A professor of music at Stanford tests his incoming students each year to determine how we become attuned to what we like:

He has them listen to a variety of recordings which use different formats from MP3 to ones of much higher quality. He described the results with some disappointment and frustration, as a music lover might, that each year the preference for music in MP3 format rises. In other words, students prefer the quality of that kind of sound over the sound of music of much higher quality. He said that they seemed to prefer “sizzle sounds” that MP3s bring to music. It is a sound they are familiar with.

So there we go. High fidelity is doomed. Have fun, kids, in your lossy, over-compressed future. I’ll be in my basement with Steve Buscemi‘s character from Ghost World. Or maybe not.

I hate my interests. You think it’s healthy to obsessively collect things? You can’t relate to other people, so you fill your life with stuff… I’m just like all these other collector losers.