A small team of researchers with Hong Kong University of Science and Technology has found that compressing recorded music into the MP3 format results in the loss of emotional tones, leaving the result with less depth. In their paper published in the Journal of the Audio Engineering Society, the researchers describe their study of the impact of compressing recordings of musical instruments and which instruments suffer the most degradation.

Most people who listen to music saved as an MP3 file know that the sound quality is lower than that of a CD or a vinyl album. But what is lost and by how much has not really been investigated. In this new effort, the researchers sought to learn which types of musical sounds lose the most emotional quality when a file is converted to MP3 and by how much.