In my neverending quest to repost every ridiculos thing I read on CDM I bring you this: According to Seattle Post-Intelligencer (or PI), you’re only listening to 6% of the original recording.

Please, read that again: “According to Seattle PI, you’re only listening to 6% of the original recording”.

The article is also accompanied by a nice little graphic saying “Going Digital Means Missing Music”.

In all fairness, the Post-Intelligencer (what kind of name is that for a newspaper, anyway?) probably isn’t written by audio engineers, so I’ll let them slide (a little) on the outlandish quote above.  But I won’t let them get away with that without at least hearing this: you deal in words and phrases, remember that.

What they meant to say is “mp3’s and other digital recordings suffer a huge drop in quality from when they were originally recorded.”

The article would lead you to believe that mp3’s are actually missing music as in missing instruments or missing tracks.  They aren’t.  The huge reduction in quality when an audio recording is compressed into an mp3 or a wav file is similar to listening to music from a distance, or through a wall.  The quality is reduced to make the file smaller, and thus, easier to store online and on a hard drive.

However, Bob Dylan is smiling as the article does say that old phonograph records have higher fidelity than mp3’s.

Maybe he is right after all.