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.'"
I take it you mean "posts as AC to savagely mock himself"
Actually while Windows certainly does have its problems, from a useability standpoint it actually is better. Linux i am sorry to say is a disaster and while it may be open source, the OS is simply a pathetic mess for this, and it only has itself to blame for this. On windows, you can run out and buy a new hardware or software, bring it home, throw in the install disk, click install, and your done. With Linux it is rarely so easy. hen Linux developers make everything worse by thinking that less features make it easier to use, which the opposite is true. They are not fixing the real problem, which is not flexibility, but software should come with reasonable defaults, and everything should be able to be accomplished in GUI and CLI. Software can thus be made to work the way the user wants to use it, if a user does not want to hassle with configuring it they dont have to, if they want to configure it they may, The idea as well is that useability at GUI level is in layout, not sparse features. There should be a lot of flexibility but less used features placed in advanced screens. Gnome and KDE are mostly useless for those who need real features and flexibility and are not any better as far as useability as they were 10 years ago.
Another are where Linux has messed up is not properly documented kernel driver APIs and ABIs, not providing a stable software and driver ABI, and assuming that the user will not use any third party software or drivers that are not installed by a distros packaging system. It also assumes that a user will always use a single driver that comes with the OS and will never need to be able to unload and load different drivers easily. The situation with libraries is also a huge mess that makes the windows dll hell of past times seem minor.