It is frequent to listen to low quality music without realizing it. But how can you tell if an audio file is of good quality? Do you know what you hear
How can you tell if an audio file is of good quality?
Today we listen to music from different devices and continuously. It often happens unintentionally – in stores, banks, supermarkets, advertisements, and many other situations, even without being brought to our iPod (if still in use). But when we decide to listen to music voluntarily, are we sure we listen to it well?
Be careful, reading this article can make sound fetishists so hostile to your company of friends. If you continue reading, you deserve this anecdote.
I was in the car with friends, when suddenly I heard one of my favorite songs come out of the speakers. Although I turned the volume knob on the ball, the sound was still very muffled. Blame the speakers? Maybe, but not in that case. To my quick question (demanding that you heard the “noise of the Titanic”), I received a very simple answer: “I downloaded it from a YouTube video.”
Now, I am absolutely not here to moralize anyone, because for better or for worse we have downloaded all the songs from YouTube, however there is one important factor to consider: how can you understand if an audio file is of good quality?
Let’s start with this assumption: Buying the records and / or buying the songs in the digital stores will surely feel great if played on certain systems. That said, the two macrocategories for listening to music are:
The type of the audio file.
The type of sound emitting system / device
Lossless discs and files are the best to listen to. By avoiding delving into complex technicalities by converting files to .mp3 there is compression that reduces digital size at the expense of quality. The unit of measure for quality is kbps (kilo bits per second) and the best value of all is 320 kbps (we tend to scale 256, 192, 128, 96, and 64 kbps). Pseudo-decent performance occurs (but with high data loss) at 128 kbps. It is better to always be on top.
While this doesn’t make sense to nerds, many people ignore these factors because they don’t know they are listening to songs about which 30% of the instruments may not fully perceive. Please note that Spotify allows you to choose the type of audio quality only in the Premium version and the lowest or “Normal” function is at 96 kbps. Also, if you ever download songs illegally from YouTube, many unofficial videos already have poor startup audio, let alone convert them to low-quality .mp3.
Now let’s say we have a song with the best possible quality on our mobile. The problem is to listen to it from a medium that has decent characteristics. To assess this, you must rely on the frequency response or how closely the audible frequencies are reproduced to the human ear by the speakers / headphones or the vehicle in question. We hear from 20 Hertz to 20,000 Hertz (also called 20kHz), this range varies with age and trauma (eg disk). It is correct to possibly check the frequency response of your vehicle: if you buy 5 euros headphones in a store, it will not have a great result, no matter how much the brain comes to us trying to hypothetically recreate incomplete or missing frequencies. It should be remembered that there are other, much more complex factors for optimal hearing, which can be easily explored on the web or in sound theory books.
Going back to the initial anecdote, we were in a Panda ten years ago, with the original Fiat speakers and we listened to a low-quality song downloaded from an unofficial YouTube video. Worse than that, one could not ask, therefore, on second thought, could not have said anything, while that opaque discontent would have been covered by my discontents and for those there are no remedies.
