“I put a pitch-shifter on the master bus!”: In the era of lo-fi beats and bedroom recording, does sound quality even matter anymore?

With bedroom-produced DIY tracks topping the streaming charts and explosive distortion the new norm on TikTok, is sound quality becoming irrelevant in 2026?

I thought I'd heard my dad's voice for the last time. A movie helped me find it again

I had missed that voice more than I knew. Being able to hear him again — young him, even if he wasn't talking to me, or ...