Ya, that’s a fact, no question.

I’m not convinced, however, that casual music listeners care all that much.

I’ve done some informal surveys, and most of the non-technical people I test on the issue can’t tell the difference between 128K and 192K MP3s.

At least, not until I show them what to listen for. But that’s kinda the point. I think music appreciation is just like art or literature appreciation: You’ll get more from it when you understand the nuances, but you can still enjoy it just fine if you’re ignorant to those subtleties.

I’m fairly sure that iPod owners who are fine with the stock ear buds are also fine with 128K encoding, because they’re not listening to the quality of the music anyway; they’re listening to the lyrics and melody.

We hated CDs when they came out because the compression sucked. It got better and modern releases are great, for the most part. Then MP3s came on the scene and it was all about portability and “passable” audio quality. Granted, portability is awesome, and I used to buy a cassette now and then in the 70s and 80s (especially when Joshua Tree is such a great album to ski to). But as digital libraries become the norm, I sure hope the defaults move up closer to uncompressed. And I hope little digital amplifiers and earphones keep improving. It used to be that even amateurs dreamed of Klipschorns and a nice tube amp. Maybe they’ll tune in again to the nuances that make great music great.

I don’t have figures to back this up, but I’d wager that the only music making any real money today is the most popular of the pop music, and I’d guess in turn it’s the music most affected by the engineering practices the WSJ decries. In other words, people have a choice in what they purchase – they can sample before buying it – and they still go ahead and spend money on “ruined” pop music.

What really hurting is music with crappy audio, are the commercial “oldies” CD’s.

I’m sick and tired of audio squelch! Some stupid engineer who’s mastering a CD thinks there’s too much noise in the original recording and then ends up squelching out all the lower volume passages.

It happens all too much. At least with iTunes, I can sample the tracks before buying something that ultimately would make a better frisbee.

Ya, the WSJ completely overlooked that! Heh, I probably could have summed up my whole point with that one sentence.

> In the selection of media today’s young people have to choose from, the
> WSJ falls at the “only old people read that” end of the spectrum. It doesn’t
> exactly have any indie cred.

Though, like I mentioned, BoingBoing and Coolfer both linked to the article, at least implying that it might have some credibility.

Not to mention the scores of “old” indie artists. Maybe not so much in the rock/pop end of the business, but think of all the jazz, blues, and classical musicians who’ve reached new listeners via mp3s and iPods.

> Apparently audio engineering is another field they should avoid writing about.

Hear, hear!

This just seems like another “iPod scare” article to me. They seem to publish one every couple of weeks – an editor tells a writer, “Write me something scary about iPods,” and we get things like crime waves targeting white earbuds, iPods making children lose their hearing, or this nonsense.

I doubt it will hurt indie artists, though. In the selection of media today’s young people have to choose from, the WSJ falls at the “only old people read that” end of the spectrum. It doesn’t exactly have any indie cred.

I create and manage web sites for a living, and I’m always amazed at how utterly wrong mainstream publications like WSJ and CNN can be when they start talking about the internet. Apparently audio engineering is another field they should avoid writing about.