Techdirt gets it wrong about mp3 music quality
From a recent Techdirt article titled Blaming MP3s And iPods For Ruining Music:
“to put the whole thing in perspective: songs compressed to mp3 level certainly do lose some quality at the margin, but there’s only a small group of audiophiles who really care or will notice on a regular basis”
The reason I even mention this article is that this was a subject of a recent post on this blog. Techdirt doesn’t get the issue, since the issue isn’t about the mp3 format, it is about the dynamic range of the music (aka audio compression, not to be confused with data compression that mp3s are known for).
I own the Dire Straits CD, Brothers in Arms, and have ripped it to my PC for listening while easily retaining the dynamic range of the song in the new mp3 format. The problem isn’t the format, it is the engineers that are compressing the audio to reduce the dynamic highs and lows of the released CD or mp3. Sure, you can distort the original music by over compressing the mp3 data file, but that isn’t generally the concern that audio engineers are raising.
Perhaps to use a better analogy: if Techdirt decided to increase the dynamic range of their writing rather than compress it to a limited fact-finding mission to achieve a 5-7 blog post day, the overall quality of the writing would probably increase. *
So, thankfully there are inexpensive tools to allow artists to publish music that they otherwise wouldn’t be able to afford. In fact, this makes me hopeful that independent artists will release more music with dynamic range since they can select the engineers they wish to use, rather than those a label thinks can make them sound “the loudest” on a CD or mp3 release.
* Note: reducing or increasing the quantity of posts per day in no way reflects the ability for a tech news site to get it right. This is for illustration purposes only. Typically, Techdirt demonstrates appropriate knowledge, so I was amazed with the poor quality of this article and decided to illustrate absurdity by being absurd.
Technorati Tags: audio compression, techdirt, mp3, music quality
James @ September 13, 2007