March 12th, 2009, at 11:34 am | 
A recent O’Reilly Radar post talks about how incoming college students prefer low-bitrate MP3s over uncompressed files more and more each year.
There’s nothing more sonically frustrating to me than listening to the heavily distorted, washing-machine highs in a low-bitrate MP3. I’m (fortunately or unfortunately) pretty adept at noticing the tell-tale slush in cymbal hits and other high energy passages, and I’ve found myself hearing it more and more in my daily life.
Between the prevalence of 128kb MP3 files, XM Radio’s abysmal sound quality, crappy digital mobile phone audio, and Sony’s awful SDDS theater system, are we slowly being reconditioned to accept low bitrate audio as “high quality?”
If this trend continues, I fear record labels will begin to intentionally degrade their released audio (not like they don’t already, but that’s another post altogether) to avoid sounding “too good.” Will live concerts and theatrical events be processed in real-time to replicate the MP3 slush?
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I find poorly encoded digital music files complelety frustrating, as well. However, I can also hear the poor sound quality of the CDs. I have often commented on the proliferation of poorly reproduced music that surrounds us on a daily basis. People don’t even know what music is supposed to sound like anymore. I guess the article and your blog post prove that. It’s a real shame, IMO.
Just setting the market up for a replacement media format akin to DVD over VHS in a few years where we’ll all be forced to repurchase all of our iTunes tracks in the new higher quality codec format. ;-)
-jr