Unintended Aural Consequences of MP3 Compression

zenst writes "A rather interesting read about possible damage to your hearing due to the way most audio compression techneques work. They mainly work by presenting a signal that the brain perceives to be the same as the original and it is this assumption that could effect our hearing and the way we hear."

Tinnitus

[The Gline]

There are many reasons for hearing loss and tinnitus that have nothing to do with what you listen to or what volume you listen to it at and everything to do with, for instance, degenerative diseases of the inner ear. The article doesn't provide much to persuade me that MP3s are going to make people go deaf.

Re:Tinnitus

[theLime]

Hmm, did you READ the article?

He says "is still unclear whether the consequences of such maladjustments are only temporary (similarly like seeing the world in green/ red discoloured after taking off red/ green 3D glasses) or if the continuous consumption of neuroacoustically datareduced sounds can lead to long lasting or even permanent damage."

and also "I try here in no way to demonize MP3 in the name of the sound carrier industry"

He's not trying to scare people, he's just theorizing, with a educated point of view.

MP3 and other lossy codecs fool our ears, and unlike our eyes, our ears require constant re-calibration to function properly. If we are calibrating to inaccurate/unnatural sounds, he thinks this could be a concern.

Certainly just listening to a few mp3's a day is nothing to worry about, but what about when all of the media we saturate ourselves with is lossy-encoded?

I don't know, and this is not a scientific article. He's just throwing the idea out there.

Re:Loses all credibility right here.

[cpaluc]

Yeah, i had trouble getting past that too.

Now have a look at this [fh-hamburg.de] page of his. He appears to think that looking at the colour pink can be dangerous too. How did this stuff manage to get posted? In the pink article he claims to be a "researcher of neuronomy(science about the improvement of the usage of brain and nervous system)". Neuronomy? That's gotta be bogus. Anyone?

Re:Other research from the author -- Pink is Evil

[geek]

Certain colors do have effects on you. Why are all padded cells white? It's calming.

Why are most hallways tope? It's soothing.

Bright colors give us an "open" feel in rooms while dark ones close us in.

Yellow is an alerting color, which is why it's used in stop lights, as is red. Colors do effect us in certain ways.

Example, drunk driver sees cop car on the side of the road with it's red blinking lights. Drunk driver can't remove focus from them and crashes into cop car. It happens almost every day in the U.S. Is it because of the color of the lights? Blue lights have proven to have a different effect. Maybe it's just that their flashing? Flashing blue lights had a different effect.

Anyway, the guy seems like a crack pot, but colors can effect us in minimal ways. Very minimal however.

Re:We still get those other frequencies!

[u38cg]

No, that's not right.

Overtones shape the harmonic spectra and create a specific waveform. Why do a piano playing a=440Hz and a xylophone playing a=440Hz sound like a piano and a xylophone? Because the overtones (which occur at 1, 2, 3,... times the base frequency) have different strenghts at diffierent frequencies. Strings tend to have good octave, fifth, and seventh harmonics, bars on a xylophone don't.

MP3 stripping is more subtle - when there are two instruments which have a harmonic line on the same pitch, one line gets stripped out, as it will make no difference to what you hear. That kind of thing

And BTW, tuning forks don't produce a sine wave, they produce a very strong set of harmonic octaves, which is what makes them unpleasant. A nice low sine tone is actually quite unoffensive, if used appropriately.

It is an oxymoron

[recursiv]

> And I thought that was an oxymoron.

However, Bose, certainly has the market cornered for customers perceiving it to have quality. They do it all with advertising.

As an analogy for you geeks, it's like Intel's dominance over AMD, despite AMD having a cheaper faster CPU. Intel does it with advertising. Actually there is a difference. Intel makes quality processors. Bose might be passable, but you won't find anyone who knows what they're talking about saying Bose is quality with a straight face. There are nice things you can say about them. Maybe convenient to set up for the average user or something, but not quality speakers.

In short you are correct.

Re:Music type...

[pongo000]

And I thought that was an oxymoron

I dunno...I have a pair of Bose 301 speakers pushing 20 years old that are still faithfully reproducing audio without any noticeable distortion. Let's see...I paid $300 for them in 1982...not a bad purchase for an amortized cost of around $15 a year.

Now, those funky radios they sell, maybe that's another story all together...

Seems similiar to Alex Chiu to me

[Guttata]

Uh, has anyone explored the *rest* of his site?

This is interesting:

"CYBERYOGI Christian Oliver(=CO=) Windler (teachmaster of LOGOLOGIE - the first cyberage-religion!)"

And

"I am a cyberage-child - born in the year of Pong"

As a matter of fact, his main page is dedicated to Logologie:

http://www.informatik.fh-hamburg.de/~windle_c/e_in dex.html [fh-hamburg.de]

Hmmmm:

http://www.informatik.fh-hamburg.de/~windle_c/Logo logie/picts1.html [fh-hamburg.de]

This is the real nail in the coffin, however: http://www.informatik.fh-hamburg.de/~windle_c/Logo logie/Logologi.faq [fh-hamburg.de]

Re:Other research from the author -- Pink is Evil

[Reziac]

I think this fellow has a problem separating cause, effect, aftereffect...

If you wear pink-tinted sunglasses (such as some of those Ray-Ban types) the eye adjusts and after a while you don't see the pink so much. And when you first take them off, everything looks green for a few minutes (which also screws up your depth perception). But the eye and brain quickly figure out what's what, and your colour and depth vision soon return to normal. There's certainly no permanent damage; if there were, we'd have millions of lawsuits over it.

Anyway, appears either he's got some peculiar ideas about what constitutes research, or he's severely good at leg-lengthening ;)

Did you guy read the rest of his pages ?

[aepervius]

http://www.informatik.fh-hamburg.de/~windle_c/

Just go to the above... The guy is a proponent of "logologie" "religion from the cybertime" (sic). The other article are nice too, like the one about natrium glutamate in cantine food ("nervengift"...). There is nothing to see there, just an Informatik Student in hamburg having fun (heck he isn't even a neurologue !) : Quote : Ich bin ein Kind des Cyberzeitalter, geboren im Jahre des Pong, und ich studiere Softwaretechnik an der Fachhochschule Hamburg (was leider den Großteil meiner Zeit kostet).

I am a child of the Cybertimes, born the same year than Pong, and I study Programming (software technic?) in the Highschool (not university something else) Hamburg (which cost me the biggest aprt of my time).

Move along, ntohing to see here.

Wrong

[dblh3l1x]

To generalize, the human ear registers the frequencies between 20 and 20,000hz. No matter what theroetically an MP3 could contain as far as "inaudible damage," speakers themselves aren't engeineered to often reproduce sounds that exceeds these thresholds. To do so would be a waste of R&D because the average human would not even hear it. The concept of this (false) argument would work, if the delivery device for an MP3 wasn't a speaker; however, because the delivery device is engineered to reproduce the audible range (ideally) for humans, how then is it somehow malformed into projecting killer sound waves through inaudible means?

Another thing to note: take an equalizer and cut out all treble and all bass; you are then left with just the mids. Does this process leave you deaf? Yes, I'm aware the signal isn't compressed, but the speakers are doing the same thing. Some frequencies are cut out, others aren't. Listen to an MP3 in 96kbs and then in 192kbs, and you will hear the difference. The difference is simply part of the wave is removed, just like in a crossover or equalizer.

Re:Music type...

[Zathrus]

Paradigm, B&W, PSB, NHT, or a half dozen others that make reasonably priced, but high quality speakers.

You can buy Bose. Or you can spend the same amount on a quality speaker and get far better sound. And yes, I've heard the difference.

For a starter, you might want to try this site [goodsound.com].

Re:wonder how much...

[Grahf666]

Umm, did you read the whole article?

I quote:

Nevertheless I try here in no way to demonize MP3 in the name of the sound carrier industry, because most music CDs are definitely 2 to 4 times overpriced and everybody who practices by downloading private "self law" against the sound carrier industry has my solidarity.

I don't think the author is any more a fan of the RIAA than you or I.

Re:Tinnitus

[superyooser]

seems like it was written by a 12-year old, judging from the English.

It looks like it was written by someone whose native language is not English. It appears that it was originally written in German, then translated, pretty well for the most part, into English. Notice that the article is on the site of a German university (www.informatik.fh-hamburg.de), and there are German words in the diagram pictures.

Re:Oh thats what it is...

[PyroMosh]

As the earlier poster said, it's from the movie Spinal Tap. And here, is the bit of dialog from the movie, which I shamelessly lifted from here [geocities.com]

Nigel: This is a top to a, you know, what we use on stage, but it's very...very special because if you can see...
Marty: Yeah...
Nigel: ...the numbers all go to eleven. Look...right across the board.
Marty:Ahh...oh, I see....
Nigel: Eleven...eleven...eleven....
Marty:...and most of these amps go up to ten....
Nigel: Exactly.
Marty:Does that mean it's...louder? Is it any louder?
Nigel: Well, it's one louder, isn't it? It's not ten. You see, most...most blokes, you know, will be playing at ten. You're on ten here...all the way up...all the way up....
Marty:Yeah....
Nigel: ...all the way up. You're on ten on your guitar...where can you go from there? Where?
Marty:I don't know....
Nigel: Nowhere. Exactly. What we do is if we need that extra...push over the cliff...you know what we do?
Marty:Put it up to eleven.
Nigel: Eleven. Exactly. One louder.
Marty:Why don't you just make ten louder and make ten be the top number...and make that a little louder?
Nigel: ...these go to eleven.

Re:Music type...

[DavittJPotter]

In the top 10 design goals of Bose engineers, Sound Quality is NOT on the list. Affordability, appearance, and saleability are.

If you've heard the "wonderful sound of Bose" because someone told you they were great, consider this. Budweiser is unlikely a fine beer, but it's the "King of Beers" due to superior marketing and brand awareness. Same thing with Bose. They've gotten their name out there, and made people aware. "Big Bass from a small space" does not equate to better sound. Proper speaker construction, good crossovers, and matched drivers *do* contribute to better sound. The fancy-ass "Bose 901's" that some people drool over? They're made up of (9) cheap 5.25" drivers, of which ONE points forward. The rest fire backward to give you the "reflection" of the Direct/Reflection equation, and make the speaker sound bigger. If you like the 'Reflection' theory, try a pair of Definitive Technology's Bi-Polar Power Towers - they'll impress you.

You want to try some really nice moderately priced speakers? Boston Acoustics, Definitive Technology, and Klipsch are all phenomenal performers without a staggering price tag. Moving up, you've got options that will astound you.

If you want a good comparison, buy a Bose waveradio. Take it to a stereo dealer who sells the little Sony or Yamaha bookshelves - the Bose sucks in comparison. :) Since you don't have a comparison at the Bose dealer, you can't make a good decision. That's why they do "Outlet Stores" that only sell Bose, so you can't do a good A/B comparison. After you retunn your $500 Bose, spend the difference on some good Guiness. :)

Remember: "No highs, no lows, must be BOSE!"

Pseudoscience

[xiphmont]

I'm not going to flame here because it sounds like the author means well, OTOH, the road to Hell is paved with good intentions. This one frankly belongs on the same list as UFO coverups and Flouride Conspiracies. He doesn't indicate any in-depth knowledge of what he's writing about, just the kind of layman-level understanding psychosomatics get when they scare themselves silly reading anatomy texts.

Perhaps our author really is state-of-the-art, but I see nothing in his article to indicate that. Everything cited can be found in beginner's texts on the subject. Nor is anything cited particularly relevant to his conclusions.

Let's not forget that the CD itself is a 'data reduced' sampling of a real world signal, at best an approximation of the original. And so was vinyl. I don't see many claims that the harsh approximations of the 33 1/3 LP are damaging ears by the very nature of their artifical reproduction... Unless, of course, you play them too loud :-) Volume can certainly damage.

Living in a modern city, it's nearly impossible to not end up with some level of permanent tinnitus, and it worsens with age. However, there's an interesting paradox here: Background noise is required for the auditory system to function properly. Perfect dead silence, for prolonged periods, will also damage the auditory system-- through atrophy due to lack of stimulus (an unexpected discovery from a few fascinating experiments)

Monty

"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence"

"Put down that uninformed pontificating before you poke out an eye"