[Trevor]

On 28/02/2017 2:32 PM, Nil wrote:
On 27 Feb 2017, geoff wrote in
rec.audio.pro:

No proof indeed. But I do have a snoop at every opportunity, and
rarely find anything over 128K of offspring, and their friends
players.

I have an idea about what that's all about. My nephews and nieces have
many gigabytes of MP3 music that they have stolen by downloading from
sharing internet sites. A lot of that stuff is many years old - the
files were created a long time ago in what seemed at the time to be
reasonable resolution. Time and technology have moved on, but those
same old music files just keep going 'round.

Perhaps, but new ones are almost always higher resolution.


Another factor is that some popular music programs like Apple iTunes
and Windows Media Player create low-quality files by default. You can
change that, but I'm sure most people don't know how or care.

Disagree. Most people who could be bothered to encode their own files,
rather than simply download someone else's, know what they are doing.



Most digital music you buy from legit sources like iTunes or Amazon are
decent quality.

Not as good as some illegal sites unfortunately. Many even have FLAC
files, something I would always want if I was paying money to download
them. Yet some paid sites charge more for a whole CD of compressed files
than the CD costs to buy. What a rip off!


Too bad a lot of young users would rather steal.
Quantity over quality.

Rubbish. If you ever looked at the illegal sites you'd see they have
almost universally been at 256 or 320kbs for quite a few years, or
roughly similar sizes for Apple encoded files. There is a simple reason,
people encode them for their own use before posting them on share sites.
And as I said already, anybody who could be bothered encoding audio
these days does NOT do it at the lowest quality settings any more.


Not long ago helping somebody who was just starting out doing FOH
and foldback for his ethnic band. He had a phone jammed full of
MP3s, all 128kbps, with which he was trying to tweak EQ etc. Now
this guy isn't totally stupid, but when I suggested maybe start
with something a little better, all I got back was a baffled
stare.

That stuff sounds worse the louder you play it. Maybe never occurred to
him that what sounds good in his ear buds would sound crappy blasted
over a high-decibel PA system.

It was stated he was doing FOH and foldback for a live band, so any
recorded music played would be background where people are usually
talking louder than the music and any defects will go completely
unnoticed. I used a player full of 128k files myself many years ago for
that purpose, and nobody ever complained. You can rarely hear what's
playing even since if you turn it up people just talk louder, and the
purpose of background music is NOT to **** everybody off between sets!



These youths and young adults seem totally disconnected from the
idea of sound quality, and seem happy to listen to whatever
squawks out of their iPhones' inch-or-so speaker, or $10
earphones.

It's not just youth. An anecdote: a friend of mine was promised an
unreleased studio recording of a local musical comedy by the show's
director. The music will be "emailed to him", which certainly means
low-quality MP3s. I said to my friend that he should see if he could at
least get an original CD of the music. He looked at me like I had two
heads and said, "well, I can make a CD from the files he sends me." At
that point I changed the subject. He just didn't understand the concept
at all and I knew anything I might say would just go in one ear and out
the other.

Why does it "certainly mean low-quality MP3s"? I have mailed audio CDR's
for decades to people who probably had no way of even playing MP3's once
upon a time. Wave files on a memory stick no harder than MP3 now either,
so perhaps your friend was right to look at you strange. Only he will
know when he gets them. I wouldn't waste my time speculating or
explaining something that may or may not be the case.

Trevor.