As I mentioned before, Farhad Manjoo published a really thoughtful review of The Perfect Thing on Salon, in which he shares a lot of his own observations about the iPod.

One thing he says, which I really wasn’t aware of, is that because people now commonly listen to music in noisy environments, recording engineers now “use a very low dynamic range when they’re mastering new albums,” basically making sure there aren’t big variations in volume. That’s very interesting. One thing I didn’t get to in the book is the audiophile complaint about the quality of digital music. (Probably if still had been writing the book when Bob Dylan had made his recent statement about no music sounding decent for the last twenty years I would have addressed it.)

Another point he makes shows how tough it is to generalize people’s experiences with the iPod. According to Manjoo, the iPod discourages listening to new music. He’s right when he says that it’s hard to decipher new music, and the iPod lures you away from that task. Even if you have a block of time set off, like a plane trip, it takes some discipline to stick to one new album when all your favorite songs — with their associations, the pitchy lines you love, and their proven rockability–are accessible with just a few twirls around the scroll wheel.

Nonetheless, I find the digital music experience to encourage listening to new music. With the iPod, I spent more time with music, and have room to consider new stuff, knowing that if I like it, there will opportunity to hear it a lot. Then there’s the idea of introducing unfamiliar songs into shuffle–once you’ve briefly vetted some new cuts for potential, it’s fun to just drop them in the mix. When it comes up, you think “What’s that?” You can do this for free: surf the music blogs, grabbing MP3 here and there. Or make a habit of downloading the authorized free stuff on iTunes or Amazon or Pitchfork. If you hear of a new band, check out the website–often there’s a sampling of some MP3s for download.

My enthusiasm for new music had been dormant before the iPod–now it’s as high as ever.