Audiophiles of the Y Generation...

You know how most people are perfectly happy with Apple standard-issue earbuds, white plastic molded around a crappy audio experience? A Stanford professor's informal annual study shows that younguns also, for some reason, actually like the "sizzle sounds" of MP3s.

Each year, Stanford Professor of Music Jonathan Berger does an informal test of his students by playing a bunch of different music in a bunch of different formats. Here's how he performs the informal study:

Students were asked to judge the quality of a variety of compression methods randomly mixed with uncompressed 44.1 KHz audio. The music examples included both orchestral, jazz and rock music. When I first did this I was expecting to hear preferences for uncompressed audio and expecting to see MP3 (at 128, 160 and 192 bit rates) well below other methods (including a proprietary wavelet-based approach and AAC). To my surprise, in the rock examples the MP3 at 128 was preferred. I repeated the experiment over 6 years and found the preference for MP3 - particularly in music with high energy (cymbal crashes, brass hits, etc) rising over time.

In other words, younger people haven't just grown more tolerant of thin, soulless MP3 renditions of their favorite music, they actually like them. Professor Berger has been quoted as saying that it's the "sizzle sounds" that people are loving because it's what they're comfortable with. People aren't just ignorant of high quality audio, they actually hate it. Gee, thanks for contributing to the downfall of civilization, mp3 players. What's interesting about this I think, is what it says about the ears of my generation. Hmm.

Personally, I don't really have too big of a problem with mp3s or mp3 players for that matter. I own an iPod. I love having an organised iTunes library and whilst I still relish in my CD and vinyl collection, I probably listen to my mp3s most of the time (always at 320kbs though, oh yes). What annoys me, are those pseudo audiophiles who spend £100+ on RCA to phono cables to 'enjoy' their mp3 player through their hi-fi separates. Why you would try and improve the sound of a medium which has already compressed and thus lost the quality of the original recording is beyond me.

So, the answer? mp3s are small and fun but if you're all about quality, stick with Cd's I say.

Jonty x

Lamps don't have feelings do they?

I had the pleasure of seeing for the first time this week, this ad:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I07xDdFMdgw

It turns out that it was directed by Spike Jones and I really don't know why but I did actually feel sorry for the lamp. Whilst the Swedish gentleman at the end of the ad tells us that lamps actually don't have feelings and yes, the new one is probably better I can't help but see the lamp wishing it could go back indoors where it's nice and warm. I guess the music doesn't help, neither does all the rain and whole street corner scenario. I also think Pixar have managed to subconsciously condition me into personifying things like lamps and cowboy dolls too.

Anyway, in the past two weeks I've managed to re-watch the whole first season of Prison Break and am currently half way through season two and I can't even begin to describe how good it is. I actually think it's impossible to be bored watching it? I also enjoyed reading the show's actor's individual backgrounds earlier this evening and was interested to see that one them had been involved in DUI and consequentially served actual real-life prison time. Kinda ironic really. Maybe being involved in such a show meant that he could easily fashion his own Allen key and break out of wherever he was through the toilet in his cell. Oops.

Jonty x

What a lovely color!

Why is it that I can get on a plane, travel to the US and find myself experiencing the same language barriers I would having landed in Spain or ... I don't know ... Namibia? Maybe that's a bit of an exaggeration but seriously, even being asked the most simple of questions like 'what time is it?' causes the person who asked it to stop in their tracks when I reply, 'half seven'.

Me being me, I set off to research why people over here say, or more importantly spell things the way they do. What caused such translations to take place in the first place? And thinking about it, although it's completely off subject, if I'm lacking organisation, am I unorganised or disorganised?

In fact, as I've since found out, it depends! Take for instance the notion of a woman whose desk is in a real state. Not organised if you will. If we were to say her desk and papers seem unorganized, things would be a bit of a mess but she could find anything she needed in a moment. If however, her desk and papers were disorganized, things would most definitely be in a mess and more importantly she could probably never lay her hands on whatever it is she needs.

So there's a fun lesson in the correct use of a word I like to use a lot but why do Americans say and spell things differently? American English and British English actually differ at the levels of phonology, phonetics, vocabulary, and, to a lesser extent, grammar and orthography.

The differences in grammar (as we know) are relatively minor, and normally do not affect mutual intelligibility. For instance these include, but are not limited to: different use of some verbal auxiliaries, formal (rather than notional) agreement with collective nouns, different preferences for the past forms of a few verbs (e.g. AmE/BrE: learned/learnt, burned/burnt, and in sneak, dive, get); different prepositions and adverbs in certain contexts (e.g. AmE in school, BrE at school); and whether or not a definite article is used, in very few cases (AmE to the hospital, BrE to hospital). Often, these differences are a matter of relative preferences rather than being absolute rules; and most are not stable, since the two varieties are constantly influencing each other.

But whatever, I think it's interesting...

Jonty x