People are just beginning, it seems, to wake up to the fact that most digital music today doesn’t sound as good as it could. That’s because the most popular compression formats — including both the lingua franca MP3 standard and the standard Apple uses for its ITunes store — are “lossy”: To make the file size smaller, they trade off some loss of information (and therefore sound quality).
This latest round in the discussion seems to have kicked off with a Randall Stross column in the Sunday New York Times, but it dates back at least as far as Andrew Leonard’s early, groundbreaking coverage of the MP3 phenomenon in Salon. Stross points out that Apple’s choice of a good but still “lossy” compression standard for its music store means that — surprise! — you’re really not getting CD quality audio when you pay for your $9.99 album.
Continuing the thread, Tim Bray writes: “I used to think that if you were listening to music on headphones on a bus or train or plane or in a crowd, the MP3 lossage really didn’t matter much. But recently I’ve been listening to the Shure 3C phones, and it’s obvious that we really shouldn’t be ignoring these compression issues; in particular since lossless compression is available right here, right now.”
Well, yes. We have the technology! The problem here is not technical, it’s political, legal, financial.
The odd thing to me is that Stross’s column — which appeared in the Business section, after all — failed to mention the obvious: that the record labels are selling lossy versions of songs online because they still distrust the new medium, even when it is being used legally and when people are paying for their product. They’re more interested in propping up their sagging CD business than in quickly exploiting a new marketplace. So after years of dithering they figure, OK, we’ll sell our wares on the Net — but let’s only provide crippled versions. The crippling applies not only to Apple’s DRM schemes (lord knows whether you’ll still have access to that music, 10 years and three computers from now) but to the 128 kbps bit rate of the songs you buy. It was one thing to accept that tradeoff in 1998 when MP3s were underground, hard disks were smaller and most of the world was on dialup connections. Today, it makes no sense.
I don’t doubt that the DRM and bit-rate compromises were part of the horsetrading Steve Jobs had to engage in to get the record labels in the door in the first place. But it doesn’t make me want to sink my cash into purchases on iTunes. (At EMusic, by contrast — which I still subscribe to despite my hissy fit when they stopped offering unlimited downloads — I pay for music and receive it uncrippled by DRM and in a higher quality, though still not perfect, format.)
The prevalence of cruddy 128 kbps music in the online marketplace demonstrates that the music industry still doesn’t believe in online distribution: It still doesn’t trust us, even when we’re paying for the music.
The real issue for the recording industry has never been loss of profits due to piracy, because no one has ever proven that there is a direct connection between piracy and declining CD sales (in fact, quite the contrary). What the industry fears is loss of control. Individual consumers — like Andrew, who wrote a column about this last week — want to buy their music and then do whatever they want with it: Put it on an iPod, put it in the car, burn new CD mixes, share with friends. It’s what we’ve always done with our music, after all; we just have better tools today.
There are audiophiles out there, of course, who turn up their noses at “CD quality” — which is itself “lossy” compared with higher-quality audio formats. But meanwhile, the vast majority of music lovers who are reasonably content with their CDs aren’t getting their money’s worth when they buy online.
So remember: when you rip your own CDs to MP3, use at least a 160 kbps rate, or higher if you’ve got a big disk, or a “Variable Bit Rate” if your ripper supports that. The added file size is negligible given how cheap storage is today, but your ears will thank you. And the next time you think of buying music from an online store, tell them you won’t settle for anything less.
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