Bring Back Hi-Fidelity

Over the last three or so years I've noticed a rapidly growing trend to use .mp3 encoded music and sound effect cues in trailers, promos, commercials television and film. Now I love the convenience of .mp3 files for my iPod, iPhone and Blackberry, but I hate the sound of them, especially if I'm trying to mix it into a spot with narration and sound effects. Everything gets this haze of mud and grit over it. It's sort of the audio equivalent of doing a high-definition picture finish using VHS source material.

I do understand the workflow considerations for why .mp3 files make it into a project in the first place. Everything today has to be faster and cheaper. It's the nature of business in the first decade of the new century. The one thing that gets moved to the back of the bus is quality. Quality; it's one thing that we, as a country used to hold in very high regard and took much pride in. Today it seems to be an annoying afterthought.

One example was a project I worked on where they licensed a Who song for 6 advertising spots. Now a Who song does not come cheap, and an ad campaign that has a budget to use a Who song is one that lasts a number of weeks, if not months. This song was the music bed for the whole spot...a key element in the "sell" of the spot. The familiarity of that song that will draw people in. The song was available as a CD at any Best Buy, WalMart, Amazon, or local indie record store, yet after months of editing and production, not one person thought to send a $12 an hour production assistant on a 30 minute trip to buy a $15.00 disc. They sent me the spots to finish using a .mp3 file; of a Who song!!!. You cannot convince me that they had no time to go out and buy the CD and overcut the music or request a high fidelity copy from the publisher. They could spend tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to license the song, but not the $100 or so it would have cost to get a hi-fidelity version of it and cut it in? That is absurd. At the very LEAST, the publisher, who is making a small fortune for licensing the song and have the best interests of the artists in mind should have required it. Have they NO SHAME?!!!

Music libraries, publishers, producers, sound and music supervisors, editors and mixers are all guilty, though some have a lot more say in what we will settle for than others. We all have the deadlines and budgets to deal with, but at some point we really have to stand back and make some value judgments. Do we really want to settle for mediocrity just to save $15 on a multi-million dollar movie or advertising spot?

What can we do about it? We can set some standards. We can all make calls to the production music companies and insist on a minimum of 44.1 16 bit files. We are paying them good money to license their songs and they give us crap quality files so that they can save a bit of drive space on their servers.

We can remind producers that using .mp3 files make their spots sound muddy, grungy and take longer to mix because of that fact. .mp3 files just don't blend in as well and downmix horribly.

We can remind editors that .mp3 files are great for auditioning music and sound FX, but should NEVER EVER be imported into a sequence. Grow a set my friends and just say no.

Let's take some pride in our work and strive to make our projects sound better, not worse. We have 24bit 192k available to us and we settle for a product meant to be played through a pair of sweaty earbuds? That's how far we've fallen in the quest for quality? Time for a change.