Compression in audio - Neil Young has a word

Neil Young has some choice words about the sound quality of todays popular music devices. From The Register:

Apple is Fisher-Price of sound quality, says Neil Young
Over five decades Neil Young has played a variety of roles including sixties protester, folk singer, Ronald Reagan supporter, grunge rocker and film maker. Now he's donning a new hat: Apple basher.

Young says Apple, with its ubiquitous iPod and iTunes, has dumbed down sound quality to "Fisher-Price toy" levels that place convenience ahead of high fidelity.

"We have beautiful computers now but high-resolution music is one of the missing elements," he told attendees of the Brainstorm Tech conference. "The ears are the windows to the soul."

Fortune's article reporting Young's comments didn't detail exactly what his criticisms were, but we're guessing they boil down to the widespread use of dynamic range compression, which reduces the difference between the loudest and softest parts of a song. Producers use it to get listeners' attention by making songs sound louder. In addition, many digital formats, including MP3 and Apple's AAC, strip out much of the signal from the original CD file, leaving the songs sounding tinny.

So true -- people either need to rip their MP3s at a very high bitrate (still getting good compression) or use a better algorithim like Ogg Vorbis.