Did these guys ruin music as we knew it ?
Can you believe we somehow let much of today’s music be filtered by six electrical engineers ?
Yes, many years ago six electrical engineers (Fraunhofer GmbH) in Germany developed the MP3 standard, allowing music to be compressed (squished) so that audio files could be smaller. This was to accommodate the (then) slow internet transmission and download speeds. In order to achieve this compression the engineers developed special algorithms to automatically remove elements from the audio files that they reasoned are “inaudible”.
It’s called lossy compression because it’s the listeners loss.
All music goes through this “loss” process when an MP3 file is created and it does not take into account anything about the music contained in the file, treating all music the same way. The same approach is applied to streaming audio today.
I have nothing against Electrical Engineers, but wouldn’t it have been a good idea to have a some actual audio engineers and musicians involved in the ground floor of this development ?
PCM/MP3 Fatigue
It’s great that we can listen to anything anywhere, but are you getting tired of the digitally compressed sound ? Am I the only one ?
Maybe growing up with LP’s and experiencing studio & live sound has spoiled me, but I’m feeling increasing digital fatigue with each passing day. Even at 320kbps I find MP3 to be stiff & lifeless.
Higher Definition Audio
There is a small but growing movement towards higher resolution audio and its gathering steam in various areas — vinyl, HDtracks, DSD, Tidal etc. The aim is to roll back the clock to the pre-digital era where the sonic experience of music was manyfold better than it is today giving the new generation a chance to hear what they’ve been missing.
Many non-musicians tell me that most people can’t hear the difference, but I really disagree. I think many young people haven’t actually had the experience of hearing recorded music the way it can and should be reproduced. It currently requires more expensive gear and downloads, but that may change if it can get to critical mass. Perhaps Apple/Beats will acknowledge this emergent hi-res movement with their soon to be unveiled music service.
We go through so much effort in the studio to capture the sound as accurately as possible and then we just let it get trashed. AAC compression (mp3's successor) from iTunes is not much better — it’s still only 256 kbs, and “lossy.”
You pay for MP3's whether you use them or not
And don’t think mp3's are free, they’re not. We all pay for them. The cost is built into the price of every device you ever bought that can play an mp3 file.
Fraunhofer (the engineers who invented the MP3) collects its licensing fee for each one. Here are the rates if you don’t believe it http://www.mp3licensing.com/royalty/.
I’d love see a comparison between the royalties these guys are getting and the royalties of the musicians around the world who’s music is getting crunched.
Must we continue to accept that someone out there has decided what in the music is going get lost and what will be kept ?
The Fraunhofer guys made some assumptions about human hearing early on and decided that … “parts that are not very audible can be represented less accurately ” and “inaudible information can be discarded altogether” !
How did they decide what part of the music is inaudible ? By asking the listener ? Even harmonic distortion has harmonic information. There are so many intangibles in our experience of music, there is no possible way you can quantify it — but oh yes they did.
Next time you are in the studio don’t forget to bring up the levels on the “inaudible information” track.
http://www.mp3-history.com/en/technology.html
- Chris Theberge, Founder — Music Works NYC
