Would you please read
carefully this document
and tell me if you think
it's serious ?

It was a shock when
I read it, can someone tell
me if it can be taken seriously or not ?

I'm really worried...

Thanks.

Here is the document :


http://www.informatik.fh-hamburg.de/~windl...r/MP3-risk.html

Remember they also say that cellphones cause cancer?

It is only natural (but silly an non-justified) to mistrust new technologies.

On this subject: what you can hear, you hear, the ear does not need "perpetual calibration". This is aload of bull.

Believe me, I'm a medical doctor.

http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....indpost&p=51036

Not at all. You don't have to be afraid.

Hearing can only damaged by loud noise, bad speakers (like bose...) or bad music (Modern Talking...).

Assuming that is at all true - it's just saying that, the part of your ear that gets used, when hearing uncompressed noise, doesn't get used as much when listening to lossy compressed audio.

Again, assuming that article is true, I think we hear enough noises a day so that we use that filtering mechanism in our ears, enough to keep it working.

This man is insanely paranoid.

Well, I didn't see that this subject had already been
discussed on another topic...more than one year ago .
I feel much better now ! I was almost ready to
throw away all my MP3 collection...

This document is wrong.

I am not sure if we should spent time explaining why. (perhaps you just want to know if it is true or no).

Even the conclusion is wrong and very incoherent. Recommending the use of analog radio and tv because they are not digital: every radio and tv station is using digital storage/transmission, and using lossy processes.
So even when watching analogic tv you are watching mpeg.

Maybe the only way to escape this evil digital technology and malicious lossy codecs is to
go back to 1970 ? Full analogue era !
Oh, by the way... when I watch Hertzian TV, do I really watch Mpeg stuff ?
There doesn't seem to ba any artefact... The material must be much less
compressed than on DVD or Satellite tv ?

Please do. If you (and the others) just say the document is wrong, you are making a undocumented claim.

The Internet consists mostly of undocumented claims, propaganda and socalled reviews. I personally don't believe anything I read on the Internes unless it has been thoughly documented and scientifically proven. True that no proof exists that lossy music is harmful, but no proof exists that is is harmless either.

Subliminal DRM messages.

Speaking of "subliminal", the author has a sense of humor he's not even aware of.

I've never claimed to be an expert in psychoacoustic audio compression, but if I had to choose between this person's "theories" and thousands of people's facts concerning the effects involved, I'd put my money on the latter.

I take it that by using some false logic we can conclude that viewing
lossy images will make us go blind? OMG, JPEG induced retinal degeneration!!!!!

Yes, but you've been sighted in the past sitting on a giant cabbage, so there is no telling whether you can be trusted

The link is pretty funny, and the author appears to have incorporated many official looking pictures into his "explanation". I enjoyed this particular segment the most:


Blaming tinitus on data reduction is pretty novel I must say.

Folks, if you follow the link at the bottom of this page you'll find out, that the author of this article is Cyberyogi, the founder and teachmaster of Logologie - the first cyberage-religion!


From the authors other sites:


So I would take this warnings serious if I was you!
Don't miss to follow these links!!!:

Warning: Pink can be dangerous for health!
http://www.informatik.fh-hamburg.de/~windl...ogologieFAQ.htm
http://www.informatik.fh-hamburg.de/~windl...English%20texts

By the way my microwave is channeling Elvis and his latest songs.
My problem is my microwave encodes all songs with Xing 96 cbr ....!
Has anyone experience to tune in lossless ?? - Help highly appreciated !

In Germany, many TV stations already use so-called "Tapeless Broadcasting", especially the news stations. The broadcast isn't stored on video tapes anymore, but instead on servers with a few Terabyte capacity. They are working with full resolution video streams of 50 MBit/sec. That's more than 10 times the datarate of an average DVD. During a broadcast, two servers play the same content parallel, frame-exact, in case one server has a malfunction. Often, they also have a conventional video tape running, in case both servers go down.

Tapeless digital broadcasting will soon become the standard. Many stations only still use analog equipment because of the big investment costs they had for it.

This actually reminds me of that thread where Spoon wondered if lossy coding would evolutionally affect us and we would lose hability to hear high frequencies

That was my parents fault!

Seriously, that cabbage was real. We used to live in a small town about 50 kilometers from the one I currently live in. That town was in the late seventies kind of a "hotspot" for UFO activity (they have 7 non-active volcanoes that supposedly attracted UFOs) and there was this farmer that had learned and further developed vegetable-growing techniques from Asia, IIRC; but he said that the aliens told him how to do it, to get a publicity boost. The picture was taked in the Town's Fair where he was showing his super-sized vegetables. They needed something to show scale, and since I was the only baby around...

The whole giant vegetable thing fell apart because, my father tells me, it was actually more expensive to grow one giant cabbage than its weight's worth of regular cabbages, and it did not taste the same.

It is one cool story, IMHO.

On topic, it is kinda hard to actually explain why is this incorrect, but I might give it a try, if somebody is interested. But, really, I don't see a point.

No, no, no, it is not cell phones which cause cancer. It is liesure suits. A know fact. Yeah, right.

I thought the author sounded like someone who believes in the 'incredible powers of attuned Quartz crystals'.



ROFLMAO!
So then there is selective pressure towards listening to compressed music which results in audio compression freaks having a much higher fecundity than the rest of the population?

"Greenwich, UK 1/1/05 - In a disturbing find, scientists have discovered that men who do not listen to digitally compressed music have dramatically reduced sperm counts. Researchers suggest men compressing CDs to Wavpack and listening at least twice a day can increase their fertility by several orders of magnitude.
Women of child bearing age wishing to concieve are recommended to do the same, with OptimFROG showing the greatest gains in fertility.
In an interesting exception, Xing (mp3) users are rendered sterile after only a few listens."

edit:
I don't doubt it, though it looks sort of like a green, mutant, miniature, dead elephant in the low res. avatar picture

Fine with me.
I don't care for having children (yeah, I am kind of selfish)
So I am fine with my lossy codecs (which nowadays is pretty much all the music I listen to)


ROFLMAO!
What do you want for less than 8k?

I've actually had kind of the same teory as this guy, but without all the details... I have a mild case of tinnitus (only notice it when all is quiet). Also, when I'm exposed to louder music (for instance at a bar) it does not take long before my hearing gets bad; sometimes I can't even identify the song playing!

I'm not saying it certainly IS a connection between music compression and tinnitus, but without research -- who knows for sure?

It was Spase. My bad.

http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=2159

And yes, I posted there (first reply) that his idea would (maybe) make sense if evolution was based on lamarckist concepts, not darwinist ones.

Have you tried going to an ears-nose-and-throat doctor? Your tinnitus sounds like it might be bad.


There is no need for research. There is simply nothing in compressed music that could be harmful to human ears (other than the volume it's played at )
"Psychoaccustic" means just that: it sounds the same to your brain. It has the same "effect" as normal music. It does not have to cover any "full spectrum" or "calibrate itself" or anything. The added noise of lossy compression is not like subliminal messages, that you are unconsciously hearing, it is meant to be inaudible. That is, below the threshold of hearing. To your brain, it is not there.

No, I have never had my ears checked. Now you've got me a bit worried, hehe.

Try to avoid too loud music and noise!
This can irreversibly damage your hearing!

If you have tinitus that is a "signal" that you was exposed too long to loud music.
If you have problems to recognize the music you really should see a doctor as AtaqueEG recommended!

Sometimes the music in bars or discos is much louder than allowed by law in working areas.

Actually Im not sure that's correct.
If I listen to a 64kilobit/sec BLADE or Xing stereo encode it gives me the urge to stab an icepick into my ear, which would likely result in severe ear damage.

Admittedly the compressed music is not the direct cause of the damage, but the point stands

edit: yes I am being sarcastic

Undocumented claim. Please provide proof.

I can actually make the opposite undocumented claim: Lossy music have already caused world-wide brain and ear damage: 90%+ of people worldwide thinks 160 kb mp3 is perfect for listening, whereas I get a headache after listening for a few minutes.

No it's just worded a little strongly. There is no plausible theory as to why lossily compressed music would cause hearing loss, and there is no body of anecdotal evidence to suggest it might be happening. Until either exists there is nothing to investigate. Further current theory would suggest that since lossy codecs subject the ear to less real, as opposed to perceived, noise then listening to lossy codecs should be better for your hearing.

[quote=Audible!,Jan 17 2004, 05:08 PM] [QUOTE]
The link is pretty funny, and the author appears to have incorporated many official looking pictures into his "explanation". I enjoyed this particular segment the most:
[QUOTE]I personally own mainly cheap CDs and phono records, but almost no downloaded MP3 musics. I have however some computer games with MP3 music, but I don't play them excessively. Despite I generally listen to music only quietly, I have repeatedly tinitus; this happens particularly often when I fall asleep while watching TV, even when the sleep only lasts few minutes. I thus also suspect the data reduction in radio and TV broadcasts as a cause, not least because the hearing uses particularly the sleep for calibrating itself, during that the presence of neuroacoustically datareduced tones thus should be particularly harmful.[/QUOTE]

Blaming tinitus on data reduction is pretty novel I must say. [/quote]
reminds me of a pre-(this season) Niles Crane

Oh, but it does.

There is nothing in human hearing's physiology ("the way it works") that could even begin to suggest such a thing. Documented scientific proof? Any book on local library on this subject. Read my lips: what you don't hear, cannot damage you.

Let me put a similar example: dog whistles. Even if I recorded one of those, handed you headphones and cranked up the volume while playing such sample, your hearing would not suffer in the slightest bit; why? because you can't hear it. It does not stimulate the "transducer" that we all have inside our ears.

This is widely documented, BTW.

*Emphasis is mine

There is no scientific backing (controlled experiment with statistically significant results) that quantization noise introduced by MP3 or any other lossy codec is different from any other natural sound for the human hearing system.

Quantization noise is just narrow-band noise - the fact that it is masked (if the psymodel is good) even helps - since it won't even get to the central nervous system through the hearing nerve, and most of the noise will be below ATH (absolute threshold of audibility) - which means that it even won't be transfered to the middle-ear.

These two facts would actually help the claim that quantization noise in perceptual audio codecs is actually less harmful than any other noise - because it is masked.

Great !
I like the idea that MP3 is good for my hearing because
it has some useless parts of the audio signal filtered out...
But, then, PCM audio CDs ... are they bad for my hearing ?
Just kiddin !
So glad I didn't throw away my MP3 collection after all !

i've been messin' around with mp3 since early 1999... my hearing hasn't changed one bit over the past 5 years

i've also been a club DJ since 1996... fortunately that hasn't affected my hearing much either

guess i consider myself lucky, blessed with good ears

And the compressed audio doesn't go directly to our ears as it is.. there is the noise introduced by speakers for example.
For damage the ear it should at least come directly into our ears without other audio interferences which could compensate the loss.

My tinnitus started just about the time when lossy compression appeared and I must also say, that a Rolling Stones concert music temporarely raised my hearing threshold, such that I was deaf to quiet sounds for some hours.
Was not I just listening to too loud music? Since then, I have earplugs with me all the time, and I do apply them. Recently I had an audiogram and it shows, that I did stop further hearing loss.

To me regular harmonic distortion also gives the urge to take off my headphones. That is how I became to love bass heavy music. 3x15dB boost at 30Hz is a 45dB cut at 1kHz. So I can have an SPL of 100dB@30Hz, yet no damaging sounds. The distortion is also reduced or pushed below the hearing threshold.

(http://www.informatik.fh-hamburg.de/~windl...ogologieFAQ.htm)

Does anybody need a doctorate degree to confirm that this man is absolutely insane?

Well then, I guess he wouldn't take blind testing as proof of MP3's harmlessness.

I haven't read through everything you have written here nor the article posted in first post, but!

I have regular problems with ears... Physical problems. My hearing itself is fine, but in period of time my ears hurt much (I really don't know the medical term to this thing in English; that's why my text is so plain, but it has been diagnosed by doctor and I have cured it over and over again). That problem has been with me very long time (that is also long time before mp3 was even invented) and now - few years I have listened mp3 format sounds a lot. And - result is that if the file has bad quality, my ears begin to hurt after 10 minutes of listening mp3 128 kbps (Xing, for example) with my earphones; mp3-s with larger bitrate I can tolerate up to 1 hour, but no more!

Funny thing is, that I personally can't make the diffrence between - let's say 128 kbps LAME or Xing, because I don't have very good equipment and also - my hearing is not so precise, but - I have tested a lot and used files that I encode myself and files from others (with EncSpot program) and - results are the sam all the time. I also can not tolerate if computer is working in the room where I sleep - at the mornings I have a headache and also I can not listen even WAV format music (directly from original CD) for a long time. BUT - if I use my Sony Hi-Fi system with earphones, I have listened music for hours (while taking a nap;)) without any futher problems...

So I don't know what to blame... bad sound card? (Earphones quite good), compressed music files?

Anyhow, I don't want to say, that mp3 can cause something, because as said - I have other problems with ears also, so... Make up your own mind.

P.S. Sorry for the hard-to-understand-text; it's quite late here and I haven't checked text for eny errors, so it might be confusing...

Spy - have you tried this?
Create two copies of a CD:
1. Copy 1:1, i.e. Extract from CD -> wav -> Burning program -> audio CD-R
2. Copy with lossy step: EAC -> e.g. 128kbps mp3 -> decode/burn -> audio CD-R

Ask someone else to put the CDs in your hifi in a random order and listen to them in CD repeat mode (without knowing which one is played) until your ears start to hurt. Repeat this several times - and document the results (time it takes until ears hurt, which CD was played and maybe some details about the pain in case there's a difference).

If you post the results here, I'm sure our statistics experts will help to evaluate the results.

I'm a little late, but anyway...

Well, in the absence of any evidence either way people should choose the simpler of two theories. For medicine though people often choose the "rather safe than sorry" and assume anything is dangerous until it's proven harmless. That's why it's so easy to upset people with alarms of cancer from this, tinnitus from mp3, etc. This stance makes sense sometimes, but nowadays I think the stress all these "health alarms" cause is worse than the actual healthrisks they warn for...

I'd debate that. There are even legal limits on the allowed exposure to ultra sonic sounds. They're ridiculously high, but they exist.

Depending on the frequency of your "dog whistle" you might start to hear it at ~ 100dB, or even lower. Hearing 24kHz at 100dB is quite common, according to published research. I don't have the references on me, but I've posted them here before.


As for wrecking your hearing with psychoacoustic coded sounds - in the short term, that's nonesense. And the fact that all "real life" sounds aren't coded means it won't happen - ever.

But if everything you ever heard came via a cheap 3" speaker, I'm sure your ears would adapt to this in some way. But I'm not sure sure whether they'd boost the unused frequency extremes, or lose them.

Similarly, if everything you ever heard had noise added tightly around the limits of spectral masking (either just within, or just outside - i.e. good codec, or bad codec!) it's not inconceivable that the ear would adapt in some way. The existing human sharp spectral masking curves are due to an active neural feedback process - the basic "dead ear" curves are much wider. Would the neural tuning curves become sharper to filter out the noise, or wider to stop us from actually hearing it?

I think it's likely that nothing would change. For one thing, the existing shape doesn't match anything specific in our environment, but can behave as a useful time/frequency compromise for some tasks. Why change?

However, to say with 100% certainty that one of our senses wouldn't adapt to a continuous change in stimulus over time (or even generations) is a very brave statement indeed!


Still, the guy crank, and I enjoy mpc without worries!

Cheers,
David.

EDIT: The quality of digital TV and (especially) radio broadcasts in the UK is enough to give anyone a headache! DAB digital radio often sounds worse than FM (80kbps mp2!!!!), never mind CD! The bitrates are higher on FreeView, but most commercial stations are a transcoded mess.

There are so many potential and unknown triggers of tinnitus. Personally when I quit smoking and taking psychotherapeutic medicines it reduced in frequency a lot. This is the same time period I was getting into mp3s so if they were an issue I doubt I would have noticed such an improvement. And don't you dare ask me to ABX by smoking again!

If this was understood from what I posted, I am sorry, I did not meant to disqualify evolution

Obviously some changes --and I am not talking about damage here-- have and will occur to our senses and to other organs/systems in our body triggered by external stimuli, but don't expect this to happen anytime soon.
I think that is pretty safe, with current hearing physiology knowledge, that you can spend you life listening to your MPCs and me to my MP3 (although that won't happen, most likely in 5 years or so we'll all be listening to lossless encoding of somekind, and don't forget about the new media that will appear/become popular in the inmediate future) without the slightest worry, besides volume, that is.

24kHz hearing? I would be very much interested in taking a look at such paper. I have never heard --no pun intended-- something like that.

Did anyone looked at the history of equal loudness curves? I am wondering about the peak at approx 16kHz. Does TV's horizontal deflection has anything to do with it?

The first part of your response is completely about organ "adaptation" (in the colloquial sense) and I have no argument with it, however your parenthesized statement "(or even generations)" leads me to believe you feel this acquired "adaptation" (to a 3" speaker or to good or bad codecs) could concievably be passed on to offspring.
I wish to stress that acquired characteristics are not heritable.

An individual whose senses have "adapted" to the "continuous change in stimulus over time" cannot transfer this ability to their offspring so that the offspring do not require a similar period of "adaptation". Without an unbelievably complex modification of the genome of the gametes which would allow for a predisposition to not require an acclimatization period to the hypothetical 3" speaker or codec processed sounds (so indescribably improbable as to be easily called "impossible"), the offspring themselves would have to go through the same acclimatization period, without question.
The sensory stimulus has no ability to physically modify the genome of the gametes. Without this ability, no amount of exposure to the stimulus will impact the offsprings ability to hear one thing or another. The genome followed by the experience in the womb dictates the physical characteristics of the ear of the newborn child, not the parents exposure to limited frequency or compressed sounds.
This is extremely well-known, and there are no known exceptions (bacterial transferance of plasmids coding for novel characteristics are not acquired characteristics since the characteristics are an outgrowth of the transferred DNA of the plasmid and only begin to be expressed subesquent to the transfer). Nor is there a mechanism known or suspected that would allow for such exceptions.

So assuming I have interpreted your meaning with the "(or even generations)" statement correctly (which I probably have not), I'm certain it's quite safe to say that such a statement regarding the ability of those whose sensory organs become adapted to specific types of sounds (in our case, those from a hypothetical 3" speaker or from all sounds being processed with a codec) to pass the ability on to their offspring is not a brave one at all.

If I have completely misinterpreted your parenthesized comment, I apologize, but there is far too much absurd nonsense and disinformation about the action of selection and Evolution on the internet as it is (the thread rjamorim linked to earlier illustrates this perfectly). This is in part due to the relative subtlety of the subject material, and also due to proscriptions (especially here in the US: see Kansas school board) against learning empirical facts that might indirectly contradict religious dogma.

TVs are a fine example actually... i'm sure after years upon years of watching teev for several hours a day could concievably place a kind of "notch filter" on one's hearing. certainly i don't know anybody over ~25 years who can hear this annoying sound. perhaps this could be tested by switching the TV to NTSC mode (instead of PAL) to slightly change the pilot tone and watch people's reactions.

however, the above is a special case. a feature of lossy coding that has been neglected in that "report" (sorry, but i just HAD to use quotes) is the fact that the masked frequencies are different frame per frame. the higher precision in the same bands in different frames would surely cancel out over a fairly short term, producing an average that is even harder to distinguish from analog noise.

the only way lossy coding could concievably alter hearing (even in an "adaptation" sense) is if one were to listen to a constant tone with a noise background coded at a low bitrate. one could imagine the ear would slowly become aware of the noise lacking in the bands adjacent to the constant tone... and in this case i'd say the most "damaging" effect would be the opposite of the above - the fact that you would be less sensitive to the frequency of the main tone.

oh, and as far as analog TV broadcasting goes... ew. nowadays i can tell a live sports event from a delayed event simply from the artefacts present. and my reception isn't even particularly good... (would this be a case of natural noise being perceptually different from quantization noise? ).

There is no peak at 16 kHz as far as I know. The curve is continuously increasing from about 13 kHz, where the second dip has it's minimum. If this dip is what you're referring to, it has nothing to do with TV. It's because of the length of your ear canal - it works like a 3/4 wave pipe resonator around this frequency.

I leave it as an exercise to calculate the length of your ear canal and check if it's correct. The speed of sound in air is 340 m/s.

Rotfl....

so do we have to be worried that after listening to to much mp3 files our brains will go lazy and unable to fillter out background sounds in the real world ? (listening to a conversation in a noisy environment would get hard)

im sure we are in no danger...

allmost all the time while listing to compressed audio there are plenty of background sound not originating from the compressed source to keep your mind calibrated.....

for example the whirring of fans on your pc.... wind blowing... a clock ticking ... your own breath ... everytime you move your clothes make noises.... cars driving by ... your neigbours making love... an airplane ... birds, street dogs, cows , sheep... trains... rain on the window. your fridge.... TL lights humming... your aquarium or other pet ... the DVD turning in your drive.... eating crisps while watching a dvd ... kids playing in the street...

well you get the picture by now ..if you start paying attention to them... the list is ENDLESS......


just try to find a silent spot somewhere a be amazed at how much "background noises" you yourself create ... more then enough to keep your mind calibrated ...


maybe there would be some truth in that story if you only listened at only 1 simultanious compressed audio source for the rest of your life, you probably would have to do this as soon as you are born, (your brain would get lazy and unable to filter out backgroundsounds, you possible would have a lot of trouble with following a conversation in a noisy environment) but that would only be possible in a theoretical world. from the moment you start mixing in other background sounds (even other compressed ones) your mind has to start working to filter them back out ....

and it could easely be fixed with a "MP3 hearing aid" (patent pending)

be happy you can get an hour or two to listen to only the DVD you want without to many distractions... and enjoy....your mind will not unlearn that quick , otherwise we would be in real trouble when we wake up in the morning....

Hi, sshd. I respect what you're trying to say, but I think you've got it around the wrong way. I think that it should be proven that it IS harmful, rather than the opposite. There is no need to prove that it isn't harmful...and besides, proving that it IS harmful (which is a far easier goal to make) will necessarily negate proving that it isn't .