Restore the splendour of sound

For audiophiles and gadget vendors, the art and science of revitalizing MP3 music is the Next Big Thing.

Where’s the volume? Almost all music in MP3 format sounds rather bland. You miss the deep rumbles of resonating bass sounds, and the sparkles of high trebles. All instruments and voices hurtle at you like nameless passengers from a crowded train. You often crank the volume knob painfully high to hear the sounds a little more distinctly, and then hastily pull it down for the next track. You rummage through your equalizer-settings or sound effects just to get the right volume and clarity of sound. The irony is that sound-equipment and high fidelity on personal stereos have gone far beyond the range of human hearing. Ipods, home theatre systems, speakers, and noise-cancellation headphones have commoditized high-fidelity sound. Yet, everyone is straddled with a growing collection of vapid MP3 music. It’s like driving a Ferrari with four flat tyres.

Throwing out the baby: The problem is squarely with MP3 music. To fit more songs into a compact disc or an MP3 player, a lot of audio details within each music track are thrown away to make files smaller. In fact, the files get squashed in size because the tonality and range within the music is literally compressed. Users can unknowingly or insensitively compress music to almost a twentieth of its original. Owing to this and other factors while digitizing or ripping music, an MP3 file sounds rather “low volume”, too.

Loudness war: The other problem is even more alarming. With each passing year, the music industry records, produces, performs and broadcasts music with even more loudness.Play any music and it must explode through the speakers or your headphones like a burst of firecrackers. Each album tries to drown out the sound of other albums to grab the listener’s attention. In the last 20 years, this loudness war has turned into an assault on the ears: High fidelity has been abandoned. Extreme loudness has led to ear-splitting distortions and even destruction of delicate sounds within recordings. Researchers at the House Ear Institute in Los Angeles in the US are concerned that all this could possibly harm the hearing of listeners, particularly children. Read more about this at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war

Since audio-tracks have preset loudness, you tend to bring the volume down, resulting in a muffled and indistinct barrage of noise. Or, you could push the knob up to barely hear the subtle details in a deluge of deafening sounds.