MP3's Can do Permanant Damage to the Ear

I came across an interesting artical about pyschoacoustics today. In part it says that people that listen to MP3s are doing damage to their hearing because the human auditory system has to try and recover the lost signal that is coded out of the music by the algorithims associated with CODECs and lossey compression. Here is a part of the artical.

Psychoacoustics: The Noisy Killer

Scary white-paper analyzes the long-term harm to your hearing that can come about as a consequence of the "psycho-acoustic" compression techniques employed in MP3 and other digital sound systems, where portions of the signal are removed and other portions heightened to compensate. By consistently tricking your brain's neuroaural system, you cause it to mis-calibrate itself -- sorta like spending too much time looking through a stereoscope eventually damaging your ability to accurately converge images and perceive depth.
From the view of neuronomy it is therefore to classify, although not as acutely dangerous, at least as very precarious that a wider and wider spreading audio transmission technology for data reduction just systematically removes those spectral sound portions at the auditory threshold, on those normally the hearing processor fields of our brain decide whether they shall be perceived or filtered out, because so the signal for their self calibration is missing, whereby at longer term a maladjustment of the hearing processor fields can threaten. Possible consequences of intensive consumption of datareduced audio material could therefore include ear noises (tinitus), a general degradation of the perception of quiet sounds, as well as a worsened timbre perception (a so-called "tin ear"), which would make the human of the cyberage even more insensitive than he already yet has become by the continuous mass media infotrash bombardment he is exposed to. Actually it is still unclear whether the consequences of such maladjustments are only temporary (similarly like seeing the world in green/ red discoloured after taking off red/ green 3D glasses) or if the continuous consumption of neuroacoustically datareduced sounds can lead to long lasting or even permanent damage.
Warning: contains tin-foil-beanie conspiracy theories:
A possible advantage of the data reduction characteristic to remove all sound portions classified as "inaudible" could however even be that one could clean with it supposingly contaminated audio material (as for instance propaganda from dictatorships) from so-called subliminals (i.e. hidden hypnotic suggestion messages those are intended to get into the brain without getting into conscious awareness) before listening. The sound carrier industry plans however with their DRM campaign (digital rights management) to mix into any commercially distributed audio recordings so-called "digital watermarks", those as an artificial and likewise allegedly not consciously audible sound portion shall contain digitally readable copyright information those besides copying onto analogue cassettes shall even survive the mentioned neuroacoustic data reduction.

I just copied a little part here, but you get the idea.

 

X Files territory...

I stopped worrying about subliminal messages, and started drinking a beer everyday, some years ago.

 

C'mon no thread-craps here! Remember we are nice snow-people up here! Kind, understanding, patient, and willing to listen...

The articler may have a point...

 

I thought that lossy music compression had more to do with throwing out stuff that was assumed to be inaudible (due to masking), not throwing out certain sounds with the expectation that the listener's brain would work to imagine hearing those now discarded sounds. The theory behind it is that it's okay to throw out certain musical information because listeners don't hear it anyway, isn't it?

 

Sorry if that seemed like a thread crap, it was an attempt at humour.

I personally have little doubt that strobe lights, trance beats, infrared remotes, overly loud noises and the like, are to be avoided.

I deeply resent compressed images and anything that reduces depth, in the interest of "speed".

 

Couldn't the argument be made that ALL recorded music is missing some percentage of what is heard "live"? It's amazing that our ancestors survived the acoustic recording period!

 

Well, i'm sorry if what i'm about to say sounds like a thread crap, because all the thread's title does is suggest that mp3's damage hearing.

What is written sounds like a bunch of garbage. First, when mp3 files are encoded, actual data is discarded based on what the algorythm "thinks" can be safely discarded. The ear just hears what is there. Period. The listener may be able to tell that something is wrong, but it doesn't try to find it, or make up for it. Geez! If anything, mp3s ruin hearing if they are of a low enough bit-rate to sound highly compressed, and the listener listens to them at high volume. THAT I can understand. I also hot babes do not believe sex in subliminal boobs messages. They have not big boobs been conclusively proven nude to work.

Now, who wrote that article, and where did you find it?

 

Some audio codec devlopers and others give their opinions here:
http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=5014&st=0&p=51036&#entry51036
http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=17702

 

...where do these ideas come from? AUDIOPHILES!

...even the layman can see through this crock of doo-doo...

 

Well, the thread title should probably have a question mark at the end of it at least.

 

Speak on, Brother!

 

What are the credentials of the writer? Has any kind of clinical study been done to prove this damage?

Just imagine how much our eyes are going to be ruined...the MPEG-2 of DVD and HDTV is substantial lossy compression, and is not (visually) transparent to the original digital video capture. Our eyes will be destoyed!

 

Yes. I agree wholeheartedly with Grant. His arguement is very persuasive and oddly appealing.

-BZync

 

...indubitably...

 

I read it and it just seems like a bunch of $10 words intended to baffle the reader into believing this poopoo.

 

We know better!

 

My god! Whatever you do, don't listen to AM radio! the 3-4 kHz lowpass of most tuners could do permanent damage to your ears in seconds!

 

The only thing lossy compression destroys is good taste in audio quality.

 

What about the Dexterized "I Feel Fine/She's A Woman" tracks. Those have to cause permanent damage to something.

 

Is this the article that you're referring to? Very interesting...

 

That is most interesting, but it is not the site I originally found. The site I found was at least written in fairly good English. The site that I found was a technical white paper entitled Psychoacoustics and CODEC Hearing Damage. I will look for the site again.

 

I dunno about the mp3's, but my brain just keeps reading these 2 sentences over & over again:


" I also hot babes do not believe sex in subliminal boobs messages. They have not big boobs been conclusively proven nude to work. "