MP3s became popular for two reasons: they occupy far fewer bytes than the equivalent track on a CD and they can be quickly shared online. They do this through compression technology that crushes file sizes to as little as a tenth of their original size. Yet in doing so, chunks of seemingly superfluous data are discarded. In theory, our ears shouldn’t detect the difference since MP3s remove frequencies we are deaf to. Yet it sacrifices quality, trashing some of a track’s subtleties and stripping away ambience. How much of a song is lost depends on the bitrates: 320kbs is close to CD-quality while 128kbs is equivalent to FM radio.…
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Gadget (Digital) - 1 Issue, Issue 6