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Compressed Music May Be Harmful To The Ears

davideduardo

davideduardo

Moderator/Administrator
Staff member
From ""The Economist"

"Now research in guinea pigs has shown that compressed music can damage the ears in ways that regular music does not. The research, though preliminary, suggests that there may be cause to worry about the harmful effects of compression."


The writer could not resist referencing Spinal Tap. Nor can I for that matter...
 
I'm curious if they put the Guinea Pigs in a sound both and somehow taught them to press the little red button when they hear a tone.
 
This is talking about dynamic range compression, although people have said the same thing about perceptual lossy data compression like MP3. There have been anecdotal reports of young people who grew up listening to MP3s actually preferring the sound of it compared to uncompressed CD-quality music.
 
WHAT???

Oh, sorry. (removes earbuds) Couldn't hear anything over the music.

Compressed audio? Well then there goes the whole media. But with tariffs, and things gradually failing along the way, we should all be back to carts and vinyl by 2028.

But it was fun, wasn't it?
 
I wonder what decibel levels the hamsters were exposed to. Compression has been around forever, practically.

The greater danger to hearing is high decibel levels. No compressors on jackhammers. Interesting article, though.
 
Every musical phrase, and who knows - maybe every spoken phrase, has to have its quiet notes and its louder notes. Otherwise, human listeners (and of course hamsters) get exhausted. Radio has been destroying itself by ignoring this important fact for many, many decades in a self defeating attempt to make their stations sound louder and more appealing. It's coming to an end now, as radio dies. Fortunately, there are still some broadcasters who understand this. Those are the ones with my TSL.
 
Robert Douglas said:
Every musical phrase, and who knows - maybe every spoken phrase, has to have its quiet notes and its louder notes. Otherwise, human listeners (and of course hamsters) get exhausted. Radio has been destroying itself by ignoring this important fact for many, many decades in a self defeating attempt to make their stations sound louder and more appealing. It's coming to an end now, as radio dies. Fortunately, there are still some broadcasters who understand this. Those are the ones with my TSL.
Click to expand...
While there have been episodes and eras of loudness wars, they were all based on being the most noticeable station as people scanned the dial. As audio processing got better, we found that the best way to overcome background noise in congested environments like cars, at work, in the kitchen, etcetera, was to make sure that lower parts of songs and even talent dialogs were not buried in that noise.

So a "good" station had an engineer who made sure that their station sounded as good as the others on the dial while not having moments where street noise, the forklift truck on the loading dock or the office machines and typewriters or keyboards did not block the enjoyment of a station.

Of course, the original intent of audio processing going back around 70 years was to prevent illegal overmodulation as well as the distortion caused by positive peaks over 100% which resulted in carrier suppression. The first equipment was just for peak limiting. As technology advanced, we added AGC and compression to sound more consistent as well as loud.
 
DavidEduardo said:
While there have been episodes and eras of loudness wars, they were all based on being the most noticeable station as people scanned the dial. As audio processing got better, we found that the best way to overcome background noise in congested environments like cars, at work, in the kitchen, etcetera, was to make sure that lower parts of songs and even talent dialogs were not buried in that noise.

So a "good" station had an engineer who made sure that their station sounded as good as the others on the dial while not having moments where street noise, the forklift truck on the loading dock or the office machines and typewriters or keyboards did not block the enjoyment of a station.

Of course, the original intent of audio processing going back around 70 years was to prevent illegal overmodulation as well as the distortion caused by positive peaks over 100% which resulted in carrier suppression. The first equipment was just for peak limiting. As technology advanced, we added AGC and compression to sound more consistent as well as loud.
Click to expand...
In Northern Ohio in the 70's we figured out to place the audio premphasis network between the compressor and the limiter and set the limiter for fast attack to bring down the highs that would overmodulate on FM stations. Then we used the compressor to bring up the average level. Compressors like the Gates Staylevel and Level Devil kept the level high but did bring up noise. Then the DAB three band compressor and the Optomod with several bands of compression came along and did a better job of compressing.
 
When the Optimod started to get used everywhere, 2 out of 3 guinea pigs said "what'" instead of answering the question. And 2 out of 3 guinea pigs were top 40 music fans based on radio listening.
 
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