Can bad-quality audio impact your nervous system? (An introduction)
I’m not a writer, and I will never be, so here and there it will be dry, but at least I won’t steal your time.
I’m an audio engineer and, moreover an audio restoration specialist.
I do edit and process audio files in different ways. I’m a perfectionist. “Acceptable”, in my dictionary, means “waaay above average”.
The main goal here will be to help people to record good/acceptable quality audio at home, and ideally non-audio-recorder people will recognize why they don’t like poor sound quality.
Why I’m here?
Actually, I’m tired a bit of that billion tons of bad audio I’m facing on the internet. Distortion, noise, re-encoding of an encoded file of an encoded file (“everything is a copy of a copy of a copy”).
But it’s my challenge.
Or a bit yours too, because even if you don’t know what it is, you feel the imperfections, that make you tired, or frustrated, even if you have not heard about this ever.
That’s why you’re switching between radio stations continuously.
It’s not the music. Your ears and your nervous system are tired.
Once I was working for a radio station. They wanted to be louder than their competitors. I told them to look at the average listening time of the listeners. Rivals got a few minutes, and the station I was working for got a few hours in a row, per listener. They still wanted to be louder. Then I was told by a taxi driver that he doesn’t listen to this radio anymore, because it’s distorted…
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Years after I found this:
https://bobbyowsinskiblog.com/spotify-loudness/
“Radio found out a long time ago that compressing the daylights out of a program only led to listener fatigue and people changing the station.”
Then I found this:
https://www.nme.com/news/research-finds-mp3s-make-music-sound-depressing-1895907
Then this one:
https://hrnews.co.uk/noise-at-work-is-having-a-negative-impact-on-health-and-productivity-new-survey-reveals/
And everyone was surprised that Spotify and YouTube maximized the average loudness of the programs. Did you upload a file that reached the maximum loudness? You get a loudness penalty. And this is OK.
Well, actually it was my introduction, hope you enjoyed and will enjoy the following ones.
Cheers,
Richard
