $12,000 that is a better car in almost every way than anything that could have been purchased in 1980. We've had 200% inflation since then... What sort of crap did you get for $6000 in 1980? Did it last 150,000 miles and have airbags, crumple zones, a CD player, and AC?

I agree. Substitute man's intervention for some other one-off event. It doesn't really change my point. Polar bears are separated from brown bears by less than half a million years - they may be more analogous to humans, which have less than a 100,000 to have differentiated. My point is that the differentiation - mild as it was - has now largely been undone. Especially here in the US where you have people with significant African heritage living as "white" people and the average "black" person having 30% European heritage. A classification system is completely useless from a scientific standpoint.

But they don't interbreed unless a person intervenes.

Ignoring for the moment that a wolf is basically a wild dog, again they only breed when man intervenes. Dogs wouldn't exist at all without man's intervention.

Weird logic jump, but yes, character traits are heritable. Humans haven't been selectively bred by a weird outside force who wants a docile animal with a smooshed up face and breathing trouble. Humans quite obviously inherit their character traits from their parents. But if you take your typical brown American, they probably have European, native American, and African ancestry. Maybe some Asian. How the hell are you going to classify that person, let alone try to correlate their inherited skin color to their inherited personality? A classification system that cannot classify the President (or nearly 1/3 of the US) is pretty useless.

And oddly, not an island.

"State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations"

Haha, that sounds awful! Probably uses something like the SPEEX codec in a 44kbps stream :)

Strings are bad - and cymbals. MP3 at low bitrates is indeed horrible. But those are all high-end that would be completely absent on AM. If you wished you could encode the MP3 with the high end filtered/compressed out and it would sound just like AM. People seem to prefer bad high end to no high end.

In any event, I wouldn't listen to either low-bitrate MP3 or AM except maybe in the car where it doesn't much matter :)

I'm not sure how old you are, but maybe your ears have lost high frequency response? AM has a very low dynamic range - something like 30dB. You can usually tell immediately that the radio is tuned to AM rather than FM. You could also be lucky enough to be listening to AM with a receiver that can handle HD or stereo broadcasts... those should sound better.

I would like the name of that streaming service, to avoid if possible :)

I'm skeptical, but perhaps in an ideal state you could coax AM radio to sound as good as Pandora's free stream at 128kbps. Certainly not in the typical configuration of an AM radio in 1980. It was not stereo, had horrid dynamic range (lower than the telephone!), and it picked up motor noise from your car engine or refrigerator. And again, you were listening through those horrid 1970s factory speakers or possibly a really crappy set of foam headphones.

Heh, yeah, now I have this image of Neil Young listening to a 48kbps MP3 and declaring digital dead.

And AM/FM radio often have static and drop-outs, and low dynamic range. Even at it's best, FM radio is distinguishable from an LP - which itself is generally full of pops and clicks and sounds a bit worse every time you play it. Tape is distinguishable from an LP, and was usually played on a crappy deck. An 8-track is an abomination, with crosstalk where you could actually hear the other tracks.

Sure, Spotify streams are distinguishable from a CD under good listening conditions. But so are all of the other media he lists. The man is completely deluded. Good artists usually are. I don't really care, since the art is what matters and not the opinions of the artist.

Probably. I was born in the 70s, so "oldies" tend to be from the early rock-n-roll era, while "classics" tend to be from the 70s. When it is 2050, I'll probably still be calling 70s rock "classic rock".

So were car speakers, especially in the 70s and 80s. Clock radios. Awful 1980s walkman earphones. The man came of age and built his fan base in an era with really crappy audio technology by modern standards. His stance only makes sense when filtered through the "eccentric artist" point of view.

Now it is true that in 1980, one could pipe their cassette deck through a really nice amp and set of speakers. Just like you can do today with Spotify.

He might not need my money, but then neither does Bill Gates but they still charge money for Windows. I really have no idea whether this behavior is driven by greed or insanity or a little of both, but it doesn't change all of the classic music he has made.

If a print artist sold prints using an analog transfer process for 40 years and then someone came along and started making digital copies that were visually indistinguishable from the former analog copies? That's an almost perfect analogy, and yes, I'd also call that artist bat-shit nuts and completely ignore their opinion.

It's OK - great artists seem to be highly correlated with bat shittedness. Young has made some really classic music and his personality quirks do not diminish his prior works of art. Bill Cosby's 70s stand-up is still funny, even if he was a rapist the whole time.