Slashdot Mirror
Young People Prefer "Sizzle Sounds" of MP3 Format
Hugh Pickens writes "Jonathan Berger, a professor of music at Stanford, tests his incoming students each year by having them listen to a variety of recordings which use different formats from MP3 to ones of much higher quality, and he reports that each year the preference for music in MP3 format rises. Berger says that young people seemed to prefer 'sizzle sounds' that MP3s bring to music because it is a sound they are familiar with. 'The music examples included both orchestral, jazz and rock music. When I first did this I was expecting to hear preferences for uncompressed audio and expecting to see MP3 (at 128, 160 and 192 bit rates) well below other methods (including a proprietary wavelet-based approach and AAC),' writes Berger. '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.' Dale Dougherty writes that the context of the music changes our perception of the sound, particularly when it's so obviously and immediately shared by others. 'All that sizzle is a cultural artifact and a tie that binds us. It's mostly invisible to us but it is something future generations looking back might find curious because these preferences won't be obvious to them.'"
This is probably no different than older people who prefer the sound of a phonograph over modern high quality digital recorded mediums like the CD. Warmness of sound on phonographs may be the equivilent to the mp3 sizzle that he talks about. People are used to hearing music over lower quality mediums like FM radio, streaming internet connections and real player. Its good that he is doing this research though because its time dependent and you won't be able to do it later.
I think the Jonas Brothers already proved this.
Annoy the hell out of me personally. Both audio and video.
Bring back analog, the real thing.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
this sounds like a peference for high treble... probably related to hearing loss.
This is not surprising at all. Talk with anyone who grew up listening to records and you'll hear a tale of music with character and soul. That "character" and "soul" is the pop and crack of dust, scratches, and whatnot that the record needle picked up - all the imperfections in the record player and record that we could hear. It's a comforting and familiar noise in the sound. The digital generation has its own pop and crackle and it should come as a surprise to nobody that their reaction to it is the same as the record generation's reaction to the sound of a record playing.
Dick Cavett said "As long as people will accept crap, it will be financially profitable to dispense it." Little did he know that if all people know is crap they actually begin to prefer it.
Haiku for you!
People have really weird internal processes that shape their preferences. Preferring shitty, hissy sounding music is just one of those odd results. I would not equate it with the perceived "warmth" of vinyl when compared to CDs. The warmth is not the snaps and crackles, but a different quality that I can't imagine anyone would think as a loss of quality. Just a change of tone.
The hissy music on the other hand is primarily as a result of poor or excessive compression that reflects a lost of information, not just a change in tone. And it just so happens that like in every other arena of human opinion most people prefer crap. :)
P.S. I am not an audiophile but I love clear, full range sound when it comes to music. I prefer digital over vinyl because I can't stand all the defects that come with vinyl, even though I grew up with them.
Unfortunately, digital music formats are driven by the market and not by quality (mp3 would've fallen by the wayside years ago given that it was already inferior almost a decade ago).
Since people are willing to accept that (young and old), they're just going to adapt to it and enjoy what they have. Hopefully someday we'll see the market push better formats but, for now, I'm not counting on much to improve amongst music players.
(Full disclosure: After getting a 1TB hard drive, I go lossless or I don't bother at this point. Not everyone has that capacity but we are moving there quickly.)
perhaps because that they're just used to it ?
Every generation has their favorite audio artifacts. Vinyl lovers like the warm sound despite the hiss and pops, im sure back in the day someone thought that wax phonograph cylinders sounded better than those new fangled gramaphone disks. Each generation gets accustomed to the sound they are most familiar with. I remember as a kid arguing with my dad who thought 8-track was much better than casette tapes.
I encountered the same feeling when I walked into a Best Buy the other day. I don't generally go into places like that, so when I did and I saw all of the flat-scren TV's, my GF and I couldn't get over how BAD we thought they all looked. The looked too sharp and too bright. I need another TV but I'm having trouble finding anyone that sells good CRT's any more!
Little did he know that if all people know is crap they actually begin to prefer it.
And that's why 2009 will not be the year of Linux on the Desktop.
Listening to electronic mediated music - amplified, broadcasted, analog or digitally recorded always loses something. I try to listen to live performance whenever I can.
Pops of the 70's phonograph
Hiss of the 80's magnetic tape
Sizzle of the 00's MP3s.
Sounds like we had a perfect format in the optical disc - now we just need audio engineers that don't fuck up the mastering with everything cranked to 11.
This is probably why the previous generation preferred tube amps to transistor ones - and gave you all kinds of arguments just why one was "better" than the other one, most of which were meaningless.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
What Sizzle? I don't hear anything, I usually can't tell the difference between 128 bit MP3 and anything else, but perhaps I'm deaf. I might prefer it because its small plays on any device, but I'm not (consciously at least) enjoying me some sweet sizzle cause I don't hear it.
That's like saying you prefer a house that smells like cat piss because you grew up in one or that you prefer your food to be semi-rotten because you didn't have a refrigerator when you were a kid. Gimme a break.
I suspect that when you miss some details things appear better. People tend to look better at a distance before you get detail. Lowered senses probably contribute to "beer goggles" as well, though there are other factors.
Stripping detail does not make art but it may make pop.
You got me into this! You were the ideologue! I'm only a poor assassin! - Twenty evocations, Bruce Sterling
be behind the preference of some people for LPs over CDs?
But, I wanted socialized health insurance!
Lots of music is processed (before release) specifically to sound good played as 128 on a low quality stereo
If the older generation actually preferred the sound of records then why did they rapidly adopt CD technology? Records would still be king!
It's the same phenomenon as with junk food. People acquire tastes and can get to like any crap, as long as they are exposed to it continuously and it's advertised enough.
No time to RTFA, but were any of the kids polled members of high school bands, or musicians on their own? As a drummer for 25+ years, I know the first thing I noticed about poorly encoded MP3s was how crappy the cymbals sounded. And I knew that primarily on account of knowing exactly how a real, live cymbal really sounds, in person, with the naked ear. Having been in a high school band, I know that the experience changed my own understanding of how all the instruments should really sound, as contrasted starkly against how they sound on many recordings, even pre-MP3 era.
I actually added some flanger effect to drum overheads because they sounded more rich that way. Lossy compression leads to similar effect and for some reason I prefer that sound to some extent.
One reason could be the clean machine hammered cymbals (zildjian mainly) that sound nice and clean, but do not have the richness of hand hammered ones.
I think that when it comes to production of music the outcome is all that matters.
I can't stand low bitrates and 'earbud' headphones. I need my 20-80Hz, whether its 320 mp3, cd or vinyl though doesn't bother me!
I must admit that whenever I hear a song that's been poorly encoded or has obvious compression errors (the modern equivalent of a skipping record, I guess) I think of the first days at an old job position ... because that's what the state of the art was at the time.
That said, I do prefer high-quality Flac, Ogg, or analogue (ahh, the hisses and pops of an actual record player).
"Good news, everyone!"
I don't think that's a good analogy. There is no accuracy in coffee that expensive coffee is closer to than Sanka is.
I can't help thinking that this isn't representative of "young people". Though it probably is typical of the average "young person".
Were the to pool the opinions of students of Julliard rather than Stamford he'd likely get a completely different result.
If the young person in question is fond of mass produced music -- as most are I guess -- then the sound quality probably isn't important to them, just as tonal nuances wasn't important to the original musicians. For kids that are musicians themselves, and especially jazz or classical musicians, the sound quality matters a great deal.
Basically this is just a badly designed study, skewed in favor of the modal average.
I'm suspicious of the quality of his results, especially his assertion that kids actually *preferred* the MP3 encoded results.
There are MANY explanations for why this could be occuring. For one, many MP3 encoders apply a low-pass filter to encoded data to smooth out artifacts. It's not clear that this professor's audio playback equipment is uniformly able to reproduce higher frequency sounds - very few people have that kind of equipment who aren't professional audio recording engineers.
I would believe it's just as likely that his "uncompressed" audio files actually SOUND WORSE because they are creating distortion in the playback equipment that the MP3 filtered files are not.
This reminds me of a story I heard once on NPR about audio engineers who worked on live audio feeds for music shows. They found that most people had crappy quality radios - they got the best response from supposed audiophiles when they applied a low-pass filter below 9KHz before it went out over the air waves.
Prefer sizzle sounds? O.M.G.
... find this article very interesting!
The old MP3 topic comes around once again. It's a pity the article doesn't give more data and how the research was conducted.
Indeed, people probably prefer what they're used to. No matter how many times people pronounce the death of high quality audio because of increasing sales MP3 players and music, an interesting side effect happens. Vinyl sales and turntables keep on going up. Sure, the new vinyl sales numbers are not stratospheric compared to digital distribution, it's, nonetheless, amazing that not only vinyl has survived, but it's growing amid all this. (Steve Guttenberg from CNet wrote about this today.)
Mal Waldrom used to hang out in a 2nd hand audio store and no matter how hard the owner of the store tried to give him a proper hifi system, he persisted on listening to his portable CD player with plastic Sony speakers. He said that the music system was only there to remind him of the music that existed in his head. Admittedly, he had the advantage of having played with jazz greats and no matter which system, the music in his head was indeed better.
I infer from the article that the students were given two samples of the same music in different formats and asked, "Which do you prefer?"
As general preference is a subjective thing, it isn't surprising that students selected the more familiar format.
If, instead, students were asked, "Which track has more realistic sounding cymbals?" or "On which track do you hear more details in the saxophone?", you might expect different results. If experimental subjects are pointed toward a particular quality to assess, they are more likely to judge objectively.
Incoming freshmen also prefer burgers & fries to foie gras & truffles, The Daily Show to McNeil-Lehrer News Hour, Linkin' Park to Lincoln Center, etc...
Why don't we point a huge silicon based mirror crafted from the moon itself, from the moon. onto those peices of debris?
Everyone knows you sell the sizzle, not the steak.
Oh, yeah, it's not easy to pad these out to 120 characters.
This is going to be a big deal. Everyone under 30 is deaf, and when they find out how much hearing aids cost, and that their insurance doesn't cover them, they're going to sue. Apple, year 2050, is Philip Morris, 1990.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
I will always love the harsh 8-bit sounds from the early Nintendo games. No one can dispute the horrible audio fidelity, but that's not what's important. It's familiar and evokes pleasant memories. That's what music is all about.
Most people, in my limited experience, do not actually listen to music as much as they listen to lyrics and the overall rhythm/beat. They could care less about the tone off the bass guitar, or the "sizzle" of the cymbals.
Java bacon! http://blog.davglass.com/files/yui/bacon/
I remember encoding a piece of music in MP3 format at a very low rate, something stupid like 12 kbps. Although it was much worse than the original in most ways, there was a weird but cool 'echo/watery' sound to it. Same kind of thing goes for amplified distortion (heavy metal), and even the cool C64 sound (pure square wave / cut off).
But it goes without saying - a higher resolution/bit rate/sample rate will *emulate* all of these 'interesting' side effects (and lots more), if the composer wants it that way. In the same way that a good pair of speakers should be able to emulate the sound of all of the crappier speakers (even if a bad pair might play all music 'warmer', perhaps with more low end or whatever, that's not necessarily how the composer recorded it). No doubt a parallel can be made with the wide color gamut of a good monitor.
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
...that this professor's research is funded by the American Bacon Association (interestingly one of the largest recipients of pork project earmarks).
As someone who has spent large amounts of time working on improving free and proprietary codecs, I am shocked! Was it all for nut? Have we made our codecs worse by making them better (more true to the original)?
Seriously, from reading the article, there is absolutely no indication this test was in any way scientific. (One of the involved having a title of "Professor" does not make a claim scientific, even though I'm sure we are made to believe that a lot)
So I'll take this claim with about much belief as I take a marketing claim: minus zero!
My brother-in-law is a bit of an audiophile. He's not totally neurotic about it, but he's much more obsessive than me. We're talkin' low-middlish-end B&W speakers (I would've bought a car for that kind of money, personally), DVD players to play CDs, NAD amp, shielded, expensive cabling, and those pointy things that you put under your speakers to poke through the carpeting to get to the hard floor below.
I sat in his "listening environment" at a preselected place (he actually had his speakers placed according to a formula to derive the best location for listening) and listened to a CD he put on. Closed my eyes, and I have to say if I didn't know I was sitting in his apartment, I would've sworn I was sitting in a club, six feet from the singer sitting on the piano serenading me. It was stunning how much difference there was between my Pioneer multi-disc Best Buy special and his equipment. I was blown away.
I think the folks in this study just haven't heard stunningly good music and have no idea that it could/should be better.
I can't deny it any more. I read stuff like this and all I can think is "What the %@#$ is wrong with these kids?!?" I can't stand digital compression artifacts. I have a relatively large mp3 collection but I dont' think I have many of my 10k++ track collection that are encoded below 192kb VBR. That's my threshold. The sound quality of a 128k mp3 is horrid. It's garbage. Just for the record (pun) I found the hissing and pops of vinyl to be annoying too but at least that didn't sound like you were listening with a tin can over each ear.
Well, I'm off to go complain about how lazy this next generation is and how they don't know anything...
I give up.
Alex, I'll take keybindings not used by Emacs for $400....
When the definition of "high-quality" in this generations eyes is getting an aftermarket set of ear buds for a damn iPod, the entire point of trying to reproduce music well pretty much goes out the door.
Of course, this also brings up the point of Garbage In/Garbage Out with regards to the compression and "mastering" that takes place with 99% of recordings made today. They sound like shit on CD before you convert to any other format.
This doesn't surprise me in the least. Sad, but not surprising. This generation is used to it regardless of format.
'Scuse me while I go get these damn kids off my lawn...
I've been very annoyed that the CDs I get of the cassettes I used to own have never sounded quite right. I try to adjust the equalizer to make it sound the way I remember but it's not quite right. Nice to know that the artifacts which I hate in mp3s are music to someone else's ears.
Here's a more likely hypothesis than being accustomed to "sizzle sounds" -- younger folks are more and more likely to be "used" to the song with its mp3 artifacts from their ipods, torrent downloads, etc - and people like what they are used to. Did you know a heroin user starts experiencing profound psychological and physiological effects while they are in the process of preparing to shoot up, with no drugs at all in the system? It's the same thing. In many ways we humans aren't a lot more complicated than Pavlov's dog.
Where's the generation that loved the tape hiss that could only be provided by a 120 minute cassette tape from K-Mart? Even better if it came from a copy of a friend's copy... don't forget to route it through your seven-band BSR equalizer to boost the hiss and muddy bass.
This generation likes their music like their president, devoid of substance and more full of noise than any other time in history ha aha aha ah, sizzle, what a bunch of dopes.
Agreed! Being an CDDA user and MP3 listener since their early appearances I have heard mediocre but also incredibly good MP3 implementations. But in my best, reasonably recent, A-B testing results I have been unable to discern the difference. The overarching issues have always been in the quality and equalization of the source material.
*Interestingly, on a recent critical listening A-B test, the only difference I did detect was an absolute noise floor on the supposedly already silent passages - I thought Wow, the mp3 algorithm is doing a great job, only discarding the least relevant information.
I prefer the sound of vinyl myself. If I can't have vinyl, I prefer 24/96 DVD audio.
I can actually hear the difference. I have a great set of headphones and besides that, my ears can pick up a wider range than most humans.
That's part of why I'm a musician. I can hear better and have better pitch. I have an ear for beauty. These kids today don't even have ears for decent sounding music.
That being said, the sampling generation made lo-fi cool. Lo-fi is supposed to be retro cool and I find that to be bullshit. It's kids who just don't know any better because they have no appreciation for sound.
They're using their grammar skills there.
The public radio show Radio Lab did an amazing show on similar issues, looking for a neurological explanation to why people react strangely to new and unexpected sounds: http://www.wnyc.org/shows/radiolab/episodes/2006/04/21.
One of the most interesting segments of the show recounted the near-riot that occurred when Stravinsky debuted his "Rites of Spring" in 1913. The music was so discordant to Parisian audiences, that they reacted -- in some cases violently -- to the oddness of the new music.
Check it out -- the entire show is awesome. Entirely consistent with the professor's findings here.
Southern man don't need him around anyhow.
Obviously the main thrust is to increase profits, so there is a need to make new TV sets sound as if their features are somehow better than those on the old models. However, it does make you wonder how much of the uptake is due to actual, visual appreciation of the better picture (even though the content is the same old crap) and how much is merely advertising?
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
I think this is one of the saddest things I have heard in my life. It is like the "kiss of death" for all things quality. I wrote a paper on this when MP3s were first becoming popular. The paper never really went anywhere, but the idea (I was a music major at the time making "clean, clear orchestral recordings") that maintaining quality throughout the entire process was key, and having your final recording be "just like the real thing", the badge of success. With compressed format so much of that is thrown out the window. Sad.
It just does get better than this!
It might also have something to do with the way music is broadcast on FM radio- massively compressed. For the most part I listen to BBC Radio 4, and if I skip to Radio One or Radio Two the level of compression causes a massive leap in volume. An unfortunate side-effect seems to be a tangible loss in a song's dynamics, particularly prevalent in rock music.
Nobody has /ever/ successfully listened to music on real player!
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
Real men only listen to 96Kpbs MP3.
I don't know about you guys, but I'd choose FLAC over mp3 everyday..
Considering I grew up with vinyl records and cassette tapes, I absolutely prefer the sound of records over CD/MP3 and it seems the kids of today prefer digital. My pops and tape hiss are their sizzle and "magic castle sound" (that's the name I give to the chimey artifacts you hear on overly-compressed audio, mainly spoken word).
I've been wondering lately if kids are going to look back fondly at compressed video, macroblocking, banding, etc the way I do when I think back at the scanlines, snow, and 60Hz buzz of tubes sets with analog signals.
This is due to what psychologists call the "mere exposure" effect. People like things more that they have experienced before. It's one of the driving forces behind advertising.
Pop... hiss... sizzle... makes me think of Bacon. Could this be the common subconscious factor that defines a preference in music? Music most like Bacon comes out ahead? I think so!
Moderation: Put your hand inside the puppet head!
Ive always preferred CDs. More than tapes or LPs or FM, which we had prior to the 90s. When CDs came along the quality of the audio was impressive and much better than previous technologies. When MP3 came along, it was like going back to tapes with all the artifacts. I do not like the sound of MP3s, it seems distorted to me.
If you look at the comments on this video comparing Metallica's CD format of Death Magnetic vs the Guitar Hero format, it's clear that many people just don't care.
As owlnation stated above, this "study" is skewered towards the modal average, and also has little to do with age as the bulk of people want to hear what they are familiar with.
There's a few factors that lead to "I know what I know, and I know what I like":
1)The average listeners interest in the arts is purely entertainment. Pop stars don't become as huge as they do because the majority of people want to meditate on the impact on society with regards to protest rock.
2)Most folks are at least somewhat apathetic to things they care about such as politics, so the strip mining of the arts is pretty unimportant to them.
3)Big business strong arm tactics like payola, monopolistic market domination, reduced primetime playlists and refusal to take risks with artists outside of perceived norms.
People get used to things like the loudness war over years and years. Especially with the way we now seek out and consume media, with technology allowing for a much higher rate of consumption. With fifty some odd years of wildly successful Disney artists, more appropriately entertainers, is anyone really surprised still?
Taste works on association which leads humans to relate taste to memories. The amount of information stored in just taste is very massive, have you tried to sit and think about it? How many foods have you tasted over your life time? How many of those foods do you associate with each other or with a peticual group of foods? Do you know why they call some food 'confort food'?
Unlike other animals, humans have the largest palette of selectible foods at our disposel. When you try a new food for the first time, your brain tries to find a smell and taste that is related to that food. That type of processing power and speed is just insane to think about. A 30 year old middle class person from USA or UK tend to have over 3-5,000 tasted food memories, and when you try something new, your brain can normally associate it with something in less then 30 seconds.
Marketing and PR groups want you to think higher quality is better quality and it just doesn't work that way. If you have a good memory of eatting PB&J as a child and liked it, you will prolly like PB&J as an adult who reflects on that earily memory when eating it.
Who friggin' cares if the audio quality is pristine as long as the artistry is top notch? Shouldn't this factor more into the defintion of "good" anyway?
All these audiophile geeks have the most craptastic aesthetics to begin with. Robert Fripp is boring and soulless, whether compressed or not.
Take away the iPod. They want to listen to music? They listen over speakers and at a reasonable volume, because they have to live with others.
What makes you think iPod brand music players and external speakers are mutually exclusive?
Teach them to be as good as their word and to not lie. Ever.
Ever? What is the appropriate answer to the question "Does this dress make me look fat?"?
128kbit MP3s have more bass than their regular counterparts. Well, maybe not "more", but its definitely has the ability to make lower frequencies sound better somehow.
The mp3 player and equalizer matters as well, WinAmp does a pretty good job of playing lower bitrate files with less of that metallic/underwater sound to them. The mp3 cd-player in my car on the other hand...
It's all about compression these days. Most pop music is compressed so much that there is no space in the music. The dynamic range is squashed in favor of bombast and getting it "heard".
But, it gets tiring fairly fast (less than an hour) for an old guy like me. Probably you kids will enjoy music loaded with artifacts a lot longer, but eventually, you will learn, if you don't go deaf first and if you ever hear any faithfully reproduced music for comparison.
Now, where can I get "More than a Feeling" encoded at 128K, I wonder? That's less than an hour.
All I'll say about digital vs. analog is that if have access to a vacuum tubed guitar amp (like say, a Fender Twin or something comparable) and use some alligator clips to attach the input guitar cable to a pair of butchered iPod headphone jacks, you are in for a TREAT.
I tried this once, and even with the mono output, I was blown away by how good it sounded. It was a little noisy because of the impedance mismatch of my ham fisted hardware hack, but it sounded warm and thick and full like you've never heard, like giving a down pillow to someone who's only had sponge foam pillows. Even newer digitally created music like Fatboy Slim sounded better.
It made me think of how those old Rock-Ola or Wurlitzer jukeboxes might have sounded.
Here's my Skullflower anecdote about MP3s:
Back in the days when I was working for an incarnation of eMusic (several buy-outs ago), I noticed that they had a release from Skullflower in the collection, and I listened to it at work. Skullflower has a pretty seriously noisy sound, but sometimes I like serious noise, and the Skullflower mp3s sounded pretty good to me. That seemed a little funny, because I was pretty sure I'd listened to the CD before down in KZSU's library (I was a DJ at KZSU in those days), and the CD hadn't grabbed me.
But the next time I was on the air, I pulled the Sullflower CD out of the library on impulse, and tried playing a track. It struck me as horribly annoying. Hm, must've picked a bad track. I played around with fading the CD down, fading something else up, and skipping to another Skullflower track. I did that several times, and found them all horribly annoying.
My conclusion: this particular "music" is full of screeching high-frequencies that drive me up the wall, and the mp3 format's compression does a good job of screening them out.
In general I prefer CDs to mp3s, but then, myself I preferred the sound of vinyl to CDs... There's been a trend in the CD era toward a very clean and bright sound that I don't think very much of. Myself, I prefer a sense of "warmth" and "depth", but for that you need some fairly serious speakers, and along with CDs came a fad for minaturization, and people don't listen to music on those major sound systems much any more.
My conclusion: it's impossible to talk about the merits of different sound formats in isolation, because music production practices change as the characteristics of the formats and audio equipment change. If you expect people to be listening on wimpy speakers via a lossy compression format, then you're going to things like lean on the highs to punch through those barriers. And then if someone takes barriers away, you're going to be blasted by the highs.
It is human nature to prefer what you know, especially when you don't know much. Otherwise, it is impossible to defend liking grits, pig-knuckles, tripe and all the other left-over pig parts that poor people say is delicious, even after they climb out of poverty and into the middle class.
I can hear the difference in several songs between compressed digitized formats and the CD I have of them at home. Some I like better, others not so much. (Although in my case, it's ogg, not mp3).
For example, The Cars' "Just What I Needed" sounds "cleaner", and I hear musical details in the right-hand guitar track I'd missed before, probably because the fuzz in the electric guitar tracks is simplified, and the stereo separation of the two guitar tracks is exaggerated. So it's probably a less accurate rendering of their original recording, but I like it better.
- "History shows again and again how nature points out the folly of men" -- Blue Oyster Cult, 'Godzilla'
The system used to play the various pieces has a profound effect on what the listener hears. It is reasonable to assume that the researchers used a consistent platform for this, but it is not stated in the article. More importantly, well-recorded music of a given genre played back on the "wrong" platform, can sound like crap compared to a highly compressed mp3 cock-up of the same material on that same platform. I have mp3 files that sound great on my portable player through ear buds, but that same recording sounds dreadful when played through my audiophile gear. And of course the reverse is also true, some high-quality tracks that are absolutely exquisite when played through the right system, are quite unimpressive when played through my portable or car stereo.
While it is true that many listeners are unable to appreciate the differences, it is very possible that the research is flawed in that it has handicapped what discernment those users might have had by coloring the program material with the characteristics of the playback system.
Except most people are playing their music through basic headphones while going to work, school, gym ,etc. and all the background noises associated with the activities. They are not sitting in a sound proof room with the best speakers, amps, etc. to notice a difference.
Most people don't actually listen to the music they play. It's often in the background while they do something else, and since multi-tasking does really exist (just quick task switching), they're not listening when they're doing other things (like looking both ways before crossing the road).
If you're on a train, plane, or bus, most people are zoned out and are probably caught up in the internal dialogue of the mind that most people call "thinking".
When listening on my own commute, and when I really want to listen, I close my eyes to block out any external distractions. (I don't have to worry about internal dialogue since I don't think in words, but 'symbols' / images).
The Stravinsky segment of the show is nonsense. When "The Rite of Spring" (not "Rites") debuted, there was a riot. That is true. However, there is a lot of evidence that this riot had less to do with the music than with all sorts of other factors -- there was a group of people (somewhat politically motivated) who already planned to stage a riot, the choreography was perceived as complete nonsense, and besides, most accounts say that people had already started shouting so much when the curtain went up that no one could hear any music after the very beginning.
Notably, the were a half dozen more performances in the initial run without further disruption.
The myth that the novel music was the cause of the riot was something propagated by Stravinsky starting about a decade later, when he actively started trying to shape his public persona. His autobiographical information is notoriously suspect among 20th century composers, further shaped through the supposed "conversations" he had with Robert Craft, who ghostwrote most of his later books.
Richard Taruskin (perhaps the world's foremost expert on Stravinsky) has detailed the reasons why this myth came to be, and this information has been around for at least a couple decades, though it was effectively summarized in his article: "A Myth of the Twentieth Century: The Rite of Spring, the Tradition of the New, and 'The Music Itself'" (Modernism/modernity - Volume 2, Number 1, January 1995, pp. 1-26).
Anyhow, I love Radio Lab in general. But that particular show had a lot of bogus claims, and this was probably the biggest.
I've read a lot of comments this way and that about the differences between high-quality MP3s and CD-quality audio are, but I've never seen any hard evidence one way or the other. No study is going to settle the issue completely, but it would be nice to have some hard data to work with instead of anecdotes, intutions, and listening tests designed by (a) people who don't know what they're doing; or (b) people with an interest in seeing the results come out a particular way. Can someone post some links to reasonably well run studies?
Fascinating! Thanks for the info. I'm going to try to find the article you cite.
The results sound fishy to me, especially with all of the studies out there in places like www.hydrogenaudio.org where mp3s encoded with a modern encoder are transparent from the original in ABX test after ABX test. If that's the case, then how can all of these kids have a preference?
So, it sounds like (pardon the pun) we have just departed the Golden Age of sound quality.
I was looking forward to high-quality 192KHz, 24-bit surround-sound audio becoming the norm -- compressed or not.
However, if the commercial music guys read reports like this, they'll degrade the sound either for cost or for effect. That's bad. :-(
It's also supposed to be bad for your ears (as are the ear buds most people use).
Most of the time, I can tell the difference right away for 128Kbit (or less) compressed audio.
When I was in high school/college, uncompressed 44.1KHz, 16-bit stereo (CD quality) was the norm and sounded nice, whether recorded as AAD, DAD, or DDD. (People debated the merits of each).
Today, here's your $1.00 MP3, and with better/faster/cheaper technology, we're getting worse audio and paying more!
Ergo, it was the Golden Age that was... :-(
Weird how that principle works out again. I always tell people I don't mind mp3s because I remember when AM was the norm, particularly in cars. More than that, 196 kbps and above is better than table top FM and many of the stereos I've listened to in my life. So, no worries.
1) As top poster says, it's partially a cultural thing I guess. Old people say the distortions of a record player and tube amp "add warmth". So these people who prefer a bad MP3 will say those awful distortions at the high frequencies add "sizzle" apparently. (Note: I have some 128kbps MP3s, those high-frequency distortions sound like crap, not like "sizzle". The better encoded 128kbps MP3s, and higher-bitrate MP3s, don't do that though.)
2) There've been articles about CDs having the dynamic range pretty well destroyed by poor production qualities trying to make them "louder". Autotune to fix up singing. Remixing, distortion mics, pedals on electric guitars, and on and on. With all that, the music on the CD *or* MP3 is so far removed from what was played at a studio, let alone a live concert, worrying about accurate reproduction of the music is irrelevant by that point. With all those distortions already there, maybe some bands do sound better in low-bitrate MP3?
3) Cheap audio equipment, headphones, etc. I'm not an audio snob, my current headphones were less than $20, but I did by some shitty headphones and throw them out -- they probably would have made a distorted MP3 sound better than a higher quality one. Earbuds are almost certain to reproduce music poorly. I'm not advocating spending large when it's for using while jogging or whatever, but MP3's perceptual algorithms are designed to make sound sound OK when parts of it are discarded; this may help the music sound "better" in a noisy environment (where the music can't all be heard) compared to accurate reproduction.
Let's do that with movie and theatre tickets too. In fact, we could do that for ALL public gatherings! Or, hey! We could just make it so that people have to present an ID at any time they use ANY good or service. It would be guaranteed to stop all people everywhere from being jerks and taking advantage of other people.
No problem. "The Rite of Spring" is a really novel work, and its new musical ideas have been incredibly influential on many other composers. But the riot at the premiere is something that's a bit overemphasized. It's so ingrained in music history that even many music historians don't realize that it has been effectively debunked for a while.
I just looked back at the Taruskin article I mentioned, and he notes that most reviews of the premiere don't even mention Stravinsky or the music other than to note that Stravinsky was the composer. It was only once the score was published in the 1920s and Nijinsky's choreography had been forgotten that Stravinsky started promoting the novel musical characteristics of the piece. This is part of a larger trend in the writings of a number of composers around this time to try to differentiate themselves from the past and make it seem like they were making a clean break from tradition.
Anyhow, I don't fault Radio Lab too much for this, because it is a well-accepted story. I do fault the person they interviewed... who is a scholar and should know better before using that as an example.
I'll buy that people have started preferring the distorted sound of 128bit MP3s over higher quality mediums. My question is, how long will this last?
Maybe some of you remember that the MP3 format was created in order to make downloading music faster. Back in 1998 it used to take 1-2 hours to download an album, now it takes 15 minutes. As bandwidth and disk space grow, the demand for compressed audio will decrease, and people will start downloading higher quality recordings.
I can see the shift being driven by iTunes marketing: "Get 3x the quality (384bit) for only $.05 more". People will eventually start thinking 384 bit is better.
It is interesting to consider this in the context of defining artistic creativity within parameters of the culture it arises from. Portability seems to be the most important thing as our audio players change over time. Technology is inextricably linked to art.
...I know the first thing I noticed about poorly encoded MP3s was how crappy the cymbals sounded.
My thoughts exactly. I simply cannot stand listening to poorly encoded music, particularly due to the cymbals. I will purposely skip tracks I enjoy due to the terrible sound the cymbals make at low bit rates. Having done some amateur sound mixing, I notice the same sound difference as you - real, live music beats any recorded and compressed format as you know what you should be hearing vs. what you're missing in the compression.
What other formats did he use? The article did not say. I actually prefer the Ogg Vorbis encoding as higher quality than MP3. I've begun the long process of converting my mp3s to ogg.
128 MP3 sounds pretty bad to me. I don't understand this "sizzle" thing discussed here, a sizzle would be distortion or artifact. MP3s aren't distorting the audio they are cutting out a large part of the audio range. Wouldn't a sizzle be adding something that isn't there in the first place.
I also don't like live music. It tends to sound completely different than the studio version. You could argue that live music is about as authentic as you can get. It amazes me how many artist actually have really bad singing voices if not "improved" in a the music studio.
That's odd, 128 bit MP3s always seem muddled to me, like the speakers were covered in a blanket or something. I've done comparison tests between uncompressed WAVs and MP3s with the same stereo, speakers, etc. and I definitely hear a difference.. particularly with classical music. It's not even close.
If i had to compress music (and i do, for my ipod and iphone)... I'll use AAC. It sounds better than MP3.
However, most of my music collection is in ALAC. I would rather convert my music to compressed formats when needed, rather than be stuck with compressed mp3s.
And MP3 at 128? No thanks.
MP3 at 128 will never be in my music collection EVER. Its 2009 not 1999!
Saying that MP3 sounds better than CD is like saying everything tastes better with ketchup.
If ketchup really made sushi taste better, why didn't the chef slap some on before serving? If the result of MP3 compression sounds better than the original, why didn't the producer apply those effects before putting it on CD?
And wow. and flutter. I absolutely despise it. I prefer the crisp cleaner sounds of CD quality recordings.
I have a pair of Grado RS-1's, and I love them.
Note that they colour the sound too -- they're far from neutral. But they sound very good, are easily driven, and I much prefer open cans to closed ones.
Back to MP3s, I don't think it's really the speakers or headphones that makes people not hear the MP3 artifacts. I think it's conditioning. People don't hear them because over the years they've trained themselves to ignore them. Much like someone who's been drinking vitamin-D fortified milk truly doesn't taste the bitterness -- it's not because there is no bitterness, and it's not because he has bad taste buds, but because he's been conditioned, and really can't taste it.
To me, the sizzle is so pronounced that I have no trouble hearing it when played over FM, in a noisy car with really bad speakers. I believe people are blind to it, due to conditioning. So an ABX test will show that they don't hear a difference, because they really don't. The elephant in the room is invisible.
Good for them. Not so good for us who aren't conditioned.
And this is suprising because? When the main source of "young people's" music comes from ear-buds and the like, what else would you expect? These kids are clueless as to what comprises a serious audio system. It's all about portability and accessibilty, and the rest be damned.
This reminds me of something I've read about when the Beatles were recording. The recording equipment at the time was primitive, and because of the layering found in a lot of their music, they were regularly doing bounce-downs on their 4 track recorders to free up the other three tracks to add more to the mix.
But of course that creates analog generation loss, which unsurprisingly annoyed their recording engineers, but John, Paul, George, and Ringo all liked the 'shimmer' sound that it created in their music.
All that sizzle ... It's mostly invisible to us
Pff... next he'll be telling us that light is inaudible.
"As long as people will accept crap, it will be financially profitable to dispense it."
You have found the secret cause of Sturgeon's Law. Congratulations. You win an internets meme ;-)
My car accepts MP3 or WMA. As a Linux Geek the latter is out so I rip all my CD's to MP3. In a car the "quality" is really not that important. Factor in road noise, engine noise, etc. and MP3 is wonderful :).
Good sound doesn't have to be expensive, a primo late 70s Sansui integrated amp can be had for ~120 bucks and Advent speakers that sound as good many 800+ "audiophile" speakers for another hundred bucks. I.e. for the price of a crappy mini system you can have a stereo that reproduces 40 to 20,000 in a musical, detailed non fatiguing way that will make you want to listen to only 256 vbr or better mp3 because it sounds so good. IMO I'd far rather have that than a couple months of crappy cable tee vee.
Tired of all the isms, don't exploit people as an employer, or a government, mmmmK?
My thoughts exactly. Having played in band I'm annoyed when I hear the "sizzle" sound that low-quality mp3s produce from cymbal sounds. But if I didn't have that frame of reference then I probably wouldn't care.
I mean when you say 192 and MP3 I think kbit/sec. I never heard of anyone sampling at a rate of 192khz. (A CD is sampled at 44100khz from what I remember which at 2 bytes per sample and left and right channels works out to 176400 bytes/sec or 1411 kbit/sec) I mean if I do the math out and use 192khz, 24bit samples (oh and figure that you're including both left and right channels in those numbers) I get a sample rate of 576kbyte/sec or 4608kbit/sec which is quite a bit higher than even an uncompressed CD.
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Of course, the purest of analog formats is the thing of life itself: water.
"Make cyberlove, not cyberwar!" -Khaed(544779)
I think the guy's conclusion is biased and uninsightful. Clearly this is a go-get-it type of research, not testing hypothesis but performing experiments and then digging or picking favorite conclusions. More likely is the background noise allows the brain to believe there is more essence to the song than there really is. It's similar with some video games and vision -- the latest graphics can actually appear worse because our internal impression was filling in the essence within the low resolution frames. Clearly there is an element of getting used to things and it would be hard to go to a low res game or recording that you weren't at all used to. But moving forward into perfect clarity always leaves the human less impressed because it dissolves the human input to the stimulus.
I think the correct interpretation would be not that people like mp3 music better but that people like what they are used to, which in turn makes this study almost worthless? The only addition to the wealth of human knowledge from this study was that even in audio quality this "odd" phenomenon occurs (i.e. familiarity is more liked) but hasn't that been proven over and over again in so many fields.
Reading your comment instantly brought back that "behaves so strangely" clip to my mind. I remember being totally tripped out by that.
I often hear new music first as MP3 from friends or on low-cost headphones on planes. If I like it I buy the CD. Playing these on good equipment at home often results in a disappointment: The bass is too overpowering and the dynamic range sucks. I suspect the sound engineers mix tracks to make them sound best on iPods or cheap equipment since this is how most people experience music these days.
Do a search on "gomes_interview.wav", select the Stereophile link, and from there go to Lee Gomes' interview with Michael Fremer on the WSJ. Compare the MP3 and WAV versions of the songs in the download. Black and White, Night and Day.
Cheers
"Whoah dude! Quantization errors are raaaaad, man!"
So if younger people like mp3 sound what will happen when they go to see the band live, they will be blown away , "wow is this how its meant to sound like".
I must be old i prefer vinyl, give me warmth over blandness and loudness anyday (records are better for dance music and dj's)
I remember when I was in Recording School, taling with a friend of mine about the difference between various formats. It was then that it hit me. That due to constantly being subjected to the MP3 format young people will become accustomed to it and like it better. But, what's more is that one day you will find a preset on some plug-in that emulates the "MP3 Sound" just as you do today with mic and amp modelers. Sound is sound, there is no such thing as the perfect sound. debating this is like debating if an SSL 9000K or AMEK 9098i produced a better sound.
Just to note your scalping solution, Glastonbury Festival in the UK actually implements that solution, because at one point 150,000 tickets would sell out within a couple of hours of being released and would mosty go to touts. Since I think last year you've needed to register a photo before you buy a ticket and they are non-transferrable.
I am not so sure. The vinyl era that ended in the 80' was replaced by the CD era and it was noticeable at the time that the CD recordings sounded terrible when played on the music reproduction systems of the time. They dont sound too bad now and we have the shift to digitaly compressed recordings which also sound awfull.
What is noticeable is that the material on the recordings and the reproduction chain changes as the engineers and public eek out the best match between the capability of the chain and the style of the music. You dont get much change in the soundfield from very high quality reproduction chains in any era and the goal of reconstructing the soundstage is only ever achieved by specialist equipment. Everything else is affected by the fashion of the time. I cannot be alone for example in finding the sound of classical recordings to be universally awfull because they mostly do not seek to reproduce the sound you hear at a concert but by multimike techniques reproduce each instrument with total fidelity as if it were being recorded in an anechoic chamber. MP3's of sampled dance music sound excellent in earbuds played on a walkman/ipod because that is how they are meant to be listened to - the sound is almost the same when replicated in a club, the only difference being that the Bass vibrates the whole of your body instead of just your eardrums.
So music of an era sounds best when being played from a recorded source of the era through the reproduction chain of the era. Having said that it is possible to emulate some of these things now.
Facts are history now plebs have politics for religion on social media.
I know! Everytime I think of that, the "Sometimes behaves so strangely" clip stays on my mind for weeks. Hehe... I suppose apologies are in order ;)
Well, if they really like it that way, I'm not going to stop them or say they're wrong. it's just one preference out of many. I just hope this doesn't mean artists will start putting this noise in their tracks deliberately, because I DON'T like it, and of course it's trivial to add MP3 distortion but impossible to remove it.
It's kind of like pop stars now deliberately overusing auto-tune on their vocals--they (or really, probably their producers) LIKE the unrealistic "pop" between different pitches and robotically flat tonality. Personally I can see that--I'm not really a fan of genres that commonly do this, but I can see its artistic merit as an individual technique, and it doesn't detract from my appreciation of artists with noticeably un-tuned voices (i.e. Tom Waits).
Back to the point; you won't get hifi at 128mbps
Of course not. 128mbps is 6 orders of magnitude worse than 128kbps.
You should get a prize... or rather, everyone else (myself included) for not spotting and pointing out that stupid mistake earlier :-)
I suspect that one bit every eight or nine seconds isn't going to give the highest quality audio. (^_^)
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).