Mp3 Audio

People have been singing and making music since the stone age.  It is a fundamental aspect of being human.   But for thousands of years, if you wanted to hear music you could only hear it live at the place and at the time where it was being performed.

Then, fairly recently, radio and telephone technology made it possible have music performed at one location and be heard by people far away.  Awesome!

At about the same time, technology was being developed which made it possible to store a musical performance for playback at a later time.  Think of the earliest recordings made on wax cylinders by Thomas Edison.  Think of your great-grandfather’s wind-up Victrola that played early 78-rpm records, which evolved into home stereo systems that played stereo LP’s.  Think of cassette and 8-track tapes that you could play in your car.  Even more awesome!

So, we learned how to capture and preserve musical performances for later playback far and wide, making much more music accessible to many, many more people — all based on analog technology.  Wonderful progress for humanity!

Then came computers and the digital age we live in today.  We learned to make digital versions of analog recordings.  We now have music recorded on CD’s and stored in computer files.  Unlike records and tapes, digital music can be played and copied repeatedly without wearing out.  Manufacturing and distribution costs for digital music are much lower than for records or tapes.

Then add the internet, a great medium for distributing all kinds of data, including digital music.  However, you want the smallest possible files in order to minimize computer storage space requirements and to make for the fastest possible file upload and download speeds.   Clever software developers learned how to “compress” digital audio files to make them smaller while still maintaining “most” of the musical content.  These are now known as Mp3 files.  Mp3’s are now replacing CD’s as a medium for delivering music to the masses.  Its becoming hard to find a new car that is equipped with a CD player and home CD players are becoming less common.

I’m not a fan of Mp3 audio because it doesn’t deliver all of the sound that was originally recorded.  Mp3’s are a pale imitation of reality, without the sonic detail that was inherent in the music as it was originally performed.

Having said that, the audio quality of Mp3’s has improved enough in recent years so that I have reluctantly surrendered to the convenience and speed they provide for delivering music over the internet.  The audio samples you will hear on this website are all Mp3 files.  Please understand that the original high definition digital audio files sound better.