[Scott Dorsey]

geoff wrote:
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 do sound design for some of the larger science fiction conventions out
there as a side project, and these frequently contain a "masquerade" in which
people put on a short display of a costume to a prerecorded track. And
invariably the prerecorded tracks they provide are not only 128K MP3s, but
have gone through multiple generations of MP3 encoding because they edit
them and then re-encode them. I have given a number of talks about why it's
important to send in a .wav file or other unencoded file but it just seems to
roll right off of them.

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.

Well, hopefully he'll go home and think about that a little bit.

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.

Yes, but this isn't a new thing in any way. The same issues existed in
the cassette era. Getting people to actually care about sound can be
difficult, but sometimes (when they are a performer or doing FOH) it's
their job to care.
--scott
--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."