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Unintended Aural Consequences of MP3 Compression

zenst writes "A rather interesting read about possible damage to your hearing due to the way most audio compression techneques work. They mainly work by presenting a signal that the brain perceives to be the same as the original and it is this assumption that could effect our hearing and the way we hear."

2 of 621 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Tinnitus by theLime · · Score: 5, Informative

    Hmm, did you READ the article?

    He says "is still unclear whether the consequences of such maladjustments are only temporary (similarly like seeing the world in green/ red discoloured after taking off red/ green 3D glasses) or if the continuous consumption of neuroacoustically datareduced sounds can lead to long lasting or even permanent damage."

    and also "I try here in no way to demonize MP3 in the name of the sound carrier industry"

    He's not trying to scare people, he's just theorizing, with a educated point of view.

    MP3 and other lossy codecs fool our ears, and unlike our eyes, our ears require constant re-calibration to function properly. If we are calibrating to inaccurate/unnatural sounds, he thinks this could be a concern.

    Certainly just listening to a few mp3's a day is nothing to worry about, but what about when all of the media we saturate ourselves with is lossy-encoded?

    I don't know, and this is not a scientific article. He's just throwing the idea out there.

  2. Re:Loses all credibility right here. by cpaluc · · Score: 5, Informative
    Yeah, i had trouble getting past that too.

    Now have a look at this page of his. He appears to think that looking at the colour pink can be dangerous too. How did this stuff manage to get posted? In the pink article he claims to be a "researcher of neuronomy(science about the improvement of the usage of brain and nervous system)". Neuronomy? That's gotta be bogus. Anyone?