Compress Your MP3s (Reblog)

First, a confession. Not only am I not an audiophile, but I really dislike audiophiles. I am willing to make slight exceptions for the slightly audiophilic personalities of both GCE and my father.

Don't get me wrong -- I like music. But even setting aside the borderline retarded folk who think that a magic wood knob on their stereo uses quantum purification to modify how electrons flow to their speakers, I think that most people who talk about their concern for sound quality are fooling themselves.

There is a recent article on Maximum PC that shows, with a relatively small double-blind sample size of 4 listeners and 4 varied tracks, that people really can't distinguish between uncompressed audio and 160 kbit/sec variable bit rate encoded audio. It is a cute read, but is actually far too kind to audiophiles in its conclusions, since it neglects the all-important statistical analysis which would have demonstrated that the results are entirely random. And this was under ideal (i.e. headphone) conditions.

Usually, when we're listening to music, our environment contributes a lot more to the sound than the actual audio. The shape of the room, our relative position in it, the furniture, drapes, etc. all have a dramatic (and typically ungoverned) effect on our listening experience.

Me? I'm happy if the volume is right. This is one of perhaps three or four parts of life where I'm actually easy to please.