From the FCS Book of Little-Known Facts – ‘Tom’s Diner’, Karl Brandenburg and MP3

When compact discs were introduced in 1982, consumers marveled at the amount of information they could store. For every three-minute song, a CD uses about 32 megabytes of data. But that size proved to be unwieldy in the early, pokey days of the Internet. Using an old, dial-up modem, it might take eight hours to transfer or download a single song. So in the early 1990s, German engineer Dr. Karlheinz Brandenburg pioneered digital compression techniques for the MP3, crunching the size of audio data by a factor of 11. While tweaking the format, Brandenburg used Suzanne Vega’s 1987 a cappella rendition of “Tom’s Diner” as the benchmark for sonic quality. He reasoned that if he could get her warm vocals to sound good on MP3, then the new platform would work with just about anything. So, if you love downloading music, thank Vega for having such a pretty voice.