Recent columns bemoaning the way mp3s are destroying music seem to have met with certain misunderstanding. And irritation.

Obviously, I do appreciate the advantages of mp3s and those funny little i-players. They are cute fashion accessories, easy to carry, and can hold ten thousand songs which - if played on cheap enough speakers - sound pretty much like music.
Now let me repeat some of the negatives, hopefully this time in terms that are clearer to understand.
Firstly, and this bears repeating, mp3s sound like crap. On any terms, compared to a CD of the same music, mp3s are lower quality and on a decent sound system anyone without cotton wool in their ears can hear it.
This is not a problem if you want to listen to mp3s on your i-whatever's tiny earphones. Whatever you listen to will sound average on those. But these days it seems even people with decent home hi-fi systems are prepared to plug in an mp3 player and listen to reduced-quality music simply because it serves the great god of convenience.
Secondly, mp3s are devaluing music as an artform by moving it from a greater achievement (the album) to a lesser achievement (the song). In a letter this week (see Letters pages 34/35) A Artus comments: 'Why do songs need to be part of an album anyway? The themed album was just something developed in the ‘60s - Beethoven didn't release any. The album wasn't the beginning of music, its demise won't be the death of music.”
Songs, of course, don't need to be part of an album. But an album is undoubtedly a greater artistic expression than a single song. 'Just something developed in the ‘60s?” – well rock ‘n' roll was just something developed in the fifties (and themed albums were around before that). And Beethoven didn't actually 'release” anything, but you could easily consider a short piece such as 'Für Elise” to be a song and the Ninth Symphony an album. Which is regarded as the higher artistic statement? Music won't die with the album – just lose some of its possibilities for greatness.
The third, and trickiest point, is that, because so many people primarily listen via mp3s and those aforementioned earphones, music is now being mixed and mastered to sound better in that format, to the detriment of the quality you experience through good equipment. Music is being made unlistenable so it sounds good on earphones. Basically, this is done by making it as loud as possible (to be more boomfy on those earphones) which means making the quiet bits louder while pushing back the loud bits. It leads to a draining listening experience as all the dynamics and life are squeezed out of a recording. This phenomenon (not entirely caused by the onslaught of mp3, but heavily exacerbated by it) has become known as the 'Loudness War”.
The war got a fair amount of attention last year due to Metallica's Death Magnetic album, which was very loud, to the extent that in the efforts to pump up the sound it was actually heavily distorted and digitally clipped. 19,000 fans have so far signed an on-line petition calling for the album to be remixed or remastered.
This concept seems to have caused confusion. Let me again quote from A Artus letter: 'Regarding mastering songs for MP3, what Winston means is they are mastered for earphones. But this can be done on MP3, CD or even vinyl, so he's wrong again. CDs and MP3s are played on the same digital equipment anyway, so what's the difference?”
Let me say this again. They are mastered for earphones because so many people listen to mp3s on earphones, but what it means is that CDs (which come from the same masters) on good equipment will sound worse. So mp3s are now polluting the quality of music across the spectrum (and, actually, vinyl isn't affected because they make different masters for vinyl).
Lastly, the letter suggests that I have misquoted Bob Dylan because 'If you actually read the Rolling Stone article he says he dislikes CDs, not MP3s.”
That's the whole point. CDs are mastered the same way as mp3s and suffer as a result. The junk food is being made to taste as good as possible, irrespective that this treatment ruins real food.
As Bob Dylan says: 'You listen to these modern records, they're atrocious, they have sound all over them. There's no definition of nothing, no vocal, no nothing, just like—static.”