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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."
The author presents only speculation, no evidence or mechanism. In fact there is a barely concealed paranoid rant about the mass media and DRM. By now MP3s are in sufficiently wide use that real hearing problems should be noticeable, yet I am aware of no studies or other complaints showing this to be the case. At worst, this is probably a "cell phones / power lines cause cancer" type nonissue.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
" I have however some computer games with MP3 music, but I don't excessively play them. Despite I listen to music only quietly, I have repeatedly tinitus (and thus I also suspect the data reduction in radio and TV broadcasts as a cause)"
This guy seemed intelligent all the way up to the point where he wrote that particular line. If it only took that little of exposure to lossy sound caused him to have tinitus, then why aren't people by the millions complaining of hearing problems? I'm quite surprised he'd attribute his hearing problems to his hypothesis. I think it is far more likely there are other causes of his problems.
I also don't think, from what I've read here, that we're in any real danger of suffering noticable hearing damage from MP3s. The the main reason is that we don't listen to just MP3s 24 hours a day. Not even close! We'll be surrounded by compressed sound for years to come, but it'll never replace the natural every day sounds we hear all the time. Right now, as I write this, I can hear things happening all around me that definitely are not digital. As long as that noise is there, I can't imagine that our brain would focus in on the compressed sound itself.
It's an interesting hypothesis, but it doesn't hold up against real world data.
Furthermore, television, movies, and computer monitors are based on persistence of vision-- the idea that the eye and brain can be fooled into perceiving motion if the pictures are switched fast enough (in the case of NTSC TV, 30 frames per second). This is a significant "compression" of the data, far larger than the amount of data being thrown out by psychoacoustic compression. NASA uses cameras that record 10,000 fps to examine explosions and things of that nature that occur far too fast for us to perceive.
Reality occurs at a rate that technology currently finds impossible to record in full. That doesn't mean it's damaging us.
Since he basically said that he feels bad hearing is a reasonable price to pay for toppling the recording industry. And that any problems could be averted by some simple hacks without increasing filesize.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Wow, the editors of Slashdot accepted this bullshit but rejected 20 or so of my submissions? At least I wasn't full of shit.
This is just ridiculous bull crap. So is the brief mention of "subliminal messages". Normally, I would elaborate further and explain, but on this I think not. Anyone stupid enough to not immediately realize that this is bullshit is beyond reason anyways.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
However, your willingness to dismess out of hand the, shall we call it, intuition, of someone who is clearly at least educated both in the anatomy of hearing and the signals-processing fundamentals, is just as baseless.
Please tell me this is sarcasm.
This guy did little more than quote a college biology book, and scan the pictures to create a web site. On first reading the article I thought to myself, "funny, it doesn't feel like April first."
Also, even if we give this guy the benefit of doubt for a moment, there is still nothing to worry about. When was the last time you listened to MP3's and/or video games in a completely soundless environment for an extended period of time? Last few times I did it, I was at home with the refidgerator humming away, a few computer fans whirring, my chair creaking occasionally, simply put, I had lots of background noise for my ears to filter out, without my speakers adding to it. Sure, I would love to put a sensory depravation tank around my computer when playing Thief, it can really blow yuor concentration when your roomate bursts out in laughter 3 feet away from you while reading his email. But, I don't have one, and so am bombarded with small, often inaudiable sounds.
If I were a betting man, I would confidently bet you were right. But just the same, I hope a few members of the medical community (I think this would take a background in neurolobiology/cog. sci/audiology) see this, and at least consider it. You could probably devise a relatively inexpensive animal study or two that could safely close off this kind of speculation.
There are far better things for that money to be spent researching. Don't waste it on junk like this.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Laziness is the father.
YES! I recently noticed that I have low level tinnitus. I recently moved to the US. Concidence? In the US there is much more caffeine in Cola beverages than in Canada. I have been intaking probably 2x more caffeine than I used to. I have noticed in the last few months that I have low low level tinnitus. Any noise is louder than it, including the sound of blood rushing thru my ears. I have yet to quit caffeine, but I think it will help significantly.
I listen to headphones at resonable volumes, I don't work in industries which have hearing-loss danger, and I don't go to bars or concerts or other loud events very often. My hearing is still great. But this low tinnitus only when its completely and utterly quiet.
So to respond to the original article: Do you drink cola drinks? Coffee? Try quitting caffeine and maybe your tinnitus will go away. And you can still listen to mp3s.
PS: If you read medical sites and other tinnitus support sites, they all say that caffeine aggrivates tinnitus because it constricts blood vessels in the ear. Quit caffine!!
Hmm, did you READ the article?
...
He says
I read it, and I don't buy a word of it. The grammar is faulty. Lay+out is make-believe at most. Pictures are from some first anatomy book. No references, just some weird hypothesis withou any proofs. Sounds like a hoax if I ever saw one.
Besides he even fails to mention most Fourier transform based codecs work. They do not even fullfill the persumptions of his hypothesis, because their main size reductions are based on sliced away frequencies outside the scope of our hearing.
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