Finally: New F Trains!

About an hour ago, as I stood on the platform of the Herald Square subway station, waiting for the downtown F Train, I never would have thought my ride home would have been so pleasant as it turned out to be, especially in the light of the recent mammoth fare hikes. But then, as I saw the approaching lights of the train, everything changed...

At first, I thought, oh no... It's one of those weird out-of-service trains. But then I paused as I noticed the glowing red lights above the front window of the leading subway car... Perhaps it was an errant 2 train? 6 train, perhaps? Then, it came closer... and I saw it:


With a gasp and a full-toothed grin, I beamed at the approaching loveliness! At long last! The MTA gods have deemed the F line fit for new trains! Even as the sleek, new doors slid open and I was greeted with the pleasantly articulate female voice, which proclaimed that yes, indeed, this was 34th Street, Herald Square and that you could transfer to the N, Q, R, V, or W trains, I could hardly believe that my wildest public transit wish had come true.


The interior was so well lit, the ride was so smooth, and the automated voice cues were so easily understood that, for a few moments, I thought I must've somehow been magically transported onto a 6 train. While I was somewhat disappointed to find out that, no, magical transportation was still not a reality, I was overJOYED to discover that I was still sitting on a Brooklyn-bound F train, slinking stealthily and steadily towards my destination.

Ah... It almost made me forget the extra $20 I'm going to have to spend... every... month.... to ride this... majestic people mover...

...

Dammit!

-e

MP3s Are Destroying Music

Sigh. It was bound to happen, I suppose...

A professor out at Stanford University named Johnathan Berger has been conducting an informal study every year for the past 6 years. The subject of this study? Students. The purpose of the study? To find out what quality of music they prefered. In a letter to Gizmodo, Professor Berger described the experiment:

Students were asked to judge the quality of a variety of compression methods randomly mixed with uncompressed 44.1 KHz audio. The music examples included both orchestral, jazz and rock music. When I first did this I was expecting to hear preferences for uncompressed audio and expecting to see MP3 (at 128, 160 and 192 bit rates) well below other methods (including a proprietary wavelet-based approach and AAC). To my surprise, in the rock examples the MP3 at 128 was preferred. I repeated the experiment over 6 years and found the preference for MP3 - particularly in music with high energy (cymbal crashes, brass hits, etc) rising over time.

Yep. You read right. Kids these days actually prefer the sounds of overcompressed mp3s to uncompressed CD-like audio. I mean, I'm all for compression... It certainly has its uses, a lot of which are good. But actually preferring the sizzle and crackle of digital overcompression to clear, uncompressed audio?? Ugh...

One thing's for sure... My kids are being raised FROM BIRTH (or beforehand, possibly) on uncompressed music. Hm... I better keep these old CDs around...

-e