OK, so I violated rule number one. Never argue with someone who is passionate about something. I also went blowing right through rule number two: Never argue with Chris Bloch about recorded music and sample rates. My friend Chris Bloch has a great set of ears on each side of his head and a good personality in between. So when I started the argument that today’s “POP” music wasn’t worth any more then a 128Kb sample rate, things got ugly.
Now, I am not a big fan of pop music. Most of it is electronic anyway and on top of that, most likely optimized for the iPod generation. The vocals are so heavily processed that it wouldn’t make much difference anyway. Enter a British pop singer named Mika.
Now Bloch had this collection of catchy tunes that I liked and I figure my daughter would get into. I borrowed a copy of the tunes until I decided if I wanted to buy my own copy. Well, I spent the next few weeks listening to it in my old beat up truck with the old beat up sound system. I had purchased a radio a year or so back that had a USB port so that you could play your MP3′s from a stick or from a CD-ROM. More about this later.
So I finally find a copy of Life in Cartoon Motion at a local bookstore and proceed to make my 128Kb backup copy. This is where things went bad. The next time I got in the trusty old truck and jacked in my USB stick with my freshly converted MP3′s things didn’t seem quite right.
I immediately noticed a lack of dynamic range. Of course this could be due to some normalizing setting in the software I used to convert from CD audio to 128Kb MP3. There was something else. The overall sonics of the music were missing. Somehow some of the “life” left what I had been enjoying for the past couple of weeks.
Now I am not talking about ten grand oxygen free speaker cable life or the “magic” spinner that correctly aligns the bits on the CD because they come out of alignment occasionally. I am talking about bouncing down the highway in a ten year old truck noticing. Something was up. So I quickly switched over to the CD-R with the Bloch borrowed mp3 files. The life suddenly came back. The clouds parted and the sun started to shine. What the frick? Ok so let’s analyze this: Different media but should be same mp3 decoder in the radio. Could bitrate make that much of a difference?
Now this Mika album is not your typical bubblegum blond pop singer. While it is British pop, it is extremely well produced. The thing I enjoyed the most about it is the sonics within the music. Great depth in the acoustical instruments. The harmonies were very detailed and didn’t sound like the same track copied and pasted oh-too-many-times. Everything is crisp without that nasty digital aliasing you so often hear.
In a state of panic that I might actually be wrong, I reached for the phone and called Bloch. Yes, I called a sound engineer before noon, but this couldn’t wait. I left a voice mail explaining my situation. The phone rang about 20 minutes later with the news that I feared the most.
It seems like the folks over at Island Records actually care about the quality of the product that leaves the studio unlike the so many “I have Garage Band therefore I am a recording studio” projects that have crossed my ears. Bloch goes on to explain that the mp3s that I borrowed are actually 300Kb+ encoded mp3s from the source not a CD.
Maybe those extra 212 bits were useful for pop music after all. Now don’t get me wrong, if it were a symphonic piece, this would be a no brainer. I think I would have gone for a lossless codec in the first place. I am going to have to work the math to see if a 340Kb rip is actually worth doing for a CD because when I ran it again at 300+ setting it does sound better but still doesn’t have those little nuggets of sonic clarity that his has. Maybe it is some sort of normalization in my software. Maybe it’s the encoder. Maybe that is why he is the sound engineer.
So to Mr. Bloch I say thank you for proving your point even though you did not mean to do so. My ears have learned a valuable lesson and I must also remember rules 1 and 2.