Why the Sound of Music Sucks Today – Part 3

In Part 2 we learned how the loss of dynamic range has helped make music today sound like a bag of butt-holes. Now we’re going to talk about the worst thing to happen to sonic quality since the cassette . . the dreaded MP3!

We all know how the MP3 has helped change the entire music industry. The file size of an MP3 at 128kBit is one/tenth the size of 44.1kHz WAV or AIFF file (CD quality audio). One minute of CD quality audio is about a 10 megabyte size file. The MP3 of the same audio takes up only 1 megabyte. By reducing the file size the MP3 made it easy to send and receive music over the internet and revolutionize the industry.

So how does an MP3 only use a fraction of the data needed to accurately express the audio without any degradation in quality? Well, it doesn’t and it sucks once again. It sucks hard . . again.

The history of how and why the MP3 came about is easily found. My favorite part of the article is where they say “By using MPEG audio coding, you may shrink down the original sound data from a CD by a factor of 12, without losing sound quality.” What a pant load! There is SIGNIFICANT and AUDIBLE loss to the sonic quality of the audio when converted to MP3 and it is easily recognized by anyone who knows what to listen for. I don’t mean you have to be a “Golden Ear” to hear the problems but you do need to give a crap about quality.[ad name=”250×250″]

Without going into too much detail let’s just say that the MP3 encoder expects the audio that is coming up next to sound the same as the audio you just heard in order to reduce how much information it has to remember. Anytime you have changes in dynamics or the stereo image then the quality of the MP3 suffers. So as long as the music has no dynamics, no changes in the left or right, and contains a fairly full sound then the MP3 sounds OK. If the music has solo acoustic instruments, maybe panned to the left or right, and some changes in loudness then the flaw’s of the MP3 encoder become more obvious. In the early days of stereo it was common to do more extreme panning including sometimes only putting drums on one side of the stereo field. Those types of songs don’t sound too great as MP3’s because the encoder struggles to deal with the drastically different information on the left and right sides.

But don’t worry, we’ve already killed dynamics and we’ve killed creativity in panning and we’ve made every single part of the song full and rich and jam-packed with every 32nd note filled with something to listen to and everyone playing everything every time. So congratulations music industry pro’s. You’ve killed music! You suck, your sounds suck, your CD’s suck and your MP3’s sound like turd.

Here’s a suggestion. Give control back to the engineers. You might be surprised at what happens. You’re so ready to blame illegal downloading for the current state of the music industry but maybe there’s a little more blame to go around and maybe the fact that a lot of your albums sound like crap has something to do with it.