There’s a great article in Rolling Stone about how music engineered for mp3 players sounds worse than that for previous media. The article, The Death of High Fidelity: In the age of MP3s, Sound Quality Is Worse Than Ever, by Robert Levine, explains how newly released music can be engineered for loudness rather than range of sound. As I was reading it, I was thinking of the latest album I downloaded from iTunes, Raising Sand by Robert Plant and Allison Krause, which sounds excellent to me. At the end of the article, Levine lists some examples of “Bad” albums noted for their loudness and “Good” albums noted for their depth and range and Raising Sand was on the good list. Nice to know I’m not deaf yet.
Tombrarian
Ongoing thoughts about media and technology librarianship
I have a fussy ear, and I’ve always been a little disappointed with the sound quality of MP3′s. I was not aware, however, of modern compression techniques to make everything seem louder. It just muddies the sounds, and here is a really good example of how: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7t40xBpqfE
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