Lose the pejorative 'Low Quality' for MP3 and similar

[Malcolm_Percival (Malcolm)]

I think speaking about “quality” is the right message, and calling things “great, greater, greatest, ultimate” to avoid negative feelings is cheesy.

We denote lossy files as “low quality” for two reasons:

Because the effects are reliably audible to some people.
Because in our product’s opinion, investing in lossy content should be discouraged

A lot of times when people argue about this topic, they cite studies of random populations–which generally determine that people on the street can’t tell the difference. A lot of our customers treat music listening as a hobby or a passion, invest in highly resolving equipment, and work on training their ears. In my experience, the artifacts introduced in today’s lossy compression approaches are reliably audible once you know what you’re listening for.

The second point is a little bit more indirect, but also important. Investing in source material that is not of the highest available quality increases the chance that you will want to re-buy it later to upgrade quality–so Roon is nudging you towards thinking about acquiring better quality source material by labeling the low quality stuff accordingly. The product’s opinion about this reflects something about who our audience is/tends to be.

BTW, for anyone who wants to explore whether lossy compression is audible for you, this is a fun test to try. It pits 320k MP3, 128k MP3, and WAV against each other. Use headphones.

Yaaaaawn. All-too predictable response, sadly. I kind of hoped for better.