MP3 format becoming preferred by our youth?

Remembering our MP3 discussion of last week, this news item caught my eye,

http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/03/the-sizzling-sound-of-music.html

Briefly, a music professor at Stanford has been testing the format preferences of his
incoming students over the past 6 years. Much to his frustration, the trend appears
to be towards more students preferring MP3 over other "higher quality" formats.
There's not much in the article, btw: mostly just that one observation with a few
more details and then speculations.

Dan

I'm still listening to Frank Sinatra records on an old VPI turntable I bought 18 years ago......and it's amplified through a vacuum tube phono stage......with tubes that were made in the 50's and 60's.

Phil

Dan Newman said:

Remembering our MP3 discussion of last week, this news item caught my eye,

http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/03/the-sizzling-sound-of-music.html

Briefly, a music professor at Stanford has been testing the format preferences of his
incoming students over the past 6 years. Much to his frustration, the trend appears
to be towards more students preferring MP3 over other "higher quality" formats.

Dan

Why? Because that is the lingua franca of swapping music online (i.e. illegally)...

Hi Dan

I'm certainly not youth, but MP3 and other compressed formats is about all I listen to.

Ears can be trained to detect tiny audio details. Since the beginning of electronic audio, every advance in fidelity seems to first astound experts in the field. Experts had become jaded to the tech warts of old tech, and the new tech would have fewer warts.

After becoming accustomed to the new tech, the ears self-train to hear defects which were at first not audible. It is amazing how accurate ears can become with training. Am pretty sure the training happens in the brain wetware signal processing rather than ear physiology. There are aged studio engineers with serious hearing loss who can somehow hear better than younger contemporaries with fresh ears.

Working with audio, it is part of the job to notice tiny details to maintain quality control. Tiny features can become gigantic fatal flaws when you listen close enough long enough. Am not saying that paying attention to detail is bad, but sometimes worked for hours fixing music/audio problems that at the time seemed horrible. Because I was closely 'tuned in' to the detail. Then next day listen to the original recording with fresh ears barely able to detect the 'horrible problem' from the day before.

The quality of the MUSIC matters more than the quality of the MEDIUM. Ray Charles on his worst day, recorded on a portable cassette recorder with a drug-store fifty cent tape, will be WAY better than some lesser artist recorded in the finest studio. Ear/brain has such good built-in signal processing that bad equipment can be 'filtered out' so it doesn't get in the way of listening to the actual music. As long as you don't obsess and get hung up on the equipment flaws.

I haven't noticed recent famous music stars significantly more talented than previous-generation famous music stars, but many non-famous young musicians seem much more serious and capable than when I started. They practice hard and perform amazing feats. Some of the young feller's output seems incredibly-perfect performance of mediocre ideas. Wheras in the past the reverse may have been more common-- Flawed delivery of a fabulous musical idea . But that may just be an old-fogey impression.

Apologies drifting-- It is just that MP3 may not be perfect, but it isn't flawed enough to spoil a fabulous song. And the finest equipment in the world isn't good enough to help a bad song.