Washington Post article on MoFi vs. Fremer vs. Esposito

If anything, MoFi did us a favor by demonstrating that digital does not inevitably lead to horrible sounding recordings.  Records do sound different from digital versions because of differing mastering and the process of mechanically converting the signal to a vinyl recording and then playing it back, and if you like the results (I do too), that is quite different from concluding that digital conversions inherently ruin the sound (I don't think that that is the case).  Even Michael Fremer often shared digital downloads of records being played back by different gear and has admitted that digital copies of his analogue playback sound good.  Clearly he likes what analogue recording and playback does to the sound, but, that hardly implicates digital as ruining the sound when digital can faithfully pass through analogue sound.

I have no problem with the notion that many of us simply like the alteration of the sound that analogue recording imparts.  Those alterations would also be there if the original source is digital or digital is somewhere in the chain.  I read an article where three recording engineers were talking about high resolution digital vs. very high end analogue—like 1” tape at 30 ips—and they all agreed that the digital recording sound much more like the microphone feed when you do a direct comparison.  But, they also agreed that the analogue tape actually sounded nicer.

To some extent, what we prefer may be a matter of conditioning—we like what is familiar.  Around 15 years ago, a researcher took high quality recordings and then converted them to CD quality recordings and old MP3 quality recording (before MP3 was even close to decent). When his college test subjects listened to analogue vs. CD vs. MP3, they overwhelmingly preferred MP; this was the sound that was was familiar to them.

I don't know the specifics of this experiment, but, I would bet it was simply a matter of running the signal through a commonly available analogue to digital converter that would turn the signal into 16 bit 44.1 khz sampling rate of CDs or the MP3 compression algorithm that reduced the amount of information stored by 75 to 95%. 

I thought MP3 sounded really bad on something as lo-fi as a car stereo, so it would not take much in the way of gear for differences to be noted.  The point was, that people accustomed to MP3 tended to like that sound because it was familiar.  I bet the loudness war works the same way--sadly, I bet the majority of listeners actually like highly compressed music.

There is a magical two-word rebuttal that seems to cover all situations and appears to satisfy a large bloc of people when uttered.  MoFi should simply intone:

"Fake News!"