MP3 sound preferred by young people

" There are definitely some audiophiles lurking on this site. Does the news make you die a little inside?"

No, it just shows how much hearing damage our youth have from listening to music too loud, ie rap music playing in the car at over 100db. I have a couple people with sound systems in their cars that shake my house from the street outside when they drive by. I can only imagine being in that car having my ear drums blown out. That isn't listening to music, it is saying, "Hey look at me!!! I got nothing better else to spend my money on!! Look how shallow I am!! I figure everyone loves my music so I am going to play it real loud!!"

You have to have hearing damage to not notice a mp3 track. I can tell a mp3 by how it "washes" out the high frequencies. It is really apparent when someone hits a cymbal in a song, for me. Also, with the "loudness" wars being in full force, the dynamic range compression applied to CD's to make them as loud as humanly possible, converting to a lossy format just makes it sound all that more horrible. It is really ridiculous. If you ever had good audio equipment, you will know what I am talking about. And these record companies wonder why no one buys their tripe. That and the fact that today's music is shallow and these so called singers need to sell sex just to make their records sell. My wife, for instance, is a little younger than me and listens to today's music. She made the comment one day, "She is an excellent singer and she even writes her own music." I was like, "What is so special about writing your own songs? Back in the day, they did that all the time." Most of these pop diva's or their ilk don't even write their own songs. No wonder they have a very short half-life in the showbiz. Some of the bands I listen to, are still selling records after 30 years. Can you say that about any of these pop diva's? Maybe a very select few if any.

Sorry for the long post...

They are used to mp3`s, that`s why. The end is near i say.

When i was young we had computer games on tape cassettes, and they sounded far superior to mp3 and flac!!!!!!!1

Shaolin sez: "I have a couple people with sound systems in their cars that shake my house from the street outside when they drive by."

GET OFF MY LAWN!!!!

Ahh so you are one of those worthless bastards arent you!!! HAH I knew it!!

I have a question... why spend hundreds if not thousands on hi-tech hi definition audio players to play low quality mp3 files on them?
I also think that the lower the quality, the louder the song sounds.
Isn't louder always better to an untrained ear?
The mid range is always boosted and the music is very basic sounding. High quality recordings often need equalization because of the higher frequencies. That's work and people are too lazy.

LoL! I am just a worthless bastard! I hate Rap though...I rank it right up there with country "music".

Get off my lawn is a line from the excellent Clint Eastood film: Gran Torino- he tells some punk gang kids, that play loud Rap music in their car as they troll the neighborhood, that are becoming a pain in his ass, to get off his lawn. Then gives them the famous Eastwood grimace. They left... http://www.cdfreaks.com/jochem/../im...4/bigsmile.gif

I think mp3's have come a long way. 10 years ago they were all 128kbps. Now they seem to be 192kbps-256kbps VBR encoded with LAME. The quality is much better. Not on par with a CD or Record but pretty good. If you took the crapfest of mp3's that used to circulate the internet it'd be easy to choose cd, now that people make high quality mp3's the gap isn't quite as large.

mp3's are still crap for music quality as the bitrate is too low and is lossy. FLAC is far better.

Yea, I saw the movie twice, excellent flick!!

Sometimes, with Flac, you can almost get 50% compression which is not bad for lossless. I do like Ape Monkey Audio too. It also has good compression also and is lossless.

You don't, you spend that kind of money to play lossless, CDs, Vinyl, Blu-Ray Audio, etc... The lower the quality the crappier the song sounds. It will NOT sound louder and it will not have more dynamic range. High quality recordings do NOT need equalization. The effort was spent to make them high quality to begin with so that you can reap the benefits on a half decent or better system. Where are you getting your ideas from???

Well, to be honest and fair, if you want to judge MP3, you have to do some hearing test or ABX the songs (of course, if we're talking over 192kbps here)... but surely that means NOT that i am an mp3 "boy"...
For me, the physical existence of the media puts the rules, be it an Audio CD, a Vinyl record or even an old twirly cassette recorded from the radio in 1975 and left on the side of a stove (yep, i have a few of these)... I just always prefer the original sound that came from the band, no matter how $H!@^#^ it gets at times, as long as i know that this how it was played, so to hell with MP3s and re-mastering, I shall always go physical, lossless and original

PS: and if I have to go lossy, OGG All the way!! (or AAC if i had to )

What you need to do is get some music that wasn't dynamically compressed to death like early 80's or 70's and then convert to mp3. It will be more apparent. With today's music, they jack up the loudness to the point of distortion so if you converted to mp3 it would sound probably nearly the same or even worse due to all the distortion. Metallica, Death Magnetic, is a prime example what I am talking about. The CD version sounds so horrible. If you look at the waveform, you can see how much DRC they used. They compressed the hell out of that entire album. What was funny and sad about the whole thing, Lars Ulrich said he listened to it in his car for a week and didn't notice anything wrong. I guess standing next to those amplifiers all those years ruined his ears to make a dumb statement like that.

I agree with you. Ogg to me sounds better than mp3.

Whars the flash mp3 player boom boxes.
This should definitely be the future, but there are so very few out there.
I stumbled onto a Coby MP-C341 at Rosses for $15. (on sale).
nobody even noticed what is was.
It is kind of goofy packaging, but nice functionally.
I have another cool palm sized unit that I had to get from Hong Kong off ebay from FiiO in China.

Portable FiiO S3

Yes you can use your phone ipod etc, but nothing with decent speakers in a boom box format.

What do you think?

Just one more post please.
Info on the above player can be found at:
http://www.anythingbutipod.com/archives/2008/07/fiio-s3-portable-speaker-with-integrated-mp3-player.php

Thanks

shaolin007: have you ever done a blind test (ABX) between a properly encoded MP3 file and the original? I think you would be pleasantly surprised. And actually, MP3 files sourced from loud sounds can sound worse because they require more bits to sound transparent, so they're not loud for this reason. They're loud because louder sounds better according to some research. If you take the same mastered track and play it twice but the second time increase the loudness by 1dB or so, the louder one will sound better to most people.

And in a news article, you shouldn't use an objective statement like: "...prefer the sound of MP3, despite its low quality."

MP3s have the ability to sound transparent from their source, which does not make them low quality.

Read over at http://www.hydrogenaudio.org some, there's some good information about lossy codecs and how to properly to an ABX test.

And just to make it clear, I'm not a MP3 fan boy, I prefer FLAC for my backups and would even prefer FLAC to be bought from online stores.. but that's a pipe-dream at the moment....

I don't think this study was conducted correctly with accurate blind tests and is all subjective.

Sorry if this comes off as an attack.. I just don't like misinformation.

There is a perfectly logical explanation to this.
When you listen to ugly music, the better the sound, the uglier it gets. No wonder they prefer mp3 sound.

Never did a blind test per se but I have had several instances of someone listening to a mp3 track and then let me listen to the same track without knowing it is mp3 and I guessed what it was every time. The mp3's were around ~250 VBR Lame encoded. Mp3's, even encoded with Lame, still have a washed out sound. Also, loud is good but only when you have silence in your music. Being loud all the time gets tiring to your ears. Classical music is a good example of being loud yet silent too.

I got used to the MP3 sound, I also use Atrac3 by Sony, I sometimes use Compact Cassette (car mostly) and Yes, I do have a turntable and about 200 vinyl LPs. What matters to me is the music. I have very diverse tastes and I love to have music playing all the time. And as mentioned B4, it's the location and the situation that dictates the media you use. Sometimes FM radio even makes the stage.
My $0.02 CDN

Not only do many of these studnets probably have hearing damage but they also may have their judgment clouded by many others things such as never having heard the original recording, the fact that the mp3's they listen are "free" as well as crack and alcohol.

I can take a record (LP or 45) run it through my Sony DAT's A/D stage and burn it onto my Marantz CDR unit and it manages to maintain that same sonic character that I liked about the original vinyl. Within a certain degree it's what goes in is what comes out.

Well, being a musician I can tell you two things: MP3s, high or low rate, are crap. They compress all the sound to an absolute minimum. This has resulted in a new trend in music production that sees songs becoming compressed to the point of being flat, as all dynamics are being tossed off the windows by the compression algorithms. You can witness thim when you look at the soundwave of a new song. Jazz on MP3? No way! I know that I pay thousands of dollars for production and post- only to have my songs played in 10$ speakers. Where is the range or the dynamics in these speakers?
Secondly, vinyl is better, technically too. Because it is analog, it's range is significantly better than that of a CD (although SACD and especially DVD audio are almost identical). Actually the gear is the biggest drawback in vinyl, since they invariably introduce noise to original recording. Still, MP3s have no such problem cause they're crap to start with.

MP3 for me is a matter of convenience. I would not want them in my reference library, but for portable devices, it is the most universal solution. I don't like devices that require MS media management tools etc. Just plain mp3 works for me. So I can't use many of the more common portable players. Still looking for a cheap player that supports folders well. So I play the cd on the home audiophile system, but mp3 on portable players, that's where the "young people" are listening to their tunes - on the gooooooooooo....

There are definitely some audiophiles lurking on this site. Does the news make you die a little inside?

YES!!!!!! It Does!!!!!!!!

U miss something critical!!!
Exists on the market FLAC PORTABLE players? & if the answer is YES, what's their capacity? A CD encoded with flac is 300-500 MB. And U can listen just 10-25 songs. How many mp3 are in 300-500 MB? Maybe 200-500... So who is that one 2 carry out 50 CDs/DVDs? Not 2 mention that mp3 players have a maximum of 4 GB ~~~ 80 - 200 songs in FLAC or..... 2400 - 4000 songs in MP3. And U want variations, not listening the same 100 songs all over... I posted here cause I searched the internet for flac players and what I've found was china stuff. Have U ever saw SONY with flac players? No. And U won't see it soon. It should be a FLAC player of 64 GB or more... close 2 a 250GB stickk (not invented yet... ) And the cost .... So the entire so called "Experiments" is Bull S**** cause (the People like vinyl not just because of its sonic quirks, but because of its tactile and totally unportable nature) the loseless audio format is not PORTABLE. YET. They should repeat the experiment after a few or even tens of years... when loseless audio format really becames PORTABLE.... So that's how U get wrong conclusions from answers with wrong ipotheses... Who like the sound of... (not silence) MP3s? NOBODY. But there is no escape from, it... for the next 2... 5... years... And if the escape from MP3 came too late it could be worthless. And that's why people are stealing MP3's and listen. Cause the loseless audio format is at his beginings... Srry 4 long post, but U all talked in only one direction.. Is the good one? I let U decide that.

FLAC is for archival purposes. It is lossless so the compression is to the point where there is no loss in music hence lossless. MP3 is lossy which means it rips out or destroys parts of music that can never be regained. Most FLAC encoded albums range from 200-300MB in size. I could fit quite a bit onto one DVD, like a discography of a band for instance. With memory being as cheap as it is, why not support FLAC? Well, IPOD for instance won't ever because Apple already has their lossless format called ALAC that the IPOD supports. MS probably won't either because they have their lossless format also, WMA lossless. That is why FLAC hasn't taken off commercially. So if you do have a IPOD, just convert your music to ALAC. Most IPOD's have over 100GB of storage. You can put quite of bit of lossless music on them.

If you are at all interested in blind ABX testing, just install Foobar and the ABX component. (Not a big learning curve.)
I was, and still am a proponent of lossless (mostly Flac) formats but have been fooled by high VBR mp3. I think there is a "soundstage" aspect that is almost completely missing in MP3 encoded audio when played on decent equipment.

I will steal your comment for my bulletin board, make me laugh my ass off, you're right of course lol

First of: ipod sucks, i cannot understand why so many people like the shitty sound it has, it's compression method to avoid clipping is unbearable, it's noisy and even it seems that worse the folding frecuency effect that mp3 have when encoded in low bitrate, it doesnt support flac, everything is propietary, in short, it may be nice, but sounds like crap and doesnt support FLAC.
I think that FLAC is the best codec for audio, however if a MP3 track was properly encoded (256K or more) and the source wasnt too dinamycally compressed, it could be acceptable for some kind of music, obviously not for classical of jazz, just listen to a violin encoded in MP3 and you get the idea too bad that there are not FLAC players outthere, I will love to have one.

I agree. Ipod sound quality is very poor but this is not down to the formats it uses. This is down to it's crappy firmware and abysmal EQ controls. Iriver sounds far better, more bass and more treble. If you have an older ipod, chances are you can improve the sound quality by downloading Rockbox, an alternative firmware with more EQ control. Plus, it supports .Ogg and .Flac. as well as all the iPod formats such as AAC and ALAC.

Back to the original post:

No.

Being an "audiophile" has a connotation to it and a definition of sorts but it is only subjective perspective. If the planet moves to like an MP3 sound more, then yes, technically it looks pretty gross based on what we perceive as [many types of] much better formats. *But* what if....
Evolutionally speaking, this is simply how things happened. A trend in technology is for "things to become smaller and smaller" right? Well thus is the case here.

Nothing could ever replace the feeling of having to lug *reeeallly* heavy milk crates full of vinyl up (then down!) three stories of narrow, rickety old steps

Actually this whole blog seems a bit like a bunch of bozos.
Actually if we are getting "evolutionary" actually just upgrading,
Then....
Because flash is getting so cheap, we can now have more than enough full 44.1k wav files on our portable devices, and no mp3 needed. So just put wav files in you portable player instead of the weaker mp3 files. Yes, and we all can be happier.
Actually if there was a good delivery system, music producers can now deliver better than cd quality on some other larger capacity media. What if I CAN GET YOUR NEW ALBUM IN 96K FORMAT, TO BETTER APPRECIATE YOUR WORK, MR MUSICIAN? Maybe even give it to me in multi-track so I can make my own custom mixes - wow, what fun, or what headaces for producers.

@nixeco, just wondering.... why would you want to use a big "raw" wav file on your flash player? while there are already lossless compressors, that offer tag support, album covers, lyrics and above all, a smaller file size with no important impact on battery life or precessing? and these already support up to 32float/24 bit 192KHz+5.1 channels!? why do you still need to liaten to the raw file while you have the exact data with more features supported under better open standards (in the case of FLAC)?

oh, and adding to that not all of the media players out there support good EQ performance with WAVEforms... while all these other lossless formats are much better supported?http://www.cdfreaks.com/jochem/..//i...s/5/agreed.gif

hq84 - it sounds like your on the right track. My point was that if you ARE concerned about sound quality, then the media sizes are there to support it. So MP3 is not an audiophile format, but not everybody cares. For those who do - you have some choices.
Thanks for the tip.
What players support FLAC with good folder support, and not too expensive?

@nixeco, i got what you mean
It's really saddening that even at high bitrates (320 kbps CBR), Mp3 fails at being transparent at times, and that's what i recall from Fraunhaufer encoded MP3s (of course, it wasn't the latest version, they've improved much since then), what i really hated was the clipping of high frequencis rather than the compression of the data itself... which was quite audible...

that's where MPC/MP+ avails, it had a quite flexible frequency range, so even at lower bitrates ~180 kbps, it managed to jump and cover the audible high frequency rather than clipping the whole range blindly, maintaing much lower bitrate & a much higher quality, OGG Vorbis was not as flexible though, but it has it's own strengths, though it's failing lately compared to a much better quality of MP4/AAC encoding & improved MP3 (FhG & LAME) compression methods...

so, they're all getting closer to transparency, but then, you have to remember that the actual cheap hardware we're using for sound output and the surrounding noisy environment and above all, the extremely damaged sound system we're housing in our own skulls, all of these, result in us missing soooo much between the good parts of the lossless, and the damaged-yet-unnoticed parts in what we believe to be "Transparent" lossy waves...

and well... one more reason to dump MP3...
TAGGING....

with ID3V1, V2.3 & 2.4, Lyrics and APEV2 and all the incompatibillities... well, i would rather stick to a unified standard which is the APEv2, used by most of the other formats, Ogg, FLAC, APE and IIRC WavPack and MPC support APEv2 as well...

well... enough said... I have to go eat

Superior to FLAC!! Free Lossless Audio Codec, get it LOSSLESS! Your analog tapes do NOT sound better than FLAC

view a spectral analysis of any MP3. You will see a definite loss of data from 16khz upward. Missing data is just that, missing-gone forever. Course the crap music these kids listen too, the less, the better