Young people prefer the sound of MP3s to uncompressed music

I, a creature of a different age, suffer a similar phenomenon. I have cherished old mix tapes that I prefer the sound of. I've tried recreating those tapes with playlists of perfectly ripped flac from cd's and they just don't have the same life.

I've gone so far as to record the tapes straight into flac and listen to those on my ipod instead.

I know every warble, wow, and flutter from those old tapes, I even have a rough chronology in my mind of when the tapes developed their defects. The too hot car stereo in my friends camero that summer day... that lousy walkman that tried to eat it.

I can play the modern digital copies in the right order till the cows come home and be unmoved but even a whisper of the noise between tracks on one of those old tapes and its '94 again and I'm back on the beach at sunset with that girl in my arms...

Ridiculous, kids these days actually like the sound of the artifacts introduced by the reproduction technology?

Everyone knows the best way to hear music is through the soft clipping of a tube amplifier.

It might well be that many people complaining about "soulless, thin MP3s" would not be able to tell a 160kbps VBR MP3 from the original in a controlled experiment. Low-quality headphones and speakers are obviously a different matter, but if you're telling somebody that compression makes their music soulless and thin, you're an audio snob without any facts.

"To my surprise, in the rock examples the MP3 at 128 was preferred. I repeated the experiment over 6 years and found the preference for MP3 - particularly in music with high energy (cymbal crashes, brass hits, etc) rising over time."

Encoding to MP3 @ 128Kbs will apply a low pass filter (so that more bits can be used to encode the lower frequencies) and high freqeuncy sounds can sound smeared. I would guess one or both of these factors could be responsible for reducing harsh sounding treble.

I'm guessing of course but if right, I wouldn't say the MP3 was better. Merely, it masks a horrible sound to begin with.

I used to think, MP3s sounds almost the same as uncompressed music (CDs), but, was until I got a fairly big audio system (in my car) that I realize that my MP3s sucked big time. But in ipods and other small devices MP3s are fine.

I wonder in what measure modern production techniques (for instance, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_range_compression ) influences the choice of the listener.

I think what the study shows is that listening to music goes beyond the encoding technique, like everything, it has the quality of contemporaneity; listening to music is made up of the music and the listening process, which includes the medium, vinyl, cassettes, cd, mp3 etc. We all have our way of remembering music, be it on 8 track, cassettes, or ipod. The current twenty somethings will reminisce about the old days, how their iPods sounded and how they would split their ear buds with their sweetheart of the day, just like the first guy and his Camero and sunsets with Susie :)

Its the same as photography, film, like cassettes, vinyl etc is no better than digital, its just different. The medium is an important part of any art form, possibly with the exception of literature. For the visual and music arts I have seen this phenomenon often but I am not sure if it applies much to books. The medium is largely the same I suppose - we've moved on from writing on pigskin, but for the past few hundred years and book today is much the same as a book from anytime, only the content has changed. The arts move, and are moved by technology at different paces. Possibly the Kindle will change things, but it hasn't had enough time to know yet.

I got an amplifier with a TOSlink (SPDIF optical) connection, and got a cable from the soundcard to the amp. This means there was no analogue distortion or amplification in the signal chain - it just went right from the soundcard to the speakers (which are studio monitors in my case).

You can hear the difference between MP3 and CD/FLAC sources quite easily, so I've come to like CD/FLAC.

I started off listening to vinyl at about 12, CD/tape until 1998, then Napster in 2000. Now I buy CDs and rip to FLAC, if possible, and hardly listen to MP3s.

By the way, albums like Madonna's Confessions on a Dance Floor sound really bad on MP3, because it's been mixed to a very full sound and compresses poorly. I don't know if that's the producer (Stuart Price) or the mastering people, but a bootleg of this album made from MP3, I ordered by mistake, was really really bad sounding.

Everyone knows the best way to hear music is live, un-miked, un-amped, with analog instruments. That's one of the reasons I've gone into opera: http://gatewayclassical.org/

The idea is interesting, but unfortunately the article doesn't have too many details. A spectrogram or something similar would have been nice.

it's fascinating how this phenomenon works. I grew up listening to cassettes I had made from recording records. These recordings had flaws introduced by the cassette mechanism, drop outs, warbles, etc. I was used to it and didn't think about it. When I'd hear the same song from a CD it sounded weird. I can't say I prefer cassettes now, I never listen to them, they're all in a box now, and many have been thrown out. Records still sound as good as ever, many are much nicer sounding than the CDs that came out later on. I wonder if digital radio will eventually replace analog broadcasts, as has happened with TV. That would be a shame as all the old radios would suddenly become door stops.