It is the job of every generation to complain that the younger generations are inferior, or headed for destruction, or whatever the latest cause célèbre is. Even in the lifetimes of those reading this blog, it’s easy to point to the mass hysteria surrounding rock and roll, then heavy metal, then rap, then video games, as examples of one generation making mindless accusations about another.
In the audio world this is just as common, it’s ongoing, and Harman has released a study that shows that the old people need to shut the hell up (I’m paraphrasing).
When I first started in this industry, going on 12 years ago, there was much ado about “youths” embracing MP3. Oh the horror, they’d say. It’s the downfall of audio as we know it. These damn kids (note, this is exactly what their parents said about their generation), they just don’t want good audio. They can’t hear the sound difference, MP3 sounds OK to them. Oh the horror, we’re all going to die, woe is me, what a world, what a world, what a world...
As much as I, speaking as both an audiophile and one of demonized demographic, tried to explain to the “adults” that MP3 was popular because of the convenience and despite the sound quality, no one seemed to listen. After all, what could I know? It’s not like I’m of the age they were discussing, once sold a wide range of audio products (via Circuit City), and had a degree in audio production.
I said over and over: if you gave people the chance to choose better sound quality, they’ll leap at it. It just can’t come at the cost of convenience, or for that matter (and probably more important), of actual cost. You see, that’s what I think a lot of audiophiles, including myself honestly, completely miss: Not everyone is willing to spend lots of money on what amounts to a hobby. How much, exactly, depends on the person.
Now, more than a decade later, the debate about the “damn kids” still rages, even though the facts don’t support it. A few years ago a Stanford professor lit off the audio doomsday fetishists by claiming that informal tests of his students found that year over year, more preferred the compressed MP3 to that of CD. Despite his own claim this was an informal test, those who wanted to hear such information, accepted it as gospel.
Harman has a long history of studying listener preferences. Floyd Toole’s work showing that even untrained listeners preferred accurate sounding speakers over inaccurate (regardless of price), is eye opening if you’ve never read it. More to the point, if there was a shift in younger generation’s tastes for sound, Harman would want to know about it. Harman is a 4.7 billion dollar business, and they didn’t get that way pushing expensive audiophile products on rich audiophiles. Even more to the point, their many clients in the automotive world wanted to know if decent car audio was worth it anymore. After all, if “kids” didn’t care about sound quality, do cars marketed towards kids even need tweeters?
OK, now the doomsayers seem less insane.
Except, turns out, it’s all crap. At the Audio Engineering Society (AES) convention in April, Harman’s Dr. Sean Olive published a paper entitled “Some New Evidence that Teenagers and College Students May Prefer Accurate Sound Reproduction.” Yep, engineers sure go after the sexy titles. The full paper will be available online soon, but for now I’ll give you the highlights (and you can check out some of Dr. Olive's preliminary thoughts on the subject at his blog).
58 students, high school and college, listened to four selections, each in CD and 128 kbps MP3. The tests were double blind. The students “expertise” ranged from none (art students) to some (recording arts majors). On average, the students picked CD over MP3 70% of the time. No student showed a preference for MP3, though a small minority showed a difficulty in telling the two apart (a nearly equal number picked CD every time, so...). Interestingly, or perhaps not, the more a student was interested in audio, the more likely they were to choose CD over MP3.
In a second round, the same students went through Harman’s speaker listening tests. These are rather brilliant. Speakers behind an acoustically transparent curtain sit on movable platforms. Press a button, and in a matter of seconds, a different speaker gets swapped into place. There really isn’t any better way to compare speakers. The students listened to four speakers. As a group they preferred the most accurate speaker of the four, and disliked the least accurate. This falls in line with other tests Harman has done with both trained and untrained listeners.
Now, as the paper itself admits, this is a limited sample size. However, I feel some extrapolations are possible. Mostly because my opinions, unlike this study, are not peer reviewed (peer read perhaps...). In other Harman studies, they’ve found that listeners prefer accurate audio, regardless of demographic. The “average person” would prefer a more accurate speaker over a less accurate speaker, given a fair comparison between the two. I think what this study shows is that “young people” aren’t different from “old people” in this regard. People are, wait for it... people.
Do young people spend less on home audio than their parents did at that age? Sure, but there’s a lot more to spend money on now, like student loan debt, iPhones, Internet, food. This doesn’t mean they don’t want quality audio. In fact, I’d argue they want it just as much. Take a look at the sales of high-end headphones in the past few years. There’s gold in them thar hills.
I have covered this industry since I was just out of college. I can sadly no longer claim to be young anymore, but nor am I “old” by most definitions. I seem to be on some cusp, where I think I can offer some bit of objectivity for both these groups.
To the younglings:
There is better audio out there. Find it. Turn your headphones down, studies show you’re going deaf. Also, everyone hates hipsters.
To the elders:
Shut up about people younger than you. By every metric, the world gets better over time, despite some really crappy dips and diversions. Embrace new technology. Also, if the music is too loud, you’re too old.
Now if you want to really talk about what’s ruining music, let’s talk about dynamic range compression.
Geoffrey,
Thanks for the nice summary of my recent research. I'll be posting a more detailed description of this study in my blog in the next few days @ www.seanolive.com. In the meantime, I've posted a YouTube video of the slide presentation here: http://youtu.be/gsVO2PAp8M8.
Cheers
Sean Olive
Director of Acoustic Research
I dont listen to mp3. I listen to internet audio. Aka slacker, pandora, i heart radio and di radio. I always seek out the higher audio format when offered. Most do offer that and immediately it becomes a better experience.
But I do not let the convenience and safety of playing music via internet radio in my car where I always am listening to it. That or either at the gym or mowing the lawn.
Souly because one. I like music discovery and I also dont want to get angry at the songs ive loaded in.
Ultimately convenience is what drives me but I sure as heck do like higher audio quality and will always choose it and can always tell the difference. Granted im 32 so im not young and no I dont own a nice pair of headphones. Allthough I did end up hijaking a pair of zune ear buds from microsoft as I found those to be the most comfortable and sonically pleasing ear buds ive come across. I sold the zune without the headphones...
As internet speeds increase I believe there will be more offers of high quality audio. The question though that I have right now is even though cd is better than a compressed cd. When does the audio format become cd quality or better yet what about blu ray or record quality? That would be lovely to start getting a taste for that type of quality.
Great read though and interesting to hear the background on testing at harman. Love that type of research!
-- mike
Hi Mike,
If you listen to internet audio then you are likely listening to MP3 since much of the content is MP3 or AAC. I think Pandora streams MP3 @ 128 kbps for free, and 192 kbps if you pay for a subscription. Satellite radio like XM is also uses lossy compression where the bit rate varies depending on the channel and program content. It can sound quite bad, and sometimes not so bad.
I tend to agree with you that the quality of audio downloads and streaming should hopefully improve as bandwidth and storage becomes cheaper and ubiquitous. Hopefully, that bandwidth is not by the content producers to add more channels and content at the expense of quality. The problem I see is that the quality of streaming via smartphones is dependent on the quality of service. If the quality of service is poor in your car, in order to get a constant connection the bit rate may get dropped down to 32 or 64 kbps even if the program in the cloud is encoded in 256 AAC. The cloud may not be the panacea in terms of sound quality.
Cheers
Sean Olive
I would argue that if the cost of bandwidth and storage goes down, the number of choices in the music will go up, not the quality. I doubt internet radio will re-rip songs for a higher quality just because they now have the space.
That said, with all we know about mp3 vs CD, when will the FLAC vs CD tests be? If the students eventually could tell the difference in the sound, what if, speakers being the same, the comparison was Lossless vs CD Quality?
Either way, thanks for the testing and the report and the experiments. Very interesting.
Cheers,
W
Adaptive audio streaming from the cloud is freely available for smartphones, iPads and web-browsers. See http://sg.news.yahoo.com/listen-music-adaptive-lossless-streaming-181752....
Thanks for the great article Geoffrey. Just a couple thoughts that aren't meant to contradict it in any way but perhaps add a related perspective from a "view of our industry" point of view. (I have been fortunate to have made a living in the consumer electronics industry for over 30 years and have only been out of it for the past two due to a medical issue. I am ready to head back to the fray but the time off has been a real blessing to observe the industry I love from a bit of an "outside" perspective).
The decision tree of convenience vs performance is always a tough one, made more difficult today as you mention in your article by the tremendous convenience offerings available versus the "old days". Since today's listening opportunities are so much more "mobile" , convenience becomes even more of a draw. In the past, portable or mobile solutions were almost always a choice of convenience over performance - for example, cassettes before Dolby noise reduction or the Walkman. DAT, DCC, MiniDisc and others soon followed, all trying to improve performance in a portable format. Later; portable CD players offered better mobile audio performance but were still pretty inconvenient (carrying discs, vibration induced skips etc.). It took the development of "no moving parts" music to make the decision of performance vs. portability a tougher one. (cont.)
My concern (or observation) is that in the past, the decision to adopt a portable format usually was made by people who were already familiar with the "better" formats available but made a conscious decision to give up some performance for the convenience of portability. Put another way, they usually knew what they were missing. My observation (or concern) today is that there are far fewer opportunities for people of any age, but primarily younger people just getting involved in music, to be aware of "something better". Our industry, across almost all categories, seems to have reduced itself to a "good enough" position, whether through distribution, market share concerns, lower cost sourcing competition, etc. It is amazing to me to see a shopping cart at Wal-Mart filled with a large screen display and a home theater in a box that were most likely selected by the consumer based on hang tags and self-marketing packaging. I am glad that people aspire to own consumer electronics gear but it is surely becoming a commodity industry and needs to be competed in as one. I completely agree with your article that fewer people view audio as a hobby. A hobby is usually pursued with passion and that passion drives the "performance is king" perspective that allows manufacturers to see and address a market for higher performance goods, that hopefully trickle down as more people become aware of them. (cont.)
Today, the pendulum seems to have swung from the performance side to the convenience side. While audio is still a passion for many, it is audio driven by convenience, more than performance; the ability to have your music everywhere, all the time. I do agree with you that the kids are alright (they are probably better off than our industry). I believe that it is not just convenience or cost that are driving the widespread adoption of lower performance, it is a lack of opportunities to hear the difference. In my own home (an admittedly extremely limited sample of four teenagers), I regularly (in a teasing way) sound like one of the "old farts" alluded to in your article; telling them they don't know what good audio is, that their only reference is highly compressed, low sampling rate mp3s heard through tiny ear-buds. I tell them however that their generation however "waking up" based on the proliferation of higher quality headphones being adopted by "ear-budders". Suddenly it isn't "uncool" to have big headphones. Suddenly my Bose Quiet Comforts that I use on planes aren't as nerdy as they were before, and can now be found on my 15 year old when he's on the lawn tractor). Disclaimer, while the "new" bigger headphones, (or the "old") typically offer wider range and/or better dynamics than the ubiquitous ear-buds, they are hardly developed, marketed or sold as "accurate". But they do start to show the kids that there is something "better" out there.
This headphone adoption also tends to show that low cost is not the principle driver. Beats or Bose or any of the new (and increasing) offerings certainly do not come cheap. I came home last week to find that that same 15 year old had rummaged through the basement, found an old pro-logic pre-amp, 5 amps, some old prototype speakers and a sub and had hooked them up and calibrated them by using the manuals. I was really proud of him. He was amazed and excited at how much better his music sounded. "His" music being his ipod and Pandora. When we hooked up a CD player and played much of the same music, it was like a light went off. It is as though he and the other three teenagers in the house have rediscovered music. They may even have become hobbyists. All they needed was the chance to hear the difference. The kids are alright......
@waltalk: Lossless formats are CD quality when made from 16/44.1 material. It's a bit-for-bit copy. When I was at Dolby, one of the engineers demonstrated to me the results of going through MLP (another lossless codec, used on DVD-Audio and now used as the basis of Dolby TrueHD). It was a perfect, bit-for-bit copy of the file from the CD.
I don't think Dolby ever did listening tests on MLP vs. CD, but I was told some engineers at Pioneer did and found to everyone's surprise that the lossless sounded better than the CD. It's because lossless uses packetized data, which isn't susceptible to jitter until the data is unpacked in the receiving device. CD is unpacketized, serial data, so it's susceptible to jitter.