"Sounding good is a perception"

"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.'"

take from http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/03/11/153205

the first few comments are pretty interesting too, IMO.

Jeez…reading this just makes me sad. 

128? Ewwwwww. That sizzle is an annoying distraction and I have a habit of chiding anyone who has overly compressed mp3's on when I'm riding in their car (yeah, I'm working on it).

that's pretty funny

i've been upgrading my MP3s to 320 lately after getting a much bigger hard drive, can definitely tell the difference

hoya - hopefully you're doing variable bit rate (VBR) encoding, too.

i'm not encoding at all, just downloading entire discographies illegally  ;D

Upgrading existing files?  Or just re-downloading better versions?

HoyaSaxa03 wrote:
that's pretty funny

i've been upgrading my MP3s to 320 lately after getting a much bigger hard drive, can definitely tell the difference

nkotb wrote:
Upgrading existing files?  Or just re-downloading better versions?

i had a hodge-podge of files from god-knows-where for a lot of my crucial bands (beatles, creedence, dylan, etc.)… they were all full albums, but i probably got the files 6-7 years ago piece meal over kazaa or something, a lot were 128 kpbs

so i'm just burning through gigabytes of torrents, downloading high bitrate MP3s… sometimes i just get the FLAC and then convert down to 320, depends on what's available out there

humorously enough (IMO), one of the LOLs-of-the-day: