iPodheads Take Notice

Here’s a new article on an old theme (old at least for Sounds & Fury) by Fred Kaplan for Slate concerning what’s missing from the MP3 classical music listening experience, most especially for users of the ubiquitous iPod and its low-bit-rate MP3 files. Mr. Kaplan makes his excellent argument contra articles by Terry Teachout for The Wall Street Journal and Anthony Tommasini for The New York Times in which articles the contention is made that MP3’s low-fi format really makes no meaningful difference in the experiencing of the music itself.

Quite apart from the fact that such a contention is prima facie imbecile when classical music is at issue (for pop music of any genre the contention is reasonable and largely correct) — a point Mr. Kaplan makes more temperately than we, and minus our above parenthetical — Mr. Kaplan in his argument contra Mr. Teachout fails to point out an uninformed bit of reasoning in Mr. Teachout’s argument which states that since he (Teachout) can no longer at his age hear many of the upper frequencies anyway, their absence in low-bit-rate MP3s makes no-nevermind difference to his listening.

The fault in that uninformed bit of reasoning is that it doesn't take into account that the absence of the upper frequencies in low-bit-rate MP3s is very much audible as a distortion of the middle frequencies as their waveforms are subtly altered by that absence due a phenomenon called “fold-down.” When those higher frequencies are present in their original proportions, they “fold down” to subtly modify the shape of the waveforms of the middle frequencies. If they’re absent, there’s nothing to fold down, and so those middle frequency waveforms lose their proper, full-frequency original shape — i.e., are distorted — and it’s those middle frequencies that contain the largest part of the musical “information,” both live and in a reproduction.

Just one more thing for you classical music iPodheads to mull over in your iPod-besotted minds.