Tech
It's Official: MP3s Are Bad For Your Health
Be Healthy. Use Vinyl.
Vinyl obsessives and anachronistic audiophiles have finally been proven right. They’ve been telling everyone for years that badly compressed MP3s were an affront to good taste, but who knew they could have such an emotional impact as well?
According to What Hi-Fi, new research conducted by the Audio Engineering Library has found that MP3 compression actively increases the negative emotional characteristics of music. The study, The Effects of MP3 Compression on Perceived Emotional Characteristics in Musical Instruments, analysed compressed and uncompressed music samples at several bitrates over 10 emotional categories. It found that in place of the happy, heroic, romantic, comic and calm qualities you’ve come to expect from your favorite tunes, the horrors of compression will bring out their mysterious, shy, scary and sad side. That means playing files at notably worse audio quality can have drastic impact on your emotional engagement with music. So if you know what’s good for you, dust off that old record player or buy FLAC for god’s sake.
