NPR: Grumpy Old Men

My father-in-law sent me this article:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=122114058&sc=nl&cc=mn-20100102

Here is my response to the article:

First of all, it describes two very different phenomenon: compression and digital quantization. The point of song compression is to raise the amplify the "softer parts" into a dynamic range that your ear can more readily enjoy, at the expense of the louder parts. For the Metallica example in the article, instead of bemoaning the loss of a sharp snare attack cutting through the song, they could easily mention that the raised floor of the music and vocals makes the actual content of the song easier to listen to. A good recording engineer should work with the band to compress the songs in a manner that benefits the song.

The concept of over-compression, or making the song sound completely flat, has been around long before digital music. In fact, radio is the culprit for the over-compression phenomenon. Radio has very narrow side-bands around the carrier frequencies, so the content has to be compressed significantly to fit within the sidebands. It's the reason why classical music is still better live and most contemporary music is dynamically flat.

Digital quantization noise was a big problem before 16 and 24-bit recording and dithering techniques were developed. Then, when mp3s first became popular, people chose to digitize at low rates to keep file sizes small. A properly digitized song's digital quantization errors will fall well below the noise level of the ear. As higher quality digital music becomes more prevalent, the only discernible difference between formats will be that analog music is more prone to noise and more expensive than digital music.

I have noticed that recorded music has gotten progressively louder. (There is something called "The Volume Knob," available on most music players, if the music is too loud.) However, without elucidating the benefits of compression or digitization, this article sounds like a couple of guys lamenting about "the way it used to be..."