L’Oreal recently ran a TV ad campaign in the UK for its new hair care product “INOA”, suggesting that its funkily-named coloration product is altogether better than any existing system.
Maybe it is, but to a music-appreciating tech geek, the comparisons fall a little flat.
Take a look:
(Hopefully that video is still there, though for some reasons advertisers don’t always like the exposure that free YouTube marketing gives them)
OK, so “first there was the road map. Now there is the GPS”.
Let’s skip for a moment the horrible phrase “the GPS” because that’s not the focus of this rant.
Now…
“First there was vinyl. Now there is the MP3″.
Unless L’Oreal is trying to tell consumers that INOA is of a lower quality than established products, this is a poor statement to make.
Most of us know that, MP3 files even encoded at their highest quality cannot match that of lossless audio files, or even lossy formats with better encoding like AAC.
Don’t even get me started on the notion that MP3 (or even CD) could be of better overall quality, in theory at least, than vinyl… and this is coming from someone who never owned vinyl but understands why it is technically superior, if not particularly convenient.
I guess the marketing peeps would’ve found it harder to justify going to the masses with the phrase “First there was MP3. Now there is 24-bit Free Lossless Audio Codec”.
Sigh. It’s not easy being pedantic, you know.
I HATE to disagree with anything posted on this blog, but..
As a true music-tech geek (major in computer science and music technology, employed by a major audio software firm), I have to point out one minor flaw.
MP3 is, at it’s highest quality of encoding, better than vinyl.
The argument that vinyl is better than MP3 is ideal on paper. MP3 is made of discrete points, vinyl offers an un-interrupted flow of ‘data’, etc..
But the one element that offsets this is the noise floor. The effect of dragging a fine metal needle (no matter how high the quality) across a groove in a chunk of vinyl (again, no matter how high the quality) raises the noise floor so high that lower dynamic ranges, already tough for human ears to process, are completely lost. the MP3 encoding process is smart enough to put the majority of its effort into these critical bands, eliminating data in the higher frequencies instead.
With all that said, I am reminded that I haven’t washed my hair in a week or two. Time to get on that.
Cheers!
–Robby
LOL Obviously, you’ve never heard vinyl. Vinyl is the highest quality to hear recorded music. Noise-floor, schmoise floor. Analogue is better than digital, and vinyl is the highest-quality commercial analogue format. I’m not even fully sure you’re being serious with your post, but thanks for the laugh.
Hey disagreement is fine :)
I guess it does also depend upon what source the MP3 was taken from in the first place. Maybe if they had made the advert about fifteen years ago they would’ve compared vinyl and CD.
Trouble is (from what I have read, at least) a lot of mainstream stuff is now produced for the lowest common denominator, which is (infuriatingly) people listening to music on the tiny speakers of mobile devices.
Ahh well. FLAC for me regardless :)
As for the hair – well I’d leave it a few more weeks and then it will start taking care of itself. Will certainly shine anyway – more than L’Oreal can give you.