See: http://web.archive.org/web/20090804164014/http://i.gizmodo.com/5166649/ipods-and-young-people-have-utterly-destroyed-music http://web.archive.org/web/20090

See: http://web.archive.org/web/20090804164014/http://i.gizmodo.com/5166649/ipods-and-young-people-have-utterly-destroyed-music http://web.archive.org/web/20090804164014/http://i.gizmodo.c... 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. And from http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/03/the-sizzling-sound-of-music.html http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/03/the-sizzling-sound-of-music... ... each year the preference for music in MP3 format rises. In other words, students prefer the quality of that kind of sound over the sound of music of much higher quality. He said that they seemed to prefer “sizzle sounds” that MP3s bring to music. It is a sound they are familiar with. EDIT: See also http://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=Myths_(Vinyl) http://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=Myths_(Vinyl)