Lo-Fidelity

"Abnormality can become a feature," says Jonathan Berger, commenting on a growing consumer preference for low-fidelity music, reports Joseph Plambeck in the New York Times (5/10/10). Jonathan, a music professor at Stanford, is commenting on "an informal study among his students that found that, over the roughly seven years of the study, an increasing number of them preferred the sound of files with less data over the high-fidelity recordings."

Ironically, amid "an explosion in dazzling technological advances … in surround sound, high definition and 3-D … the quality of what people hear — how well the playback reflects the original sound has taken a step back. To many expert ears, compressed music files produce crackly, tinnier and thinner sound than music on CDs and certainly on vinyl. And to compete with other songs, tracks are engineered to be much louder as well."

This has everything to do with the rise of iTunes and the demand for quick downloads and jam-packed MP3 players. "It would have been very difficult for the iTunes store to launch with high-quality files if it took an hour to download a single song," notes David Dorn of Rhino Records. However, Apple last year "upgraded the standard quality for a song to 256 kilobits per second from 128 killobits … preserving more details." And a few services, such as HDtracks, are now offering higher-fidelity downloads, but so far mostly only for "classical or jazz music."