Google brought this to me...

July 29, 6:27 PM


By Derek Wood


Examiner.com
　
It would be naive not to acknowledge that MP3s are, at this point, a fact of life. They have taken over the music world and it won't be long before CDs will go the way of the tape, the 8-track and the record. It's something that people of the music world need to accept. And they're certainly trying. iTunes has taken things to the next level, all but ensuring the destruction of CDs.


The issue lies here: the quality of the MP3s being distributed among the world are lacking. Your ipod, while handy to carry around with you, does not deliver what it should. For the amount of money you invest in your music, you should demand more. That is why the CD existed in the first place. Instead of progressing to the SA-CD (which was a miserably failed experiment you can read about here) we seem to be regressing. The record to the tape was evolution in the form of removing crackle. From the tape to the CD was a monumentous jump that not only improved sound quality, but increased the life of your recordings. So the next logical step would be to improve upon the CD. Unfortunately, that isn't happening. Thanks to the digital age, with MySpace, iTunes, Napster and all the rest, people have come to accept, and expect, lower quality. Perhaps it doesn't bother them. But it should.

Record companies spend millions of dollars on producers, expensive studios, session musicians, mixing, mastering, etc. to bring the public the cleanest most overproduced sound they can. What the MP3 manages to do is take that masterpiece and squash it down into something that resembles a home recording.

Ok, so maybe that's an exaggeration. But the amount of frequency response you lose in the conversion from the original wav file to an MP3 is immense. Pop a CD (if you own one) into your CD Player (if you own one) and listen to your favorite song. Now play that same song in iTunes. If you don't hear a difference, you need to buy new ears. While iTunes is a drastic improvement over the streaming quality of MySpace, it is not doing your 99 cents justice. Would it be too much to ask to receive a 256k MP3 over the 128k they deliver now? No. It wouldn't. And you should write in and request that they make a switch. It's your money.

Obviously the folks at Apple are thinking about travel size and making sure you can fit all of your songs on your iPod. But even at 256k, your files will be a fraction of the size of a wav file and you'll have such a better listening experience. 128 is just unacceptable. It has come leaps and bounds since the MP3 was invented, but it should not be the standard for the digital age.
Beyond just getting more bang for your buck, think about the jobs that will be lost if poor quality is continually accepted in your music. No label is going to pay for high quality productions anymore if the public doesn't care about high quality sound. This means all those studios where your friends are interning will go out of business. All the engineers will be out of a job. If there's no need for high quality recordings, the labels will just sit back and say "here's an mbox, do what you can and we'll release it". You don't need an engineer for a home recording.


It's not that iTunes, or the move to MP3 format is bad. It just needs to be better. And it starts with you caring about what you're listening to.






Author: Derek Wood



Go to Derek's Home Page
Hollywood Local Music Examiner

　
Derek Wood is an Examiner from Los Angeles. You can see Derek's articles on Derek's Home Page.