Many years ago, the only way to listen to music was to go to a concert (or the pub if you were just rif-raf).

Still many years ago, but a bit more towards the present day, people were making recordings of music on wax cylinders for playback at some later time with some hideously expensive piece of equipment housed in an ornate mahogany box (you still went to the pub if you were just rif-raf).

Even more recently, they managed to squeeze the wax cylinder into a disk shape to record the music for playback at some later time with some hideously expensive piece of equipment housed in an ornate mahogany box (you *still* went to the pub if you were just rif-raf).

More recently still, the rif-raf were able to afford their own piece of equipment to play back the vinyl discs.

Then someone had the bright idea of making an audio cassette which contained the same music as the vinyl disc, but thanks to Mr Dolby, it had some wonderful noise reduction technology to reduce the hiss. (The rif-raf were now carrying a boom-box next to their ear to take their music wherever they went.)

Then Mr Philips and Mr Sony came up with the Compact Disc (25 years ago plus a few days). This was a revolutionary breakthrough in sound recording. The music was no longer stored on lossy media such as vinyl discs or magnetic tapes, but instead it was stored in digital format, made up of 1′s and 0′s. The music would always be the same, no amount of playback would ever alter it and the quality would be as high as it was the day it was recorded. Now, digital recording does introduce some form of loss to the original live playback, but that goes into the realms of psycho-acoustics (very interesting, but complicated). (The rif-raf now transported the music in their cars at stupidly high volumes.)

Then came another breakthrough. MP3. At the time, it was heralded as another amazing breakthrough in the field of sound recording. Instead of having to transfer huge CD quality files, you could compress them to MP3 format and then send them over your ‘pitch and squeal’ dial-up internet connection.

What people failed to realise (or just conveniently ignored) was that MP3 compression caused you to lose a great deal of the data of the original recording. In my 2nd job out of university I had a long argument with someone about the pros and cons of MP3 compression. His argument was that the MP3 compression algorithm did lose data, but that the data (music) removed was only the data that the human ear could not hear. My argument was that if you remove information, you must be reducing the quality of the music (even if it was only a psycho-acoustic effect).

Anyway, in the last 2 weeks I have seen several articles in major publications highlighting the fact that you do lose information when using MP3 compression and that it’s really not such a good algorithm after all (See this story in the IHT). I finally feel vindicated in my assertions of several years ago. (The rif-raf now carry around a tiny thing like an iPod to destroy their hearing).

History of sound recording
Psychoacoustics
Psychoacoustics book by a couple of my university lecturers.