The music kids listen to these days is crap

Not the music itself, mind you (though I could moan about the loudness war some other time) — just the format that’s become widely preferred among teenagers and young adults. Standford researcher Jonathan Berger has been testing his students’ format preference for the past 6 years, having them listen to a recording in a number of formats, from low resolution MP3s to “ones of much higher quality”, (SACD?) and found some disappointing results. As Dale Dougherty of The O’Reilly Radar puts it:

each year the preference for music in MP3 format rises. In other words, students prefer the quality of that kind of sound over the sound of music of much higher quality. He said that they seemed to prefer “sizzle sounds” that MP3s bring to music. It is a sound they are familiar with.

Dougherty goes on to argue, persuasively I think, that people gravitate to the medium that they grow up with, playback artifacts and all. People who grew up with LPs, for example, like the background analogue noise and naturally limited frequency range of vinyl.

If you were 13 years old in 2004, when the iPod mini came out, you grew up with MP3s and probably prefer their sizzly upper register (and not paying for music, but I digress). Me, I’ll always go for a very clean open sound because I grew up on CDs — though I have an innate fear of being sold old recordings that haven’t been remastered properly.

But consider this: the ubiquity of the iPod and digital music means boomers and their kids, will have approximately the same degree of hearing degradation at the same time.

Music-listeners brought up on MP3s like recordings with lots of extreme high frequencies are in for a big let-down relatively early on. As a person ages, their ability to perceive exactly those frequencies diminishes significantly. And this process is accelerated by listening to music loudly, which has become a lot more common since carrying around your entire music collection became not only possible, but more convenient than it was for me to carry around just a couple of CDs (and the batteries to ensure I’d be able to listen to them all) just 15 years ago. People now spend hours at a time with music blasting into their ear canals in all kinds of noisy settings that require them to use high volume settings to hear their device.

With the combined buying power of boomers and their kids should we expect recordings to start to be produced to sound good to their damaged ears?

Given that recordings are already being produced with the iPod as the assumed playback device, it’s not unlikely that the limitations of the listener’s ears are the next consideration to take into account.

And so I begin work on an “I’m not frickin’ deaf” EQ setting for my iPod…

Hat tip: Gizmodo

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