MP3 technology, are we settling?



The technology of MP3's have been on my mind lately... the more I hear about their overall poor quality, I wonder if we're getting used to mediocrity when we could easily be experiencing much better quality music if we just put a little effort into it (similar to our food consumption).

2 Articles recently breezed through my RSS reader recently talking about this and I thought I'd share:

Five ways to make digital music sing

Neil Young says the tech industry doesn't care as much about music quality as it should.

Perhaps that's because the average iPod-toting iTunes customer doesn't give a second thought to whether the digital file of the latest single they just bought is uncompressed or lossless.

Young told a bunch of tech luminaries gathered for an industry conference as much on Wednesday: "People's understanding has been skewed by MP3s and convenience. It's important to get music out there...but not at the expense of quality."

He's not the only one who feels that way. Grammy-award-winning producer T-Bone Burnett (who says audio nowadays is so degraded it's akin to viewing "a Xerox of a Polaroid of a photograph of a painting") is spearheading CODE, a new high-definition audio format distributed on a DVD.

(keep reading...)

Wrong! 5 Reasons Lossless Formats Will Not Destroy MP3

Rumors of the imminent demise of the MP3 format are exaggerated, and I for one won't stand for it. A recent DVice article claims that the compressed MP3 is going the way of the Dodo bird because everybody's going to switch to lossless formats, which retain every audio bit on the CDs from which they were ripped.

According to the article, lossless codecs will "destroy" the MP3 format because hard drive and media capacities are on the rise, Blu-Ray movie soundtracks are encoded losslessly, iPod docks are showing up in high-end home stereos and Apple could flick a switch and have iTunes start encoding into Apple Lossless by default. Balderdash, I say!

(keep reading... )

Posted: Tue - August 12, 2008 at 07:48 AM           |

©