Distortions added by MP3 as shown by legendary recording engineer George Massenburg

I don't use mp3s because I find them completely unnecessary given today's storage realities; it's cheap and copious. My mobile devices alone check in at 112GB. I also prefer, of course, the greatest listening experience possible. Imperfections exist in mp3s whether one can isolate them or not. Why bother?

 

Because I like to have more albums on a HD space that I'm carrying around than lossless allows

Because most people can't hear a difference

 

Twas ever thus

Dear Mr. Hoffman,

Do you remember the first time you heard Purple Haze? That was one raw, distorted sound, aggressively nasty. And that sound led to a tsunami of distorted guitar sounds. I think kids like to emulate strange new sounds and they pick up on a lot of low-bit computer sounds like "speak and spell" along with the sounds they're bathed in while playing computer games. I use the I-Pod a lot, it's not hard to hear encoding artifacts. I can hear emulations of MP-3 artifacts in recent Music, like The Heavy. But I think of the distortions of a worn record and then I think of the distortions of Jimi Hendrix and I see the same process happening with earlier technologies.

 

If something I want to hear isn't already loaded on my ipod/iphone I will spend all of perhaps two minutes making room for it. I don't need 3000 albums available while jogging. Do you?

 

I don't think that is it. I think the argument is that AM radio sounded worse than MP3s, but people put up with it out of convenience.

I do not know if is is possible to determine whether or not AM radio was as much of a primary audio medium as MP3s are now.

 

It's sufficiently analogous. I had the little earphone in my ear, catching Beatles songs on my transistor radio, hoping the teacher doesn't notice, all this in fourth grade.

And standard earbuds for I-Pods sound real bad.

 

No, it isn't. This is a pet peeve of mine, but "lossy" should imply something specific, and if it's taken to define "anything that isn't a completely perfect reproduction," then it loses all meaning. You could start calling 1 gigapixel snapshots saved as bitmaps "lossy" because they don't properly inhere all of the details of the real world.

Lossy=compression format that discards data in the aim of conserving space. Period. By this definition, 11kHz, 8-bit PCM audio is not "lossy," because it holds exactly what it says it holds. And that's the way it should be.

 

But don't you just wish that you could make half of the speed I do ?

But weren't you aware of the potential hazards of working with products from ACME?

 

The point is not whether I "need" them all, the point is that I have access to any album in my collection at any point I desire it while I am jogging.

 

I hardly ever listen to mp3, once in a while on my iPad while travelling.

When I first heard mp3 over a decent stereo system, I was surpirsed how good it sounded vs my expectations. However, you can clearly tell the difference vs a more high rez format, be it CD or high rez downloads. Nothing wrong with listening to it on the road but I would never listen to it at home.

 

okay it is not lossy by the IT dictionary - BUT where is the data that is truncated - lost no? or do you believe you can always fully re-construct the sampled source?

 

Why would you do that and what exactly is it supposed to prove? Here's a nice analogy posted recently at hydrogenaudio.org:

technical discussion on why this method is complete nonsense in regards to mp3 available here:

http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=82292

 

Here we go again! Yes you can always fully re-construct the sampled source as long as it doesn't contain frequencies higher than half the sampling rate. Sampling is not truncating.

 

I can't eeeeer you!

My Uncle Charlie—Charles G. Arlington, KFWB News, Los Angeles!!!*—had these heavy-weight portable reel-to-reel recorders and when I visited him for the summer, he let me play with them and yes, I'd record the audio from TV shows with the ghastly sounding mike that came with the recorder. Now those were distortions!

The kids these days . . .

*That's what he sounded like, a cross between News on the March and Kent Brockman.

 

Can you fully reconstruct the difference between a master tape and an LP? I don't understand where you're going with this.

 

bits are though..

 

Has anyone ever done a demonstration of how MP3s sound relative to a lossless medium while listening on earbuds or while in a car driving in traffic?

 

My only point with the tired analogy is that I grew up listening to a poor quality medium, and eventually became interested in sound quality. Likewise, some kids today will eventually seek better sounding mediums than mp3.

 

Nope, Uncle Charlie and Aunt Liz lived across the street from Bob Hope at the time.

Now let me see how I can tie this in to our discussion of MP3s and the decline of western civilization.

 

exactly - every formats adds or gives up something - question is how much is it to you? All I said was MP3 is efficient and gives choices of quality/cost ratio

 

Some of the audio information in a recording starts its life as M and S (depending on the mike technique) and gets converted to stereo (left=M+S right =M-S). So if the information in the S channel is mangled, then when it's added to the M, all you're getting is a composite that hopefully will have enough M to mask the mangling of the S. Since the S contains the phase information that creates the stereo soundfield, what might sound fine on a set of earphones or low-budget playback system might sound less focused and clear on better quality playback equipment.

 

+1

I strictly rip everything at 320kbps. The older mp3's I have from 10 years ago are atrocious - ripped at 96 or 128.

 

I don't think this is a good analogy. First of all AM radio never had unnatural artifacts which are present on MP3's. Granted there was a lot of compression but IMO that was more of a help than a hindrance. Without AM compression we would have never heard the lower level detail that came across on AM radio.

Secondly people generally didn't record AM radio and use those recordings as thier main listening choice. They went out and bought the records, which of course almost always sounded far better than AM or MP3's.

Just yesterday I was mentioning to my cousin how AM radio actually could accentuate the lower level details of a recording. I was listing to 'Alley Cat' which has tape echo on the piano. It can clearly be heard for what it is on the recording and the tape echo is way down in the mix. On AM, the tape echo was so much more prominent that when I played the song on the piano I played the tape echo parts as triplets. I had no idea it was tape echo, and not triplets, until many many years after the fact.

Oh, as for recording TV audio, I didn't use a microphone to do this. I had a portable TV which had a headphone jack. I also used to take feeds from TV's and radios by tacking a cable on the volume controls of the devices I wanted to record. I made quite a few reel to reel recordings this way and they were far better than using the speaker/mic interface.