Re: Please don't use ....
I honestly can't decide if you're being sarcastic or not. But, just in case:
"MP3 compression removes sounds the human ear cannot register" - and this affects sound quality to the human ear how?
Changes the audio wave? Er... how? In ways the human ear can't register? Nobody cares about the things in the audio that they *can't* hear. Or is this some sort of Zen where removing the bits you can't hear anyway somehow affects the bits you *can* hear (which, of course, is true to an extent if you do the job badly or too much, but the point of MP3 is that it doesn't, provided you have high enough settings, and yet it still takes 1000th of the storage space).
Maybe, just maybe, the thing is that people don't care about audio quality because 99% of the population CAN'T tell the difference between a decently-recorded MP3 and the original sound source, or cheap headphones and stupidly overpriced ones, or Bose hardware and some actual, professional rig, or gold-plated oxygen-free cable and a 50p bit of copper?
Maybe the vast majority of people were never able to. Like those able to discern HD at any sensible distance in a proper equivalence test (note that PAL signals fed down analogue copper into an interlaced SD TV compared to a HD-clean, digital processed signal with greater display dynamics available on the actual image elements anyway isn't really an accurate test of just resolution, for example) - maybe they are in the absolute minority in this case? Maybe most people bought a new TV in the last few years to get a flat screen rather than a cubic box, a bigger screen, a brighter screen, one that has HDMI sockets but NOT because it was actually capable of HD? Maybe it really doesn't matter if you wear designer trainers or some cheap junk that lasts longer but looks slightly different (and probably came out of the same factory anyway).
Maybe, just maybe, people don't care because THEY CAN'T TELL. It's like a colourblind person being told they have to buy a t-shirt that's red-and-green rather than just red. If they can't tell, and there's no compelling reason to otherwise affect said purchase, maybe it's all the same to them and they'd rather have the cheaper, easier, plain red t-shirt?
I can't spot HD. My HDTV receives both HD and SD and displays both with relative indifference (many don't - I've seen some HD TV's that just cannot handle SD content nicely). I can see the difference up close (from years of working on 1024x768 screens back in the VGA-only era from inches away while watching SD TV's *PERFECT* images on a WinTV card in the corner of my screen), and I can spot a dead pixel or screen dirt at ten paces, but I haven't actually bothered to do anything about HD.
Hell, I have HDMI inputs for everything purely because that's the standard now, not because I get anything more from them (but HDMI travels less well over Cat6 than VGA in my experience). They are just sitting there, doing the job of a SCART or Composite lead, really. About the only thing I can see that actually comes out in HD differently is if I plug my laptop in, with it's stupidly high resolution which I can't read from the other side of the room when it's like that anyway. Put it in 1024x768 and I notice no less pixels, but it's at a decent size I can read from 6 feet away. About the best thing about HDTV's is that everyone now has a TV you can plug a computer into if your screen breaks, and which will take any resolution that even a ten-year-old laptop could pump out quite happily without requiring special conversion, adaptors or smoothing.
My car has an SD card reader in the radio. Junky MP3's are all it plays because - with even the quietest of driving noise - I can't tell the difference between that and the CD player in it. Hell, I can't even tell when it's the radio playing the same songs as I have on the SD card unless I drive through a tunnel. You could swap the radio for anything else and I still wouldn't tell. I changed car for one with the 15-year-old original radio/cassette in it recently and could not tell the difference between that and the usual radio I use when I moved it from my old car.
My laptop has inbuilt sound, and it's a gamer's laptop, as was my previous one ("gaming laptop?!" I hear you cry? Yes, because for the games I play, the fast-paced twitch-reflex FPS shooters and everything else, I can't tell the difference between a powerful desktop PC running them at 120fps and my laptop that doesn't dip much below 60, so why not have a laptop that's portable and battery-backed as well?). It's supposed to be very good sound, according to all the stickers on it. They make a big fuss about how it's not your usual integrated sound.
I turned off the mixer panel in the toolbar because it annoyed me (and all that equaliser junk). I set it to 2-speaker stereo in VideoLan and any games because it made my movies sound funny in 7.2. I plug in a cheapy pair of over-the-ear headphones and I'm literally deaf to the world except for game sounds (and can hear the slightest buzz - on other people's laptops, I actually pick up their hard disk and even mouse-moving-on-the-screen sounds through those headphones that you can't hear otherwise without a stupidly amplified external speaker). How many people with expensive headphones for "quality" then have noise-cancelling ones that basically modify the signal based on some internal mic at some unknown sample rate anyway?
I can happily watch TV through my laptop with the internal speaker and entertain a room of friends without anyone cringing. You know why? It's good enough. If you asked me if I could save £5 by not having 7.2 surround on my computer's sound card, or 96KHz mixing, or whatever, I'd do it.
Maybe, just maybe, some people are overly fussy and think they need these things, or actually do need these things and want to make EVERYONE else have them for no good reason (possibly to make them cheaper for the person to get their "specialised" hardware? I don't know). If *YOU* can hear the difference, you go buy them. Don't tell everyone else what they should or should not be buying, listening to, or watching.
Me? Hell, if push comes to shove, I'll pull a pair of in-the-ears out of the "60p" box in Maplin's if I really need them. I'll barely notice. I suspect almost everyone on the planet is pretty much the same. Back in the 80's, I don't remember anyone complaining about the audio quality from the huge over-the-ear school headphones that all plugged into a splitter box out of the back of a cassette player. I work in schools - found some pair that was LITERALLY from the 80's the other day in the "does anyone want these" bin, was tempted to keep them for myself but actually, they sound just the same as any other headphones I've ever tried that were a similar design. And nothing has a 5mm jack or whatever size it is any more.
Please stop telling people that audiophiles should somehow be deciding what the world listens to. That's like having sportscar enthusiasts dictate how fast milk floats should go.
If you can hear it, good for you. I'm quite happy with MP3, SD, 25-50fps, and having more money in my pocket. As are about 99% of the world.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
