Jonathan Berger, a professor of music at Stanford, said he had conducted an informal study among his students and found that, over the roughly seven years of the study, an increasing number of them preferred the sound of files with less data over the high-fidelity recordings.
"Online music stores have typically offered MP3s at 128kbps, ie very compressed files, which is fine for pop music but it's not exactly high-fidelity, " he said.