Experiment on Your Friends (or Simple Psychology Experiments that Destroy People's Whole World View)

Here's a little experiment you can try on your friends.

Take a true lossless file and use iTunes or whatever you like to create an inferior version (160kps or whatever you like). If you are unsure of the source of your file, take a CD and rip a 320kps and a 160kps version.

This next part is critical -- make sure they are normalized to the same volume.

I'd also suggest that you use regular computer speakers or iPod style headphones and turn off any and all eq, and effects in your software, but that's really up to you... whatever you do, be consistent for each song (volume, eq, listener position).

Make a playlist that plays :30 seconds (arbitrary number, but why listen to the whole damn song?) of one file twice, and the same :30 of the second file once. Make sure that your subjects can't tell which is which by reading the file names or whatever, perhaps rename the three files with random letters (Q, F and J or something like that).

Have your subject listen to all three files and ask them to tell you which one is different. It's also a better design if you have yet a third person run the experiment who doesn't know which file is which and if you are out of the room or at least out of the subject's view. Repeat the experiment, ideally with at least 10 friends. If you don't have 10 friends or don't like letting people in your home, round up some tech friendly hobos on the street.

Random chance says 33% will get the right answer just by luck -- those people will take this not as sign of random probability but of their innate genetic superiority -- don't ruin it for them. If four or more of your friends can tell the difference -- congrats they did better than random chance. I'd still guess that more than 50% will get it wrong.

You could then ask them to tell you what files were the higher quality and lower quality files -- this is a more difficult question then just asking which was different as "better" is somewhat subjective. I'd expect the number to be even lower than before.

I stole this design from market researchers who have been running this experiment using Cola for almost 30 years -- subjects as a whole have done no better than chance and the experiment has been run literally thousands of times.

Incidentally, be prepared to have people hate you for this... people do not like being wrong.

I don't believe you, and you're going to be mad

The format wars rage endlessly on but now it's less about mp3 versus flac or even the classic analog versus digital than it is about spitting out numbers and complaining about quality.

Sorry, but I'm calling bull shit on the indie audiophiles.

I challenge anyone to tell the difference between a a 320, 160 and 128 file played over a regular pair of computer speakers like the ones that come with your HP, Dell or Apple. (I realize most of my readers have perfect pitch and exceptional hearing, so I'll follow this post with an experiment you can try on lesser humans at a later date)

I'm not saying there's not an actual difference, because I believe it can be heard even by the average Joe -- but not on crappy computer speakers or headphones.

I'd also bet most people couldn't tell the difference on their iPod ear buds or with their Zune plugged directly into their car or into their Sony bookshelf systems above their TV.

I firmly believe part of the reason that so many people feel strongly about the differences is because they are consuming music from file sharing service where there is no quality control. Someone rips a CD with their crappy software and out spits a file, somebody else loads that into their version of iTunes, maybe converting it to another file format, sample rate, etc.

The kps Nazis are essentially trying to enforce some control -- but they kind of have it backwards -- the problem isn't all in the format or the files. 320 or lossless or whatever really is a signifier in the peer-to-peer world that the 'uploader' took a little more time and put a little more thought into the enterprise. But I'd argue that's its more a suggestion of the quality of the file rather than the guarantee of quality. The science behind the higher quality files is sound, but I don't believe most people have the equipment, the ears or the desire for it to make a difference.

Why? Because in part, a lot of this music is still being ripped from CD at high rates of speed and have plenty of errors. Even many of mandatory kps people don't know what they are doing or take the care to check the files they create against the source.

Not to mention that most mastering engineers didn't work to the new formats in mind -- likely they also worked towards creating a CD. CDs, where much of this supposedly high resolution music is still sourced from has a relatively low quantization and sample rate (16 bit and 44.1 sample rate). Most music recorded digitally today is captured at 24 bit and 192 sample rate (although the sample rate in particular is definitely far from universal) and I'm told that this should lead to better CDs as well, though the format it self still has many limits. You can get a great sounding music file from a CD, but without processing it to fake it -- you can't add resolution, clarity or low and particularly high end transients that aren't there to begin with.

By contrast, I've heard many people say, "That Radiohead album sounds really good for 160kps files." No shit, they worked with Nigel Godrich and high-rent mastering engineers to make it sound good. I don't think they just through the mixes in iTunes or Win Amp and let them go out.

I think consumers can and should demand high resolution music, but that doesn't mean it will make most music sound better because the playback equipment simply won't translate the improved quality. Most people's car speakers, home stereos, computer speakers and iPod ear buds are not particularly high quality and they don't care -- the mass of content in my opinion fits with the mass of consumers.

The rock revolution was built on transistor radios and LP players with crappy built in-mono speakers. The iPod and the Walkman before it revolutionized music consumption, but arguably degraded the sound quality that proceed them. The stereo high-fi revolution of the late 50s and FM radio are arguably the only notable mass market improvements in recorded sound to ever take hold. LPs, cassettes and CDs were all considered to downgrade the sound quality that came before, though each offered greater conveniences to the user before completely unavailable. Each of these formats also got dramatically better as time went on and better techniques were developed.

But the bottom line is that convenience makes the world go round, not quality.

Wag Your Finger at the Scalawag

Maybe you've heard, the music industry isn't doing well.

Sales are down, the majors are eating it and more rounds of layoffs and jettisoning of artists are bound to happen. Radiohead is leading the way for any artist that can live comfortably off touring, the rapidly declining back catalog sales and has a reasonably digitally savvy fan base (unless someone figures out how to rejuvenate those with a sell-able, presumably download equivalent of the impact of CDs on the industry in the late '80s and DVDs on home video in the late '90s).

Even if you don't want the headache of setting up your own Radiohead-esque distribution, you can cut your own deal with a brick and mortar (like Wal-Mart and the Eagles) or a digital distribution service (like Tune Core and Frank Black).

There has been a lingering question about what the hell emerging artists and new bands will do in the new age. The answer might very well be succeed.

If you were the type that was motivated enough to work hard and get a deal in the old model, you should be the type that's motivated enough to run the business of your music. Labels often functioned to outsource a lot of the bullshit leg work that bores and disheartens potential rock stars, but as Steve Albini famously pointed out in his legendary article "The Problem with Music," this outsourcing came at the expense of almost all the monetary reward for most newly signed artists, even those small percentage who sold quite a few records. (If you've never read it, read it and notice that even though it predates the digital revolution, it points out how the majors implosion was basically inevitable).

In the future a few of lucky lazy, who had talent and were scooped up and became famous and rich will probably fall through the cracks and be lost -- because they'll be so little scooping going on.

But it also points the way to the next wave that's already happening... capitalism is returning to the music business. With the majors' cartel over distribution effectively broken and TV and radio's declining relevance in breaking new artists you have a freer market. Small labels, marketing companies, artist reps etc. are out there making money with and for there artists and covering the same leg work bullshit the majors did at a fraction of the cost. In some sense we may just see the same sorts of assholes in smaller office buildings, and some artists will still get ripped off -- but now it will be more as an artifact of the free market, not a standard operating procedure of the whole industry.

The industry has been declared dead before, several times actually and every format change has been declared inferior to the predecessor (LPs took almost 10 years to catch on, in part because a lot of people thought '78s sounded better). They could find a way to come back, gain a new foothold and become more dominant than before (as they did after they were declared dead in the wake of the death of disco).

If you want to bet on anything, bet on even more convenient consumption for consumers (if an iPod is 100X more convenient that LPs, what's 100X more convenient than an iPod?) and for a new trend in music to arise that will get people excited again and offer an opportunity to make money.