XXXXXXX XXXXXXX 20052005 MA XIMMAMAMAXIMXIMXIMXIMUUUUUMMMPPPPCCC 0000
DO^
HIGHER
BIT
RATES
PAY
OFF?
THE AUDIOPHILE
Proudly, defiantly discriminating, our audiophile takes
a dim view of MP3’s “lossy” audio compression. And
don’t even get the audiophile started on the pitiful
quality of tracks peddled by downloading services like
iTunes or Napster To Go. Can an expertly compressed
track fool even those golden ears?THE PLURALIST
You’re just as likely to find the pluralist kicking
back barefoot on the futon listening to Miles
Davis’ Spanish Quay as you would at a Pixies
reunion show covered in beer and sweat. But
at what point does even this most laid back of
listeners balk at bad audio?HOW WE TESTED
Each lucky participant was asked to bring
in a CD with a track that he or she has
listened to for years and knows so inti-
mately that a single missing hi-hat tap
would stand out like a sudden blast from
a tuba. We ripped each track using iTunes
at three quality levels: 160Kb/s, 320Kb/s,
and uncompressed WAV. The compressed
files were ripped using variable bit rate
(VBR) encoding, meaning that a 160Kb/s
VBR track allows the bit rate to rise and fall
depending on the complexity of the music
while maintaining the selected bit rate as
the minimum bit rate for the track.
In a quiet room with mood lighting and
kitschy Scandinavian furnishings, the par-
ticipants put on a pair of Sennheiser HD
580 headphones that were attached to our
test PC’s Creative X-Fi soundcard. The par-
ticipants listened to not only the three ver-
sions of their own track, but also the three
tracks from each of the other participants,
for a total of 12 tracks in all. Each partici-
pant was allowed to listen to each track as
long as he or she could stand it, and was
allowed to repeat portions of the track and
do A/B testing with the other tracks.JANUARY 2006 MA XIMUMPC 39
)
n a tidal shift akin to the Sexual Revolution, the
heyday of Napster that’s 1.0 markedly changed
Americans’ perceptions of intellectual property rights
and fair use. Some folks considered the music-swap-
ping orgy a shameful, lawless epidemic of hedonism
that would inexorably lead to social and economic
chaos, while others considered it a thrilling, lawless
epidemic of hedonism that liberated all of us from the
musty stench of an increasingly bland and commercial
culture. "ut everyone understood one thing MPs
were here to stay.
"ack then, most MPs were encoded at constant
bit rate #"R 128+bs, striking a balance between
acceptable audio quality and file sizes that were small
enough for easy trading over a dialup connection. "ut
what was born out of necessity endures today, as most
of the music available on rogue peer-to-peer networks
is still compressed at this rate. )t’s been called hnear
#Dv quality, but we know better—it isn’t even in the
same :ip code as #D audio.
"ut at what point do higher bit rates stop paying
off and simply take up too much space 160+bs
12+bs And can a hardcore audiophile really tell the
difference between a 20+bs track and an uncom-
pressed one What about a normal music listener
These are the questions we wanted answered
when we set out bear traps around the office and came
back later that afternoon to retrieve the snared employ-
ees. &rom the bunch, we selected four representing
a range of musical tastes and quality demands. We
handed them headphones, pressed the play button,
and got some surprising results.PHOTOGRAPHY BYSAMANTHA BERG