Music is not dead… At least to me

Today I read an interesting article (and Gizmodo’s take on it) detailing an interesting audio study.  Apparently, a music professor at Stanford conducted a study with the aim of determining students’ tastes in music compression methods.  Long story short, the students preferred the compression of MP3s (particularly rock at 128 kbps) to to higher quality codecs or uncompressed songs.  Gizmodo humorously jabs that young people have “utterly destroyed music.”

Maybe it’s a perfect storm of digital audio compression, the loudness war, and the portable music set of generations?  Think about it.  In under a century’s time (don’t check the dates on this, I’m just thinking mainstream inventions, widespread acceptance, etc.), we’ve gone from music being exclusively live or performed, to being readily and cheaply available, at whatever volume we like at whatever quantity we like.  That boils down to badly mastered, badly compressed music being piped into tinnitus wracked ears on crappy iPod earbuds.  For hours a day.  I guess it’s better than radio quality.

As a race, maybe we’ve become desensitized to music, leaving us wanting it louder, quicker, more convenient… but not caring about the quality?

I hate to think that that’s true.

CMOY Headphone amp, Grado SR-80s, iAudio X5

My setup doesn’t look the prettiest, nor is it the most high end, but I can hear flautists inhale, and I can tell that the clipping on certain NIN tracks is on purpose.  I end up listening to Happy Hardcore and Industrial on it most of the time, ironically.

I know a few audiophiles of my generation that indulge in noise-canceling headphones (particularly the Audio-Technica variety), high quality surround sound systems, FLAC encoded albums, mild flirtations with vinyl (I have a couple of my favorite trance tracks), not to mention my whole involvement with non-mainstream MP3 players.  I remember a certain back and forth I had with Klipsch over their 4.1 Promedia speaker set, the subsequent upgrading of my pre-amp, and my eventual surrender to getting a set of Logitech Z-540s.

Are we special or elitist?  I wouldn’t say so, wanting good quality music is something that’s just a higher priority to us.  Or maybe the rest of my friends are just as finnicky as I am about good sound. What I do know is that we clearly aren’t the majority (at least according to the Stanford study), and this is disheartening.  I haven’t seen an MP3 player as suited to my needs since the Rio Karma as my current iAudio X5, and that’s almost 3 years old now (two new batteries later…  Thanks for soldering that, Chris!).  Maybe that’s because the public just doesn’t care about audiophile sound, and the audiophiles will find their own ways to get by.  Oh well.

At least I can tell the difference between a 128 kbps, 256kbps, and uncompressed file…  Most of the time.