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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.
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 also seems to happen a lot with older movies. If a person grew up watching older films, they have no problems watching and appreciating classics. I've noticed this while watching Hitchcock films. The people who grew up with older films are on the edge of their seat with suspense, while the MTV generation folks are bored out of their mind.
That has nothing to do with nor does it reflect the quality of flatscreens. Box stores are known to mess up the sharpness, brightness and contrast of their TVs on the showroom floor to make it 'pop' (heck, some TVs even have a demo or showroom setting that does it at the push of 1 button). I too personally think it looks like crap at those settings.
Its best to do your homework online, then when at the store ask the salesperson if you can adjust the settings to something that you find more acceptable. I've never been turned down when I've asked this. It gives you a better representation of the quality (but not a full representation, as the lighting at your house will be different).
Generally, flatscreens are better than CRTs when calibrated properly. I know you couldn't pry my DLP out of my cold, dead hands (though DLPs are not true flatscreens). For true flatscreen, you can't go wrong with a properly calibrated Sharp Aquos.
It's better to burn out than to fade away
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.
It's not just previous generations that prefer tube amps to transistors. The differences are not obvious until you try to overdrive them, at which point they break up very differently. Tube amps distort with a lot of coloring overtones that you just don't get from a transistor amp, which tends to sound crunchy and just plain distorted. The advantage of transistors is reliability as tubes will eventually blow out and need replacing. When I play my guitar, I almost always use tube amps for recording and personal playing for pleasure due to the better sound, but I usually use a solid-state amp for gigging due to the reliability.
"I just want to thank my coach Eric a.k.a. Disco for shattering my reality..."
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.
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 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.
My mom made us watch The Birds when we were about 12 or so. We giggled at the obvious wires and rubber birds... she had nightmares for a week when she watched the same thing when she was about the same age.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
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.
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'