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.

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.

Back when music was delivered on phonograph records there was a limit to how much information could be etched into the disc before it cut across the grove and rendered the disc unplayable. On magnetic tape there was a limit to how much magnetic energy the tape could hold before it became distorted. With digital audio there is a limit on how loud you can go when sampling the sound-wave. That limit in digital audio is called 0 db (zero).

If 0 is the limit, and no one is allowed to go over it, then we need to find a way to bring up the overall average volume of the audio in order to make it sound louder. In effect we are going to sacrifice the dynamic range of the music in order to gain a perceived volume increase.

The dynamic range is the difference measured between the softest and loudest part of the song. In music the dynamics are just as important as the tempo or the key in creating any kind of emotional connection to the music. Composers and musicians know that they can draw you in to a piece with subtle (or not so subtle) changes in dynamics. The chorus of a rock song is louder than the verse so you can feel that lift in energy. The second movement of a symphony is often softer than the first so the composer can play with melody and orchestration without banging you over the head. Imagine if a performer started singing the Star Spangled Banner as loud as they could right from the 1st line! I doubt they would get much of an emotional response from the audience, at least not a positive one.

So up until a few years ago in the battle of volume vs. dynamic range the winner, for the sake of the music, has been dynamics. Engineers who spent years learning their craft were given control over the volume of the recording secure in the knowledge that anyone who wanted it louder would TURN IT UP! You know. That little knob that says “volume” that most music playback devices have.

Take a look at these two pictures of music waveforms. The image on the left represents the waveform of music recorded with a large amount of dynamics. The image on the right shows what the waveform of a modern recording with almost all dynamics removed. Guess which one sounds louder? Guess which one has nice dynamic range and emotional context?

If you want a good example of dynamics then put on a pair of nice headphones, close your eyes, and put on Pink Floyd’s “The Wall”. Do you hear how the volume changes help create emotional rises and falls? Now don’t touch the volume knob and put on almost any new rock album. . CONGRATULATIONS!!! YOU ARE NOW DEAF!

It seems we’ve lost our trust in the listeners ability to work the volume knob, and the radio station broadcast engineers ability to regulate the broadcast signal, so now we have music with no dynamics and it sucks. It sucks hard.

(Next time: the worst thing to ever happen to music – the MP3)

Anyone over the age of 30 has been thinking the same thing: Why does this new CD sound like crap when my old copy of Pink Floyd’s “The Wall” still sounds great? Shouldn’t new music sound better?

There are many reasons for the change in audio quality over the last few years but I’ve got a few of my favorites I’ve been wanting to vent about for awhile now.

“Louder is Better” – The powers that run the music business, and generally ignorant people everywhere, think that a loud song sounds better than a soft song.

If you’re old enough to actually have owned a real stereo system then you might remember turning up the LOW and HIGH (or Bass and Treble if you could afford that kind of thing) knobs to the delight of your little speakers as you made it “sound better”. Those of us with jobs would spend even more money on a Graphic EQ that allowed us more control only to end up with the classic EQ “smiley face” pattern boosting the highs and lows to the same effect. It sounded better to us and we felt good about it knowing that our hours of mowing lawns had bettered our lives in such a meaningful way.

The Fletcher-Munson curve tells us that as the volume of what we hear increases so does our perception of the low and high frequencies. Therefore, when played back to back and with no adjustment to the volume controls, the louder of two songs will have more perceived high and low frequencies and thus “sound better” to our inner audio geek.

If I ran a record label, and I wanted the music we released to sound better than my competition, then I might tell the producers that I want the music mixes to be louder than others. Those producers (who, let’s be honest, couldn’t make it as artists themselves) might then instruct the engineers to make it louder. Those engineers (who, let’s be honest, haven’t seen the sun or a woman in years) will bitch and complain and try to explain but in the end will do what they’re told because they like their jobs and really don’t want to go back to mowing lawns.

So how can an engineer make the music louder when the maximum audio limits are set by the format on which it is recorded?

Thus it begins . . . .THE LOUDNESS WARS!!!!!

Who can make their music the loudest? Who can push the limits on the radio? Then along comes the CD, and later the MP3, and everything gets complicated.

(NEXT TIME – Pushing the limits! or How I Spent My Summer With Bleeding Ears.)