Washington Post article on MoFi vs. Fremer vs. Esposito

I have no problem with the notion that many of us simply like the alteration of the sound that analogue recording imparts.  Those alterations would also be there if the original source is digital or digital is somewhere in the chain.  I read an article where three recording engineers were talking about high resolution digital vs. very high end analogue—like 1” tape at 30 ips—and they all agreed that the digital recording sound much more like the microphone feed when you do a direct comparison.  But, they also agreed that the analogue tape actually sounded nicer.

To some extent, what we prefer may be a matter of conditioning—we like what is familiar.  Around 15 years ago, a researcher took high quality recordings and then converted them to CD quality recordings and old MP3 quality recording (before MP3 was even close to decent). When his college test subjects listened to analogue vs. CD vs. MP3, they overwhelmingly preferred MP; this was the sound that was was familiar to them.

@larryi - that's an interesting test with surprising results. I mean, I was familiar with VHS tapes, but DVD's still looked a lot better to me when those came out.

I'd like to see more details about that researcher's test of 15 years ago, as I'd have to question how he converted those 'high quality recordings' to 'CD quality recordings' (to me, CD's are plenty high-quality). After all, there were some really rubbish sounding CD's through much of the 80's, especially. It's a real art and skill, mastering music for CD's and other media.

I'd also be interested in knowing how the test subjects did this listening - if it was on crap earbuds or on a crap system, no, I probably wouldn't be able to tell the difference, either, or might prefer the mp3... If it was on a good sound system (and it may have been, I don't know) or quality headphones, the results might have been quite different. 

I don't know the specifics of this experiment, but, I would bet it was simply a matter of running the signal through a commonly available analogue to digital converter that would turn the signal into 16 bit 44.1 khz sampling rate of CDs or the MP3 compression algorithm that reduced the amount of information stored by 75 to 95%. 

I thought MP3 sounded really bad on something as lo-fi as a car stereo, so it would not take much in the way of gear for differences to be noted.  The point was, that people accustomed to MP3 tended to like that sound because it was familiar.  I bet the loudness war works the same way--sadly, I bet the majority of listeners actually like highly compressed music.

MoFi has an interview on their site with their President being interviewed by TAS

I tried to copy the link but failed

There is a magical two-word rebuttal that seems to cover all situations and appears to satisfy a large bloc of people when uttered.  MoFi should simply intone:

"Fake News!"