Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood Doesn't Hate MP3s
We live in an age when the fidelity of our music is seemingly less important than our ability to easily access, transport, and share it. As vinyl records were eventually replaced almost entirely by CDs as the predominant music format, MP3s and other files have now become the standard. They are digitally compressed (to varying degrees), making them sound significantly 'thinner' (read: lower sampling rates) than their disc-based counterparts.
But composer and Radiohead member Jonny Greenwood sees things a bit differently. "They sound fine to me," he told the New Yorker when asked whether MP3 was a satisfactory medium for his music. "They can even put a helpful crunchiness onto some recordings. We listened to a lot of nineties hip-hop during our last album, all as MP3s, all via AirTunes. They sounded great, even with all that technology in the way. MP3s might not compare that well to a CD recording of, say, string quartets, but then, that's not really their point."
He says the desire for higher-quality formats primarily belongs to "thirty-something men who lurk in hi-fi shops, discussing signal purity and oxygen-free cables and FLACs" -- a group with which he associates himself, to some degree.
Greenwood goes on to compare MP3s' imperfections to analog tape's hiss. "I was happy using cassettes when I was fifteen, but I'm sure they were sneered at in their day by audiophiles," he said. "If I'm on a train, with headphones, MP3s are great. At home, I prefer CD or vinyl, partly because they sound a little better in a quiet room and partly because they're finite in length and separate things, unlike the endless days and days of music stored on my laptop."
Interesting thoughts from a man rather qualified to speak about such matters. [From: New Yorker, via Gizmodo]
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
taint said 4:14PM on 9-04-2009
depends on how they're encoded.
under 256k = awful
256k and up = decent
320k = hard to tell it's an mp3
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Ryan said 10:31PM on 9-04-2009
Mp3s don't use a lower sampling rate (all standard encodings use 44.1KHz, just like a CD). The compression comes from leaving out some data, which the encoding algorithm predicts you wouldn't hear anyway. Basically, if there's a whole range of frequencies of sound blaring at different levels (which is what happens with music) some of them will be masked by others, and there's a decent model of how people hear sound that can predict which parts of the signal won't be heard by a human ear.
I guess my point is that yeah, mp3s compress data, but they don't do it by reducing the sampling rate.
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Derp said 1:19AM on 9-05-2009
MP3's do sound fine, until you hear them compared to the full sized versions. The musical content may be there, but the full low and high frequency sound of the real thing gives you music you can experience rather than just listen to.
If you just want to hear the melody and rhythm of a song, then MP3 is fine. If you want the musical experience that the artist, producers and engineers wanted you to hear, then MP3's don't cut it.
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