/K-pop Songs Ringing?

I first noticed a high-pitched ringing when listening to BLACKPINK on Spotify around February or March 2021. This incessant sound was prevalent throughout most of their discography—though not all—and made the listening experience unbearable. It was almost like walking into a room with an old CRT TV turned on. What’s strange is that this problem seemed to appear out of nowhere; the tracks had sounded perfectly fine before. Fortunately, I had my local music collection to use as a reference point.

When I switched to my FLAC files, the issue disappeared, and my ears were saved. To investigate further, I used a program called Spek to create spectrograms and see if I could pinpoint the issue. Below is a comparison between a FLAC file ripped from Qobuz using qobuz-dl and an OGG file ripped from Spotify using Soggfy.

The issue is clear. The 19kHz region in the Spotify rip is plagued with something, but why? Before using Spek to visualize the problem, I turned to Reddit, as usual, to see if anyone else was experiencing this. Sure enough, many people in the r/BLACKPINK subreddit were complaining about the same thing, though not everyone. Some users said they could only hear the ringing on their PlayStation but not on their phones, while others couldn't hear it at all. This isn’t exactly the most audiophile community, so I can infer that some people either have subpar listening gear or damaged hearing.

A few comments mentioned that the release of the BLACKPINK Lightstick V2 coincided with the addition of high-frequency ringing to make it sync with the music. While these frequencies are supposed to be inaudible, they are clearly not for many listeners. This reminded me of the early 2010s when I had an iPod Touch with a mosquito repellent app that made my brain buzz.

Soon after this week of annoyance and out of spite, I switched back to listening to my FLAC files. Then, Rosé, a member of BLACKPINK, released her debut single album. After watching the music video, I played the songs on Spotify and was once again struck by a wall of ringing. I immediately turned to Qobuz for unaltered tracks, but quickly realized that even Qobuz had received the afflicted version. Another source I use for lossless music is sharemania, where people upload albums from different streaming services and even CD rips. Someone uploaded Rosé’s album ripped straight from the CD, but the ringing was still there.

At this point, I was at a loss. If even the physical copies have the noise, what can I do? The answer is, unfortunately, not much. Another group under YG Entertainment, BLACKPINK's agency, soon started to show the same issues. TREASURE released the first EP of their "SECOND STEP" series, which was also plagued with this problem. However, for the sake of this article, I listened to the EP on Spotify, and surprisingly, the ringing wasn’t there¹. Perhaps it was removed for TREASURE, but it definitely still exists in BLACKPINK’s tracks. It shouldn’t feel like winning the lottery when YG releases music without this ringing. Hopefully, this trend doesn’t extend to other groups and companies because it is simply unnecessary.