Here’s how the NHL accidentally contributed to the music piracy crisis.
[This was my weekly column for GlobalNews.ca. – AC]
t the end of the ’90s, the recorded music industry was swimming, drowning in money thanks to increasing sales of high-margin compact discs. Times were so good that no one bothered to follow up on stories of a new technology called “MP3” that was allowing music fans to trade digital music files quickly, easily and illegally online.
MP3 technology was the product of a team led by Karlheinz Brandenberg at the Fraunhofer Institute in Germany. In 1988, they began work on a way to efficiently send audio down a plain old copper telephone wire, a medium that wasn’t capable of much bandwidth. But by carefully applying the theories of psychoacoustics — the idea that louder sounds mask quieter ones, thereby making the quieter ones inaudible and thus superfluous — digital audio files could be compressed to one-tenth of their original size.
The Fraunhofer pitched their compression algorithm to international technical standards bodies under the name Motion Picture Experts Group, Layer 3, or “MPEG-3” for short.
The German group did not do well. Other codecs couldn’t shrink files as much, but the mathematics of the competing algorithms were less complex, didn’t require as much computing power (hey, this was the ’80s and ’90s), and sounded as good as MPEG-3s in their shrunken state. As the defeats piled up, funding was threatened and Brandenburg and his people were told to pack it in and move on to some other project.
Then an unlikely saviour appeared. Steve Church ran a company called Telos. He was looking for ways to improve audio quality of remote broadcasts. Back then, remote broadcasts used a telephone line from the broadcast location back to the studio. It worked, but because of the bandwidth issues of copper phone lines, the audio had an annoying tinniness to it. Church realized that MPEG-3 technology might be the solution.
