When Good Enuff is Great

Great article in the most recent edition of Wired magazine. It talks about how lo-fi high tech is taking over and poised to rule the world. Nowhere is this more evident than in how people consume music. I mean how many of you know anyone who stores songs on their iPod’s in .wav form or file sizes bigger than 3 or 4 megs?? For someone wanting the “best” audio, 320k is the limit and judging by how most people build there digital libraries these days- even 128k will do. The ease of downloading songs thanks to their small file size has trumped over quality. I asked my 17 year old son the other day, who is also a musician (and a picky one at when it comes to sound), what his choice of bit rate for his digital library is ,and he said, " 320k because they sound better on my car stereo". In the recent Wired article it talks about how Jonathan Berger a Stanford University professor, recently completed a six year study of his students in which every year he asked his newest students to listen to some different songs played in a variety of different digital formats. The formats included everything from standard mp3 files to uncompressed wav files. Berger says that over the years, students actually preferred the standard mp3 files to anything else. He says they have grown accustomed to the distortion found in the compressed files. To them- that is what music is supposed to sound like. Hmmm….does this mean the days of clocking long hours in the recording studio and agonizing over getting that “perfect mix” are over? I mean why worry about adding that extra 16k of “air sparkle” to your mix when the only person that is going to hear it is you…through the studio monitors.

The bottom line in all of this is that low price, flexibility and convenience have trumped power and fidelity, and it’s not just in the way we access music. Kindle, You-Tube and those cheap notebooks are even further proof.