

Young people prefer the sound of MP3s to uncompressed music - markessien
http://i.gizmodo.com/5166649/ipods-and-young-people-have-utterly-destroyed-music

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noonespecial
I, a creature of a different age, suffer a similar phenomenon. I have
cherished old mix tapes that I prefer the sound of. I've tried recreating
those tapes with playlists of perfectly ripped flac from cd's and they just
don't have the same _life_.

I've gone so far as to record the tapes straight into flac and listen to those
on my ipod instead.

I know every warble, wow, and flutter from those old tapes, I even have a
rough chronology in my mind of when the tapes developed their defects. The too
hot car stereo in my friends camero that summer day... that lousy walkman that
tried to eat it.

I can play the modern digital copies in the right order till the cows come
home and be unmoved but even a whisper of the noise between tracks on one of
those old tapes and its '94 again and I'm back on the beach at sunset with
that girl in my arms...

~~~
jerf
"I've tried recreating those tapes with playlists of perfectly ripped flac
from cd's and they just don't have the same life."

See the story from a day or two ago about how badly CDs are being mastered.

Personally, I listen to a lot of non-English music and I'm beginning to wonder
if part of the reason might be that non-US music companies seem to be much
less likely to utterly destroy their music in the quest for illusory volume,
because the "foreignness" is not something that I particularly care about
either way.

Try your experiment on a CD from the mid-nineties. It is highly likely that
what you are experiencing is a result of atrocious mastering, and _not_ a
digital-vs-analog result. Note that it has to be a CD that physically dates
from the mid-nineties, not merely an album from the mid-nineties, as companies
have been going back and destroying the old music on re-releases.

Of course that doesn't address the issue of your personal memories and if you
like that, hey, great. I'm not going to complain or tell you it shouldn't be
that way.

~~~
ciupicri
Could you provide, please, the link of that story about CDs?

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jerf
I had a post on that story, but I can't get through to my threads display (HN
seems to cut that off when load is high, makes sense, not complaining). But
I'll endorse aoeu's Wikipedia link. Between that and some of the article
Wikipedia links you can get a pretty good idea of the problem and the scope.

Until this problem goes away, CDs are no longer the choice of discriminating
audio enthusiasts.... but not because "digital" is worse than "analog", but
rather because "destroyed digital" is simply bad. Right now in the "digital
vs. analog" war, CDs aren't bringing their A-game.... they're not even
bringing their D-game.

A further thought occurs to me; maybe people prefer "Crappy 44KHz originals
with clipping softened by MP3" to "Raw crappy 44KHz originals". This ought to
be controlled for, if it wasn't, as this might be the rational choice even by
audiophile standards. (Yes, it's crap vs. crap, but there may yet be a
distinctly less crappy one.)

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asmithmd1
Ridiculous, kids these days actually like the sound of the artifacts
introduced by the reproduction technology?

Everyone knows the best way to hear music is through the soft clipping of a
tube amplifier.

~~~
ensignavenger
Is there anyone still making tube amplifiers? I might like to have one, if it
didn't cost too much.

~~~
tricky
If you've ever soldered anything in your life you can build one yourself.
They're really easy to build, kits are available, and parts are VERY cheap. Of
course, be careful. Getting shocked by 750 VAC is... interesting.

~~~
ensignavenger
That's a good idea. I think I'll give it a try. Thanks.

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miloshh
It might well be that many people complaining about "soulless, thin MP3s"
would not be able to tell a 160kbps VBR MP3 from the original in a controlled
experiment. Low-quality headphones and speakers are obviously a different
matter, but if you're telling somebody that compression makes their music
soulless and thin, you're an audio snob without any facts.

~~~
jibiki
The article establishes that people can, in fact, tell the difference between
MP3 and uncompressed, no?

~~~
miloshh
According to the article (and the one linked in it), the percentage of people
that _prefer_ MP3 quality is rising, that's all. It does not say these people
would actually be able to tell that the recording they prefer is an MP3.

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aoeu
"To my surprise, in the rock examples the MP3 at 128 was preferred. I repeated
the experiment over 6 years and found the preference for MP3 - particularly in
music with high energy (cymbal crashes, brass hits, etc) rising over time."

Encoding to MP3 @ 128Kbs will apply a low pass filter (so that more bits can
be used to encode the lower frequencies) and high freqeuncy sounds can sound
smeared. I would guess one or both of these factors could be responsible for
reducing harsh sounding treble.

I'm guessing of course but if right, I wouldn't say the MP3 was better.
Merely, it masks a horrible sound to begin with.

~~~
Erf
It could just be me, but I've observed MP3 encoding tends to make hard
transients more mushy, which is something that one might become accustomed to.

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igorgue
I used to think, MP3s sounds almost the same as uncompressed music (CDs), but,
was until I got a fairly big audio system (in my car) that I realize that my
MP3s sucked big time. But in ipods and other small devices MP3s are fine.

~~~
jerf
They don't have to. The theory is sound. Throw enough bits at a good enough
encoder and you can't tell the difference.

However, 128Kbps in an encoder designed to encode as rapidly as possible will
not have that result, and that's the usual case.

Also, hooking up a decent set of headphones to an iPod and that itself can be
a "nice audio system". The stats on the iPod are pretty good, it's the
headphones that are crap. I have a Creative Labs Zen myself, which has an
inferior interface, but has even better audio statistics, and the best audio
experience you can get in my household are my ~$100 monitor headphones hooked
up to the Zen. That's pretty fine. Run a great MP3 through it and you'd never
know it's not the original CD. Run a mediocre MP3 through it and you'll cry.

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vorador
I wonder in what measure modern production techniques (for instance,
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_range_compression> ) influences the
choice of the listener.

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sfphotoarts
I think what the study shows is that listening to music goes beyond the
encoding technique, like everything, it has the quality of contemporaneity;
listening to music is made up of the music and the listening process, which
includes the medium, vinyl, cassettes, cd, mp3 etc. We all have our way of
remembering music, be it on 8 track, cassettes, or ipod. The current twenty
somethings will reminisce about the old days, how their iPods sounded and how
they would split their ear buds with their sweetheart of the day, just like
the first guy and his Camero and sunsets with Susie :)

Its the same as photography, film, like cassettes, vinyl etc is no better than
digital, its just different. The medium is an important part of any art form,
possibly with the exception of literature. For the visual and music arts I
have seen this phenomenon often but I am not sure if it applies much to books.
The medium is largely the same I suppose - we've moved on from writing on
pigskin, but for the past few hundred years and book today is much the same as
a book from anytime, only the content has changed. The arts move, and are
moved by technology at different paces. Possibly the Kindle will change
things, but it hasn't had enough time to know yet.

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zandorg
I got an amplifier with a TOSlink (SPDIF optical) connection, and got a cable
from the soundcard to the amp. This means there was no analogue distortion or
amplification in the signal chain - it just went right from the soundcard to
the speakers (which are studio monitors in my case).

You can hear the difference between MP3 and CD/FLAC sources quite easily, so
I've come to like CD/FLAC.

I started off listening to vinyl at about 12, CD/tape until 1998, then Napster
in 2000. Now I buy CDs and rip to FLAC, if possible, and hardly listen to
MP3s.

By the way, albums like Madonna's Confessions on a Dance Floor sound really
bad on MP3, because it's been mixed to a very full sound and compresses
poorly. I don't know if that's the producer (Stuart Price) or the mastering
people, but a bootleg of this album made from MP3, I ordered by mistake, was
really really bad sounding.

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ewiethoff
Everyone knows the best way to hear music is live, un-miked, un-amped, with
analog instruments. That's one of the reasons I've gone into opera:
<http://gatewayclassical.org/>

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ciupicri
The idea is interesting, but unfortunately the article doesn't have too many
details. A spectrogram or something similar would have been nice.

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weegee
it's fascinating how this phenomenon works. I grew up listening to cassettes I
had made from recording records. These recordings had flaws introduced by the
cassette mechanism, drop outs, warbles, etc. I was used to it and didn't think
about it. When I'd hear the same song from a CD it sounded weird. I can't say
I prefer cassettes now, I never listen to them, they're all in a box now, and
many have been thrown out. Records still sound as good as ever, many are much
nicer sounding than the CDs that came out later on. I wonder if digital radio
will eventually replace analog broadcasts, as has happened with TV. That would
be a shame as all the old radios would suddenly become door stops.

