SDMI Beat Goes On
Music & MP3
10/19/2000; 4:27:20 PM

Cracked or not? The SDMI saga continues. from Salon and a back-up article from The Register: SDMI hack: the 'golden ears' ride to the rescue. The Salon article contains further quote from one of the original sources and The Register has some backup info.

The Register seems confused about what a "golden ears" is. A "golden ears" is a person with highly trained hearing. Babies have to learn how to see, and how to break their visual input into discrete objects, because your eye mostly percieves just an array of colors.  Your ears had to be trained the same way. There is a much wider array of skill in ear-usage, because hearing tends to not be so importent on a day to day basis. Basically, a golden ears would be able to hear the distortions in the music with great accuracy. For the most part, anyone with good hearing in both ears can become a golden ears just be expending the necessary effort.

The most interesting quote from my point of view is from the original source:

'The key is how "success" is defined. In this case, the attacked samples have been 1) run through a watermark detector to ensure that the watermark was removed, and 2) subjected to preliminary listening tests performed by "golden ears" listeners to ensure that each attacked sample still sounded better than a 64 kbps MP3 file.'

Frankly, a 64kbps music file is not very good. The SDMI requirements are quite high, to encode something that will do that much damage to the music when removed.