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Updated 110 Days ago
Why Today's Music Sounds Like Crap
Hey iPod owners and Zune owner, did you know the portability of your music comes at more than a monetary cost? Sure it’s convenient keeping all of your Richard Marx tunes in a device smaller than your pocket, but there’s gotta be some benefit to occasionally ditching the MP3s and dusting off those CD jewel cases every once in a while, right? Let’s find out …and let’s enlist the help of St. Louis-based audio guru Joe Shambro (JS). This guy not only has a rock resume that includes clients like Sting and Maroon 5, but, as a voting member of the Recording Academy, he helps to decide who takes home a Grammy come awards time. In other words, when it comes to muzak, he knows his stuff.
"What's that? Why yes, this IS the rare import version of Chumbawumba's Tubthumping...thanks for asking!"
ToastedRav: Let’s compare. When playing through the same system, MP3 or CD, whatcha like?
JS: All things equal, a CD will sound better than an MP3 recording to someone with normal range of hearing, and in the case of those with trained ears, it's no contest. MP3 compression works by reducing and eliminating frequency ranges in a song. While it makes for a smaller, more portable file, it's eliminating a lot (up to 90%) of the detail you'd normally hear. MP3 compression was originally conceived with the thought that by focusing on the frequency range of vocals, listeners would be willing to trade off the lower quality for portability.
ToastedRav: So are we destined for a future of low-quality sound if we demand the portability and convenience of MP3s?
JS: I don't think we're doomed to bad-quality portable music. Most players are capable of playing uncompressed or lightly-compressed formats which bring higher sound quality, but most of those formats are harder to find, and take a long time to download to the average user. Consumers will always move towards whatever solution gets the job done in the easiest way possible, and currently, MP3 is the easiest way for most people to download music -- and most don't care about the loss of quality.
"So, not only are the headpnones cool, but
you can barely tell I'm wearing them!"
ToastedRav: Will portability and sound quality ever marry in some type of blessed audio union?
JS: The resources are there for those who prefer to carry their music in higher quality. Ever since MP3's first hit the scene in the late 90's, the quality of MP3 compression has gotten much better.
It's getting more convenient to share larger files, and as that happens, more people will have access to better quality music. Another way to ensure good quality music is to rip your own CD
collection to lossless compression, iTunes being one of the most popular music softwares that supports lossless compression. True, it takes more hard disk space and more time, but it's worth it when you compare the sound quality between the two.
For more information about Joe Shambro, visit his site, or read his articles on About.com
About The Author:
Chris Files is a video producer and writer for ToastedRav.com as well as a world-champion moose caller*Story idea? Drop a line to chris@toastedrav.com
*1998 Winter Olympic Games - Nagano, Japan
© Copyright 2008 ToastedRav.com and Bonneville International
An Equal Opportunity Employer all rights reserved
Of course, Digital Rights Management will also have to be defeated to allow for people to truly enjoy the music they pay for at their convenience
Signed,
The Lone Zune Owner in St. Louis
What is reCAPTCHA?
reCAPTCHA is a free CAPTCHA service that helps to digitize books.A CAPTCHA is a program that can tell whether its user is a human or a computer. You've probably seen them Ñ colorful images with distorted text at the bottom of Web registration forms. CAPTCHAs are used by many websites to prevent abuse from "bots," or automated programs usually written to generate spam. No computer program can read distorted text as well as humans can, so bots cannot navigate sites protected by CAPTCHAs.
About 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans around the world every day. In each case, roughly ten seconds of human time are being spent. Individually, that's not a lot of time, but in aggregate these little puzzles consume more than 150,000 hours of work each day. What if we could make positive use of this human effort? reCAPTCHA does exactly that by channeling the effort spent solving CAPTCHAs online into "reading" books.
To archive human knowledge and to make information more accessible to the world, multiple projects are currently digitizing physical books that were written before the computer age. The book pages are being photographically scanned, and then transformed into text using "Optical Character Recognition" (OCR). The transformation into text is useful because scanning a book produces images, which are difficult to store on small devices, expensive to download, and cannot be searched. The problem is that OCR is not perfect.
reCAPTCHA improves the process of digitizing books by sending words that cannot be read by computers to the Web in the form of CAPTCHAs for humans to decipher. More specifically, each word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is placed on an image and used as a CAPTCHA. This is possible because most OCR programs alert you when a word cannot be read correctly.
But if a computer can't read such a CAPTCHA, how does the system know the correct answer to the puzzle? Here's how: Each new word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is given to a user in conjunction with another word for which the answer is already known. The user is then asked to read both words. If they solve the one for which the answer is known, the system assumes their answer is correct for the new one. The system then gives the new image to a number of other people to determine, with higher confidence, whether the original answer was correct.
Currently, we are helping to digitize books from the Internet Archive and old editions of the New York Times.