Here’s one for the audiophiles out there. Turns out, your seemingly endless diatribes about how important high-quality audio is were actually being made in the best interests of the people who were standing there, thinking up ways to extricate themselves from the conversation without seeming rude.
As What Hi-Fi? reports, a scientific study has found that hi-resolution audio not only gives you a truer representation of what the artist intended, but it’s actually better for your mental and emotional health than lower resolution audio such as the ubiquitous MP3, which is how most people hear their music nowadays.
According to a study by the Audio Engineering Library, MP3s and their similarly low-res cousin formats compress audio frequencies to the point where they are actually affecting the “timbral and emotional characteristics” of the music. In other words, the instruments used on a given song simply don’t sound the way they’re supposed to.
As a result, the compression used in MP3s and other such formats enhance the neutral and negative emotional characteristics of the tones and sounds in a song and weaken the positive ones. In translation, listening to ‘Let’s Groove‘ in an MP3 format will actually make you less likely to get up and shake that thang than hearing a high-res version.
The study, entitled ‘The Effects of MP3 Compression on Perceived Emotional Characteristics in Musical Instruments‘, was performed by analysing compressed and uncompressed music samples and different bitrates over 10 “emotional categories”. MP3s apparently strengthened characteristics like “mysterious, shy, scary and sad” and weakened those like “happy, heroic, romantic, comic and calm”.
However, angry was one characteristic that remained relatively unaffected by MP3 compression, so if you’re into hardcore and heavy metal, you can continue listening to your Parkway Drive and Slayer MP3s and know that the music is having its intended effect on you. Those looking to cheer themselves up might want to invest in a Pono or something.
