Important things about the quality of digital music and digital video audio
1. The file format does not play a decisive role
What the producer of a track does with it in the studio is a thousand times more important than in what format the result of this work will be encoded. You can’t make candy out of shit – a decent track with an artistic message, properly produced, mixed, and mastered in an acceptable dynamic range (where you didn’t go overboard with compression in the first place), even on unimportant speakers, will sound better than a dull, gray, poorly mastered track, even if you hear it in lossless format on a fancy stereo system. It is always. This should be obvious to everyone.
2. Compressing the file size by 80% does not proportionally reduce the audio quality
When you compress digital audio, you get rid of the main ballast without affecting the quality of the music audible to the human ear. This process is called lossless compression (very similar to RAR or ZIP files). If you want to reduce the size of the audio file even more radically, you will have to shred the source and its sound forever; this is already a case of the notorious “quality loss”. Yes, as a result, the track undergoes irreparable changes, but people too often create darkness, claiming that this happens indiscriminately.
It’s time to admit that most people can’t hear some of the details on the album. It’s just that our ears cannot be compared to the hearing of a dog and other animals. You can get rid of a lot of secondary information in the audio and no one will know the difference. This is psychoacoustics in action, this is how lossy audio compression works. There is a certain threshold below which the difference begins to be heard (MP3 with a bitrate of 96 kilobits per second cannot be compared with an analog of 320), but this does not mean that the myth about the relationship between the percentage of compression and the end result is true. It is a myth.
3. People make the most of life when music is far from being of the best quality.
Life story. In the 90s, the conditional hero of the article participated in an illegal rave, spent the whole night and decided that he would make DJing the profession of his life. A brave step and a fateful decision. But what happened to the sound at that party? Everything was wrong, remember. The needle flew, the EQ not tuned, and the amps periodically cut out. Has anyone fired on this? Barely.
Have you ever been to a nasty sounding party that changed your life? Danced all night by shitty announcers in a weird club and left in the morning with your future life partner? They turned on the shortwave radio in the car, and there an old hit sounded like a balm on the soul and saved him from a reckless act. Or the cork didn’t seem so boring anymore. Did you play your favorite song before the tape broke on your pocket cassette player and you decided to form a band? All bloody sweltering summer listening to the playlist on Vkontakte and remembering this time for the rest of your life? Did you play a deplorable sounding set, burning with embarrassment, and then a line of people lined up with you, saying it was the best party of your life?
Congratulations! You are 99% of real people in real life situations who have experienced something with music. And music of such quality that the remaining percentage of purists and snobs are ready to burn to ashes. These guys think you need to worry about the audio format and dynamic range of someone’s equipment. Better to live real life. After all, it is quite short.
4. The search for an ideal is harmful
Each of us wants the world and its components to be ideal; this is the axiom. Any DJ wants to have speakers in clubs connected and tuned, every track in the collection shines with quality mastering, and so on. But only the results of the work done are taken into account, each of us is forced to make commitments every day.
So interestingly, this also applies to the quality of the music. We already noted at the beginning that this is an important point, but not so much as to deny the space of options and the possibilities of making decisions, perfectionism is completely out of place here. For example, a distinctive underground producer puts out a new track at 128 KBPS, and it will definitely break the crowd. A dilemma arises: to play it or not?
Purists will answer negatively. But you have to be honest with yourself and judge by the emotions you want to convey through music. If the combined weight of the factors exceeds five minutes of not-so-high-quality sound on your computer, the question can be dismissed.
