thestreet.com (jim seymour) strikes back ...
A couple of months ago I wrote about e.Digital (EDIG:Nasdaq OTC BB), a tiny San Diego company that some had pegged as a possible big winner in the new era of downloadable music. I said in that column that I feared that audiophile-quality sound -- the big advantage claimed for a forthcoming portable music player to be produced with technology from EDIG and its licensing partners, Lucent (LU:NYSE), which I am long, and Texas Instruments (TXN:NYSE) -- wouldn't be such a big advantage after all, because I think this is a market where convenience and economy are going to outweigh sound-quality issues for some time to come.
After all, portable music players -- "digital Walkmen" -- are usually used in settings, such as driving, jogging, cycling, perhaps at the office or on campus -- where the surrounding background noise, plus the typically crummy "earbud" headphones employed, work powerfully against hearing anything like high-fidelity reproduction.
EDIG holders didn't like that call, of course, and flamed me. Fair enough: It's part of the job.
But an excellent piece in the September issue of Sound & Vision magazine (successor to Stereo Review), which compares audio quality from the three main "codecs," or COmpression-DECompression engines, now suggests that the much-lauded EPAC codec from EDIG's partner Lucent may not be better sounding than the other available choices, after all.
The writer/researcher, David Ranada, used three experienced "professional listeners," including a codec designer, in the double-blind listening tests. The results will surprise anyone who routinely disses MP3 as a low-end standard or who waits expectantly for EPAC and other presumably high-end codecs to appear. In general, none of the three big codecs used in the Sound & Vision tests had a consistent advantage over the others.
This is important news not just for MP3 junkies but for investors trying to figure how to make a buck in the downloadable digital music market. No matter what you think of my view that "good enough" sound will rule, if there isn't a clear advantage to one or another of the available codecs, especially when judged by three skilled recorded-music critics, then the probable dynamics and economics of this market change dramatically. And it means that the MP3 format itself is likely headed for an even longer and more profitable life.
The article has some necessarily dense passages, but it's well worth reading for anyone interested in the MP3 market. You can find that issue on the newsstands now, but in a great example of the advantages of pixels over dead trees, you can read an expanded version, with even more arcana, for free at S&V's excellent Web site.
A tip: I've found that for me, the big difference in the perceived quality of playback of downloadable digital music comes from the bit-rate at which the music has been recorded, not the codec involved.
I've gone over to a 192 kilobit-per-second rate for all my MP3 files, which to my ear is "CD-quality" or better. In my highly approximate tests -- no fancy equipment, no high-tech test equipment, just ears, experience and patience -- the threshold of pain, where I thought I could tell a difference between an original CD and an MP3 copy of it, was about 160 Kbps. By going to 192 Kbps -- a choice readily available in most CD "rippers," such as Real Networks' (RNWK:Nasdaq) estimable RealJukebox, now in its second beta -- I'm buying a little insurance on that call, at a small cost in hard-disk storage space. |
