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Are iTMS's 128kbps Songs Worth Collecting?
pinchhazard writes "Randall Stross of the New York Times offers his opinion on iTunes Music Store's decision to offer downloads at only 128 kbps, and that decision's potential to affect collectibility of the songs. The article says that Apple makes the claim on its web site that "you'll get the full quality of uncompressed CD audio using about half the storage space."
Rhapsody, which offers encoding at 192 kbps, is compared."
... Except that Apple isn't using MP3, but AAC - which provides significantly higher quality at 128kb/s.
;-)
Sounds a bit like the Megahertz Myth, all over again.
This article is full of so many distortions, it's mind-bending. First, they are revealing the secret -- which they assume none of us gullible rubes ever realized before -- that most digital music we get from the internet is stored with lossy compression. The article goes on to explain that all music with lossy compression sounds crummy (comparing it with 8-track tapes), and the only measure of digital sound quality that matters is the bit-rate.
Music from the iTunes Store, they say, sounds extra-crummy since it's compressed to only 128 kbps. (The distinction between AAC and MP3 is never even mentioned.) The implication is that consumers will rebel someday when they discover they've bought a bunch of music that isn't "true CD quality". Clutching torches and pitchforks, they'll storm the ramparts at Cupertino.
Maybe I'm just a tin-eared old goat, but the difference between a CD and a 128 kbps MP3 track doesn't leap out at me in casual listening. When it comes to 128 kbps AAC or 192 kbps MP3 tracks, they sound like CDs to me -- even when I listen closely, with headphones. Maybe if I had audiophile speakers or better headphones (or younger ears) it would make more difference, but honestly. . . This is not a distinction that keeps me up laying awake at night, wondering if my music collection is subtly flawed.
At the other extreme, the true golden-eared stereophiles of our world have complained since CDs first appeared about *their* low sampling rate. What, only 44,000 samples per second? You can't capture sonic detail at the high frequencies that way! But given the difference in sales between iPods on the one hand, and SACD or DVD-Audio players on the other hand, I think anyone can see which way the wind is blowing.
I'm doubting the majority's ability to discern or even care about the quality differences. However, anyone into serious collecting will definitely very much be concerned with this. Probably won't hurt Apple's business significantly though, and I'm sure they know it.
I only pay 10 bucks for the CD's on iTMS. Not 17 bucks like in stores. The download is actually about 40% off the retail price. Now if that discount is worth sacrificing the art, quality, etc, thats your choice.
That was the promise way back when the first CD's came out. You'd then buy your the complete discography of your favorite band, thinking that even though you were shelling out $15 a disk, you were getting top quality recordings that were on indestructable media.
Then, five years later, guess what? The record companies remastered and re-released those same tracks. It doesn't matter if your favorite artist is Rush or Cat Stevens or Miles Davis, it all got re-mastered. Doesn't it ever strike you as odd, and perhaps intentional, that the first release of every popular CD was mastered so poorly it needed to be redone just five years later?
So along comes the iTunes store, and we're seeing the same damned thing. Once again, there's promises of how great the music sounds. But instead of crappy mastering, they are using crappy bit rates. And you know exactly where this is leading. Five years from now, they'll bump up their sampling rates to 192 kps or something. And even though you've already bought and paid for all your favorite songs, you're going to be asked to buy them all again if you want the best sound. And in another five years they'll probably jump to uncompressed SACD quality downloads, and you'll feel this big incentive to buy the same songs yet again.
Not that I care. I stopped buying CDs a long time ago. The entire business is run by dishonorable people, and now it looks like that mentality is dragging down one of the computer industry's more principled companies.
I'm generally "Interesting," "Insightful," and even "Funny" here. What the hell happens to me at parties?
the NYT article quotes the idiots at Stereophile. When your magazine recommends that people buy 200$ power cords for their reciever to "filter" out the bad power that your outlet gets, thats trouble.
Stereophile is also well known for shunning proper ABX sound listening tests because with such a test they wouldn't be able to tell the difference between a $5000 amp and a $200 amp. link
The fact that the article doesn't even go into how AAC compression works, makes it pretty obvious that its a sham. This article seems to be written from a elitist, anti-logical stance. Sigh.
Sorry, Hit submit too soon. Between the author and the submitter, there's some miscommunication.
THe "Half the size" bit is about Apple Lossless, not about AAC, and is in the fanciful segment wherein the author envisions his own version of iTMS offerings. He has no understanding of the expensive nightmare that housing and providing CD-sized tracks over the Internet presents. I believe he twists Derick Mains words in the last paragraph of the first page; paraphrasing his "reasoning". He doesn't seem to realize that offered lossless compression would need to be more expensive.
The author of the article makes no mention of the different codecs used for the iTMS and Rhapsody, leaving the comparison to a linear scale of bit-rate between the two services and CD-quality, but neglects his own findings later. If the bit-rate were the only difference to him, the article would have been much shorter.
He refers to comments from Sterophile twice to bash Apple - but never Rhapsody - and refers to 128kbps as "the low end of the bit rate range", clearly unaware that smaller MP3 players compress music down to 96 or 64kbps. He refers to an "apples to Apple" comparison of 192 to 128kbps, saying, "the companies use the same software standard for compression" when, in fact, they don't.
He muses, "we should have the option to collect with true CD quality". Well, sir, you do. It's called a CD. If you don't wish to make use of the online music stores, don't. No one is forcing you to type in your credit card number.
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
The author of this article shows no understanding of signal processing or how music data is compressed, so his conclusions are silly. Comparing lossy music compression to 8-track tapes is silly.
He complains about lossy compression, but saving signal data (like photos or music) is always a lossy process, because there no exact digital representation of them. You decide to save a certain amount of data, let's say, 3 megabytes (or 30 megabytes) for 3 minutes of music, and then you decide what to put in those megabytes. You will always be able to get more/better data into the same space if you use signal processing compressors than if you just use uncompressed samples saved at some sampling rate and width per sample.
People who don't understand signal processing have a problem with the concept of "lossy." Signal processing engineers are not idiots. They don't design algorithms saying "I want to lose information and make a lower quality signal." They're just saying, "I want to save the data in this much space, which part of the data do I want to lose?" If you're saving recorded music, you are always losing data. The goal is to lose the least important part. The idea is slightly subtle, and it is apparently confusing to some people.
Good grief. This is the MHz myth redux. Bit rate does not equal quality. It's the codec. Otherwise we'd all be saying that 2500 bps mpeg-2 is far superior to 1500 bps DIVX. You'd get laughed off any forum for preaching that, yet everyone goes around proclaiming it as gospel truth for audio.
Here's the real reason this nonsense keeps coming up: Competitors to iTMS are so far behind in terms of downloads it's laughable. So, what do they do? Smear the competition.
That's all this is, plain and simple. It's nothing more than competing download services spreading FUD to try and knock down the market leader, and folks here just drink it right down and think they're intelligent and discerning consumers for doing so.
You can tell a great deal about the character of a man by observing those who hate him.
Well, let's see. I used to listen to albums, that were apparently far superior in sound quality than anything else in the world. They would get scratches that would cause them to make popping sounds and would add fuzz to the music. What the hell, it still sounds fine.
Next, I bought cassettes. Cassettes had an always present hiss in the background and after several plays, the music on the cheaply made cassettes would start to fade. What's worse, the tapes would eventually stretch and snap after overuse. That was fine too. I could listen to my music.
Then I bought CDs. These were okay too. They were bulkier than cassettes--sort of. They were also prone to scratches, but far less so than records. The problem was that they were digital and not analog, which meant that I wasn't getting to hear all the sound that was being played by the artists (as we obviously were with LPs and cassettes since they had infinite information storage capabilities). Oh dear. Where's my tape hiss? Where's the fullness of my phonograph? Well, whatever. I can still hear the music.
Now I have lossless MP3s and AACs. The horror. They don't scratch. They don't add tape hiss. They don't wear out at all and are incredibly portable. However, they don't store all the information that our CDs do. They even distort some of that sound. Oh no! Oh, wait, I can still hear the music. That's okay.
So, my point is, what the hell does it matter? There's no perfect recording medium. If there were no choices we'd be happy with whatever we had. Now that the common consumer has a choice, she frets day and night over how many bits she's losing. Talk about a waste of time. Freedom of choice isn't always a blessing. It can distract you from those other freedoms that are slipping away.
1. Nyquist theorem also assumes that the samples are real numbers, not 16 bit ints.
2. Phase is not important IF you have a perfect band limiting filter when doing ADC conversion and perfect sinc(x) filter on the output. Of course building a perfect noncausal filter (sinc(x)) is physically impossible, thus the higher sampling frequency. Only dogs can hear imperfections near 20KHz anyway.
The biggest problem with CDs right now is not their sampling frequency (although raising it to 96KHz would allow engineers to not pay so much attention to band-limiting - the aliasing would be well above 20KHz anyway which you can't hear, and sinc(x) filter could be simply omitted on the DAC end).
The biggest problem is that the samples themselves are 16 bit, so any kind of digital processing in your stereo that goes before DAC can screw up things pretty dramatically. The problem becomes especially bad for low-level signals.
NYT Describing Real's service: "With a subscription service like RealRhapsody, one saves personal tastes in the form of playlists that replace actual music collections, providing access to favorites no matter what storage format comes out "
I'm really surprised the New York Times allows this blantant advertising within its editorial content, done through the guise of one interviewee's quote. I know the NYT is trying to appeal to a younger hipper audience, but damn! if this is the best they can probe the problems with music distribution, they should stick to covering opera.
Could the reporter not do a few back-of-the-envelope calculations? How much would it cost pay a small subscription fee the rest of your life, starting at $10 a month and working upwards over the years.
My parents bought 4 Simon & Garfunkel albums in the late 60s. Cost? Maybe $16 for the whole lot. They then enjoyed them for the 30 years. Then I transferred them to CD. That $16 has lasted them the better part of a century. They, like most people, do not own a *lot* of music, maybe 70 albums total (most of which I listen to now, actually). The cost of that collection is *far* cheaper than what they would have had to pay in subscription fees, would such a subscription service been in place in the 1970s. Now they enjoy the msuic they bought years ago without paying anybody anything!
joab
Could the reporter not do a few back-of-the-envelope calculations?
I'm pretty sure that the "reporter" did not want to do any back-of-the-envelope calculations. The column gives the reader a strong impression that there's something wrong with the iPod and iTMS. Stross gives a flawed explanation of music compression, and then proceeds to single out Apple as though they're the only ones that distribute compressed music. He never bothers to explain that all the online music distributors sell music compressed to about the same degree with lossy techniques. He doesn't mention that iTMS sells tracks compressed with AAC as opposed to the WMA tracks everyone else sells, and that AAC arguably gives better fidelity than WMA.
After reading Stross' column last night, I did a little test. I listened several times to Cowboy Junkies' "Mining for Gold" on my copy of the "The Trinity Sessions" CD. The track is just Margo Timmins singing a capella for a minute and a half in the Church of the Holy Trinity in Toronto, and was recorded with a single microphone. Listening to the CD version with a good pair of headphones you can hear subtle echoes, lots of detail in Timmins' voice, and occasional soft ambient noises. I then ripped the track onto my PowerBook at 128 kbits/sec and listened to that. With a good pair of headphones, you could hear subtle echoes, lots of detail in Timmins' voice, and occasional soft ambient noises. I'm sure that an editor of Stereophile magazine would know better what to look for to discern the difference between the CD track and the compressed version, but for practical purposes the two versions are indistiguishable.
It's clear that Stross has some sort of bone to pick with Apple, or else is completely unqualified to write about these things. Either way, this is one column that certainly never should have been printed in the NY Times.
I think the thing that bothers me most about this piece is that the NY Times published it without making it clear whether it's news or opinion or what. It's published under the heading "Digital Domain," but that alone is not enough to tell me what the nature of the writing is.