The evolution is here

The MP3 has become synonymous with downloaded music. But there are still people who refuse lossy digital downloads and would prefer to buy CDs to rip at optimal quality. MP3, AAC and other audio formats were designed to reduce the amount of data needed for a file to provide an accurate representation of an original recording. This enabled files to be sent over a low bandwidth 1990′s internet or packed onto the earliest low capacity MP3 players. They all use a form of compression through perceptual encoding – analysing the uncompressed waveform and using a model to work out which bits will be beyond the capacity of most human ears. This information can be reduced or discarded, resulting in a smaller file.

Listen 'ear

People who have naturally sensitive ears and/or who have trained their brains to recognise slight differences in audio quality (e.g. audio technicians, classical musicians) may spot flaws in MP3 tracks that most people would not. This is where lossless compression formats come in, for example FLAC which compresses audio without losing any data, so you can maintain the 16bit depth and 44.1kHz range of CD audio. However the results are considerably larger files than even the highest quality of MP3 (320kbps).

There is an argument that the MP3 and by extension the iPod, iTunes and Beatport et al are changing our perception of music itself. Thomas Edison promoted the original phonograph by demonstrating that a person could not tell whether behind a curtain was an opera singer or one of Edison’s cylinders playing a recording of the singer. Students of audio engineering and psycho-acoustics are regularly asked to take part in “double-blind” experiments, where even the person conducting the experiment does not know at first the MP3 from the file of higher quality to avoid subliminally passing the answer to the students. Each year preference for the MP3 format rises. Students prefer the quality of that sound to music of a much higher quality. The “sizzle sounds” of the MP3, it is a sound they are familiar with. It is perhaps comparable to a generation of people preferring the artifacts of vinyl – the crackles and pops. It was familiar and comfortable to them. Is this now the same with iPod lovers? Listening to music on your iPod is not about the sound quality of the music, and it’s more than the convenience of listening to music on the move. 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.

Of course, pandering to the market has influence here: If you are a sound engineer mixing for a mass market, these days you’ll tend to assume crappy reproduction environment for your target audience and you’ll mix accordingly, with lots of brutal compression and tricks to give the vague illusion of real bass. The resulting recordings do sound better in the MP3 formats on inferior equipment – not that they sound especially good anywhere. It’s the reason for the popularity of Phil Spector’s “wall of sound” which sounded substantially better on transistor radios than music from other producers.

Ye olde headphones

Time for a bit of history… Apple (and Microsoft) chose poor quality encoders with low quality defaults in both their respective media players of iTunes and Windows Media Player. Apple sold low quality sound files with Digital Rights Management, to stop people sharing the music. This encouraged people to burn the tracks to CD and re-encode them to remove the DRM thus reducing the quality further. The music industry has effectively encouraged the P2P file sharing networks where often the quality and encoding is unknown. Now an entire generation think this is how recorded music ought to sound. There is a comparison to fast food, such as McDonalds with the wide variety of low-bitrate music. A McDonalds hamburger has very little in common with a home-cooked meal. People are trained by exposure to expect certain sets of flavours or textures and will dislike anything of a higher fidelity (a meal made from scratch). Until people are exposed to higher quality music, and an appropriate environment to enjoy it in. MP3s will do enough to get the basic flavour of a song across. We don’t adjust our taste to that which is best, we like what we have already grown to like.

For most listening purposes, with most equipment and most ears, MP3 is perfectly good enough. Sure, use FLAC for archiving purposes – it makes sense to have a lossless master of your CD – but if you’re clogging up a portable player with FLACs or Apple Lossless files, then either a) you have superior ears, a headphone amplifier and seriously high-end headphones or b) you’re lacking in common sense. However, it’s not all about which sounds better, it’s which sounds different – how does the music make you feel?

FLAC

MP3

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