A recent article published by NPR begged the question “Whatever happened to the audiophile?” Over the last 20 years, technological advancements in the audio industry have made listening to music more convenient and mobile. However, many of these strides toward convenience have amounted to a deterioration in the quality of sound that listeners are ingesting.The article got our World Media Group staff thinking. As listeners shift from expensive home stereo systems to counter-top iPod docks, what is lost? We decided to focus our comparison on the difference in sound quality between standard 16-bit CDs and the average .mp3 download.

“The MP3 codec (for COder/DECoder) was developed at the end of the 1980s and adopted as a standard in 1991. As typically used, it reduces the file size for an audio song by a factor of 10,” Stereophile.com

To simplify, the MP3 file format is designed to shrink audio files into a much smaller amount of memory. This file compression allows consumers to carry around several thousand songs in an MP3 player the size of their palm. As the files are compressed, though, some of the data from the original recording is lost.

More from Stereophile: “Although they are universally described by the mainstream press as being of ‘CD quality,’ MP3s and their lossy-compressed ilk do not offer sufficient audio quality for serious music listening.”

Audiobox put this argument to the test. With a given audience of 20 or more people, they found that the majority of listeners can distinguish the difference between an MP3 audio file and an uncompressed audio file at any compression level. Therefore, the difference in sound quality is not simply a math equation for audio engineers to debate, it is a distinguishable variation that even the average listener notices.

To ignore what MP3s have done for the convenience and portability of music would be ludicrous. At the same time, it is important to note that this convenience comes with a price. As archivists make the transfer to digital storage facilities, much of the original recording quality will be permanently lost.

Learn more about the production of high quality CDs and the benefits that they offer.