HeyPapaLegend Studios

This is aimed at anybody, especially those in the Advertising world, who has ever been the author of the title sentence. If you’ve ever asked this of a music studio, read ye further and redeem thyself.

Most professional sound engineers know that the almighty Compact Disc is really anything but. The CD was born out of a manufactured need for “improvement” in a time when the music industry’s Toffee Noses (read record labels) were bored with the “lack of progress” in their industry.

Unlike it’s predecessor, vinyls, whose evolution spans more than a century, the CD-format was hammered together in rush by a few well paid mathematicians and scientists, with hardly any involvement from actual musicians and sound engineers.

You see,  digital recording, (unlike analog recording) by its very nature can be (and has been) improved more and more as computer technology grows, which pretty much equates to infinity. And although it was quite horrible compared to analog recording a few years back, digital recording today has undeniably evolved into a phenomenal recording medium, and is the staple medium world wide.

The problem is that all that improvement in recording quality (i.e sampling and bit rates) means almost squat when you’re always forced to down scale back to CD “quality” (44.1Khz / 16Bit).  Imagine TV recording and broadcasting reaching full 1080 HD, but TV’s never evolving past small black and white tubes on your grandma’s Formica kitchen counter.

Now, I must jump in and stop my own rant at this point and mention that CD’s today are not all bad. There have been improvements in the technology. Disks are pressed with more detail, laser technology has improved by leaps and bounds and the high quality of digital recordings made today do filter through to the final product. In fact, as I am only 26, I grew up with CD’s, only occasionally listening to my parents’ and grand parents’ vinyls, and if I was kept in the dark about the theory behind CD’s I  probably would never have complained, because the music still sounds great to me, as much on CD as on vinyl.

By now you’re wondering:  “So what’s your %$#@*&% point!?” and I apologise for the lengthy “intro”, but I needed you to understand where I’m coming from.

My real issue, the real reason I cry in the shower every morning while gently hugging a pool noodle, is the abomination that followed the CD. It followed in less than great footsteps to start with and was not even really conceived from the CD, but is rather some bastard offspring that is fast destroying the world of music, it should be called the mp666, but it hides behind a much less sinister name, it is the mp3.

Mpeg Layer 3 or Moving Picture Experts Group – Layer Three, was introduced to the (FILM) industry in the early 90′s as a compression tool for audio that dramatically reduces the size of audio files while retaining the original sound quality… apparently.

The very idea is absurd. Lets say you take a 3min song at CD quality – it will be about 30MB big. Encode it with a mp3 algorithm and it is reduced to about 3MB. Now the last time I checked the Chinese have not yet managed to hide tiny, well trained wizards in computers that roam motherboards looking to cast some spells, so I can assure you that the drastic reduction in size is not magic. That 27MB of data is lost, destroyed, deleted.  What remains is a faint resemblance of the song that is made up of only 10% of the original file.

Let’s say you take a high quality photograph of someone sitting on a chair, in a professional photography studio with proper lighting etc. Then give the developed photo to a talented amateur artist to copy with a few coloured pencils.

Then take that pencil drawing and show it to anybody and ask them what they see. They’ll inevitably say “a person sitting on a chair” and will probably be happy to look at it as is. If you never show them the original photograph, how will they know how great the original looked with it’s vivid colours, depth, textures, shadows etc.

The mp3 equates to virtually the same thing. You see, as far as compression codecs go, most of the mp3 algorithms out there are really good at what they do (hence me suggesting a “talented amateur artist”). However the fact remains that converting a file into mp3 destroys almost every detail of the original music, the very thing you are paying for as a client.

Mp3′s were never intended to conquer the world as it has, burning down villages, killing peasants and kicking dogs on its way to world domination. It was meant for film engineers so they can move audio data around quickly.

But before you could say “I’m gonna jab a pencil in my ear” the mp3 is everywhere – spreading like a moist, swollen rash in to every crevice of the industry we all work in.

Just to prove my point, take any song you love, whether it is on CD, vinyl even an old tape deck. Sit down in a comfy chair, close your eyes and listen to it nice and loud, hopefully on a relatively good sound system or HiFi. Now go download the same song off the net (and do not pretend you don’t know how…). Now do the same thing, sit down close your eyes and listen to the mp3 nice and loud. Nuff said.

If you can’t hear the difference I suggest cleaning out your iPod and replacing all those nasty mp3′s with the originals in a lossless format like .wav or .aif. Ipods do accept these formats, though you won’t be able to fit 9 billion songs on, but let’s be honest, you only ever listen to a hundred songs max! You see your brain has gotten so used to the low quality of mp3′s that you can’t tell the difference anymore.

So, finally my bottom line. You won’t send a TV advert off to station in low res Quicktime file over email right? Not after you paid all that money to get it shot properly, edited properly etc.

So why then spend good money on music that’s been recorded by great musos, mixed and mastered to make it sound as good as it can get… and then ask me to email you an mp3 to stripe to picture… FML.

Obviously mp3′s are great for the approval process where the track get’s sent back and forth until everyone’s happy, but for final product? I think not.

Die mp3, die…