Listen to what gets lost when an MP3 is made
The MP3, the file type of most songs you listen to on a computer, is compressed. Part of the reason people love vinyl records so much (even though they don’t necessarily sound “better” than digital formats), is that they are closer in format to the way you would actually hear a song if you were standing in the room with Rihanna instead of listening to “FourFiveSeconds” on your phone.
Compression happened because (especially in the 1990s when this change was happening) file size needed to be small enough to live on your computer in mass quantities without slowing it down. Now, many computers have the space for higher-quality formats, but the MP3 format has become an industry standard. And information is lost as songs are converted to MP3 format.
The very first song to become an MP3 was Suzanne Vega’s “Tom’s Diner.” A German engineer played the song over and over again as he tried to squeeze the song into a smaller size without changing its sound too much. Here’s “Tom’s Diner” in its MP3 format.
