<story><title>24/192 music downloads make no sense</title><url>http://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>hatsunearu</author><text>The single worst thing that harms audio quality is excessive compression. It&amp;#x27;s ruining everything, I&amp;#x27;d say. Heck, I&amp;#x27;m sure everyone who knows their worth would agree that compression harms audio quality.&lt;p&gt;Recommended reading: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Loudness_war&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Loudness_war&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;edit: compression as in dynamic range compression, not data compression like mp3 in audio</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>beat</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve played acoustic and electric instruments for over 30 years, and recorded numerous albums.&lt;p&gt;Compression is the &lt;i&gt;best&lt;/i&gt; tool we have for accurately reproducing the musicality and emotion of a musical performance. Without compression, most recordings would be unlistenable.&lt;p&gt;Don&amp;#x27;t confuse the foolishness of the loudness wars for &amp;quot;compression is bad&amp;quot;. That&amp;#x27;s like saying the internet is bad because there&amp;#x27;s porn on it.</text></comment>
<story><title>24/192 music downloads make no sense</title><url>http://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>hatsunearu</author><text>The single worst thing that harms audio quality is excessive compression. It&amp;#x27;s ruining everything, I&amp;#x27;d say. Heck, I&amp;#x27;m sure everyone who knows their worth would agree that compression harms audio quality.&lt;p&gt;Recommended reading: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Loudness_war&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Loudness_war&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;edit: compression as in dynamic range compression, not data compression like mp3 in audio</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>muraiki</author><text>Reading &amp;quot;compression&amp;quot; as both a programmer and audio-minded person made that first sentence difficult to parse at first. :)&lt;p&gt;But yeah, it&amp;#x27;s obvious when I have my car stereo nearly on max to listen to classical or jazz, and then if I turn the radio and get a pop music station my ears are about to explode.</text></comment>