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.'"

Comments

Like the phonograph.... The what?

[suso]

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.

Re:Like the phonograph.... The what?

[ProppaT]

Actually, that's a whole different ball of wax (bad pun intended).

Records provide analog sound which does sound more more natural and warm if the original recording was also analog (using good equipment). This is an extremely hi fidelity medium.

And 128 mp3's are an extremely lo fidelity medium. I can't stand listening to them because it actually cuts out audible portions of the music that I can hear if listening to the cd or a high quality rip.

I think a part of this equation that is being left out is the volume at which the listeners were playing the music. Also, with some of these kids doing nothing but listening to their ipods 24/7, I'm wondering if their earing isn't temporarily damaged.

I would be curious to see what these kids would think about the different samples if they went a month without listening to any music. They like the hiss because they're not used to hearing anything without it (on crappy headphones none-the-less). I wanna know what happens when they "reboot" their ears. This isn't just a matter of some people prefer sennheiser headphones and some people prefer grado headphones, this is a matter of some people liking how things actually sound vs. some people liking distorted music with hiss laid over it. That's kind of unsettling to me.

Re:Like the phonograph.... The what?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's funny...I'm an audio engineer and I have been using both the WAV and MP3 formats for the past ten years. I used to listen to CDs but for the past 8 or so years I have been using Winamp to play MP3 and more recently the iPod.

Nowadays, when I finish a track, the wav doesn't sound right until I encode it to mp3. The mp3 sounds better to me. It's not due to a lack of knowledge of the distinctions between the two...I'm familiar with all the boring technical differences...it's due to ear training. You consistently hear your reference material (other well recorded and or well written songs on an iPod or some other device) in the mp3 format, and so you end up coming to prefer the mp3 format.

Re:Like the phonograph.... The what?

[Sponge Bath]

...if it's not what you're used to then "different" is likely to be considered "bad"

That explains the continued success of Coors and Busweiser.

Re:Like the phonograph.... The what?

[dgatwood]

I find his works rather interesting. I used to do a classical show on a college radio station, and we'd always play something at the end that bent people's minds a little. Quite often, it was a Glass number. The idea was that if people didn't experience different styles of... I guess I'd call it neoclassical music... then they would never grow to appreciate it.

That said, young people's preference for hyped, brittle highs is a bit like most Chinese-manufactured condenser microphones (for precisely the same reason). When you first get one, you love the bright, crisp highs because it is new and sounds exciting, edgy, etc. Then, once you've experienced good-sounding hardware, you fairly quickly realize just how harsh and abrasive that sizzling sound is by comparison and run away screaming. I would say that any kid who likes that sound hasn't been to enough concerts in the real world---probably because they're sold out to the stupid scalpers before they get a chance to buy tickets. Real concerts don't sound like that.

Which brings up my thoughts for solving the scalping problem. Require that all tickets be in the name of a particular person. Print it on the ticket. In order to change it, you have to go to the box office and show a copy of the receipt from an authorized reseller or from the box office. Otherwise, when the name on the ticket doesn't match your photo ID, you don't get in. Scalpers at that point would be unable to buy up large blocks of tickets and resell them at astronomical prices because the tickets would be worthless without the person being able to show a sales receipt from the box office or an authorized reseller. But I digress.

Re:Like the phonograph.... The what?

[Rei]

MP3-320 may be better than MP3-128, but it's generally overkill. Most people's impression of the quality of 128kbps MP3s comes from the era where most MP3s weren't encoded with VBR. VBR makes a massive difference in quality per unit size. I've seen three or four blind comparisons between VBR mp3s at different bitrates, as well as conducted one of my own. The results, in general, are that about half of people can tell the difference between 128kbps and 160kbps or 192kbps, and beyond that, there's generally little to no ability to accurately tell the difference, even among self-described audiophiles.

Re:Like the phonograph.... The what?

[Anonymous Coward]

The comparison only seems fair. Vacuum tubes distort sound in a way that can be easily understood as favorable - harsh frequencies are softened, etc. The idea that the sound has been "improved" by tube distortion can be perceived, but also explained in technical terms.

I have a hard time understanding how MP3 distortion can be seen as favorable. With MP3 compression, the "distortion" is artifacts and interference. The flabby, washy, sizzle effect. Yuck. I find it to be especially *bad* on extreme high frequencies like cymbal crashes and horns.

I have noticed that MP3 (file) compression can sometimes have a similar effect to dynamic range compression, which recording studios over-use to make all of the levels as loud as possible. The desired effect is that the song is louder coming over the radio, but trained ears also notice that there is no variation in the dynamic range. Trained or not, ears get fatigued listening to music that is over-compressed (dynamic compression, not file compression).

I think it could certainly be possible that students simply perceive the MP3 song as louder.

Re:Like the phonograph.... The what?

[rickb928]

I grew up through the phonograph era to CDs and now various digital formats.

Remember any of the phonograph expiriments in the 70s? Piling on pennies until the stylus pressure was the better part of a quarter-pound, and skilled listeners unable to hear the difference? The Bose demonstrations pointing out the human ear's sensitivity to distortion that varies with frequency? Actually, AT&T might have more information on this, since they wanted to send only what was needed to be intelligible. But I digress.

I always preferred the 'West Coast' sound, even on LPs. The JBL L100 speakers delivered this sound the best, IMHO, and the more accurate the amp the better. Headroom was my god. But I sacrificed the tube amps for solid-state very early. Warm response = less high-end. While I transcribed LPs onto reel-to-reel, I used Revox decks and usually ran them at 15ips, spewing tape but I saved my LPs. It wasn't about money. I was into heavy metal before it was called that. I also developed a taste for Mahler, but that's another story. And I was a bass freak, not to the exclusion of high frequency response. Tape hiss destroyed it, no matter what flavor or Dolby processing or companding I tried. I wanted it all, defined as everything but mids....

CDs were welcomed by me, first 'cause they didn't wear like LPs, and of course the s/n won me over. No more tapes! I loved the wide response, the cleaner highs, the impossible lows. Platter rumble limits your bass response. At this point I was listening to stuff through 30" EV drivers and eithber Phase Linear or Crown amps, 3-5KW of them(This suited disco). Some of the stuff I fell in love with would be in the 12-18Hz range, impossible with phonographs unless I built a room just for that purpose. I bought CDs instead. Of course, portability won me over too, though there was one big problem with portable CD players - the headphones were generally terrible. My Koss Pro-4AAs fit the bill. And I would never hear that car coming. Instant death, oblivious to all but the music. I survived, of course.

But the headphones I migrated to were all pitiful. Not sealing the ear canal meant no bass response - can't get much out of a .7" open air driver. Think the free air resonance must have been around 300Hz. So CD players were half a loaf.

MP3s offered the future or massive amounts of music in packages even more resilient than portable CD players. Nice! Of course, most of them I first heard on my computer, and the speakers on that were weak, so I upgraded as much as I dared, then plugged it into the stereo. Ick! Tinny, sibilant, bass like mud. I was distraught. this was not an advance.

I learned, of course, about bitrates, and now I listen to nothing below 256kb/s, and usually 320kb/s. I use a lot more space, but it is worth it to me. A while ago I had a revelation - 128kb/s sounded like FM radio, which is usually not that good after the station gets finished limiting/shaping/twisting the audio for their own purposes. I realized shortly thereafter that FM radio is mostly driven by computerized stations now. They use MP3s. FM radio *is* 128kb/s. Sadly, it is ruined, probably forever.

So kids today prefer the sizzle of 128K MP3s? I'm learning to turn down those classic albums I remember, and hear all sorts of amazing stuff going on that would be lost in the din ordinarily. My apologies to all those artists whose work I so diminished for so long.

Of course, popular music today for teens is so electronic that encoding a higher bitrate wouldn't make the same difference as it would for say Mahler, or Glass, or even Pink Floyd. Drum machines aren't the same as animal hides. I doubt I could hear enough difference myself. Kids' ears already ruined by in-ear drivers and iPods with enough power to deafen you (thanks, Steve) are probably already hearing-impaired at 16, if not earlier.

I modify my music a lot, but not having the sound to modify is the real crime of 128kb/s MP3s. It's why I prefer

Deaf?

[Lawrence_Bird]

this sounds like a peference for high treble... probably related to hearing loss.

Were any of the kids surveyed members of HS bands?

[Yewbert]

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.

Audiophile?

[jshackney]

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.

Re:Not Surprising

[PitaBred]

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 Skullflower anecdote

[doom]

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.