Does Portable Music Have to be Compressed?

FunkeyMonk writes "The Christian Science monitor has an article discussing the gap between music fans and audiophiles when it comes to portable music. Would you pay a few cents more to have lossless downloads from iTunes and other online music retailers? As a classical musician myself, I choose not to download most of my music, but rather rip it myself in lossless format."

Comments

more for non-DRM

[yagu]

Actually I'd like to be able to get an "original" image a la the CDs you buy, but allow single CD tracks. Would I pay more for that? I don't know. I've never bought any of the DRM'ed crap because it's DRM'ed, so I don't know how badly (or well) compressed they are.

If there are audible compression artifacts anywhere in today's downloadable DRM'ed music I'd probably insist the compression be less or not at all, after all I'm paying for music, and a compression artifact (to me) is analogous to stuck pixels in a monitor or camera... my threshold of tolerance is zero for that.

(I had one of the very original SONY Mini-disk recorders, and remember a passage of a Doobie Brothers track where some high pitched bells instead of sounding like high pitched bells sounded like someone sneezing... unacceptable... completely altered my experience of MD (along with numerous other things about SONY).)

So, bottom line, DRM aside, I consider it the responsibility of the music industry to deliver what they claim they are delivering... music (usually). I'm willing to bet what they are delivering has artifacts... I wouldn't pay more to get rid of that, I'd demand they replace the defective product.

The nice thing about my CDs and my derivative mp3 collection (recorded at 320 VBR) is if I hear an artifact in my track, I have the unedited original, I rip it at higher quality until the artifact isn't there.

(As an aside, I think the article makes an exceptionally great point not directly related to the users:

That's important to sound engineers, too. "You spend a long time training your ears and striving to perfect your craft and put out a better product," says Jeff Willens, an audio-restoration specialist at Vidipax in Long Island City, N.Y. "When you finally discover that these things are being listened to on cellphones and through pea-size earphones, it's kind of disheartening."

So, in addition to short-shrifting consumers with less-than-perfect (to the ear) product, the movers of downloadable music thumb their noses at the collective profession of sound engineers and engineering... pretty rude.

Granted, a lot of the music out there is crap -- it's no justification for compromise on the medium.

Oh, and re the subject line of my post... I'd pay a little more for non-DRMed music, not uncompressed music.

Double blind test

[theLOUDroom]

The right way to answer this question is with double blind testing.
"Audiophiles" like to make all sorts or ridiculous claims that lead to things like $2000 speaker cables, gold CDs and just a general proliferation of nonsensical technobabble.

Psychology simply has too strong of an effect on questions like this to get an actual answer from a forum like this.

What you'd really find is that as the bitrate of an mp3 goes up, the number of people who can tell the difference goes down. At some point the number of people who can tell the difference becomes a statistically insignificant sample. This would be a good project for some grad student.

Re:Double blind test

[Alcari]

I recall a test at the university here. The local audiophile group set up their best of the best stuff, which measured up to about a Lexus worth of gear. Insert one CD holding original tracks, 128, 160, 192, 224, 256 kbit/s mp3s, all at 44.1khz. Most people could generally pick out 128kbit as 'not quite as good as the rest' but all the others sounded pretty similar. However, when the platina encrested CD player gest replaced by a generic mp3 player, it all sounds a lot worse.

Re:Double blind test

[Anonymous Coward]

No need for grad students. Hydrogenaudio regularly does double-blind listening test (there's a new one currently underway) and the results are damming for "audiophiles" everywhere.

Using up to date encoders, for the vast majority of people, for the vast majority of tracks, 128 kbps is indistinguishable from source.

Link.

Everyone should try to ABX at least once. You'll be shocked how much worse your ears are that you'd believe them to be... ABX Just Destroyed My Ego is a very informative read for any would be audiophiles:

I think the reason is in large due to the common misconception that audio compression heavily alters the sound. Less dynamics, weaker bass and all those other descriptions "audiophiles" like to throw around, and that in fact are nothing more than just placebo. But in reality, the artifacts are much more subtle, and often require actual training for an inexperienced user to be able to hear them.

Mr. Goddard need to get with the program

[Overzeetop]

WAV? He uses WAV? Why on god's green earth would you bother using WAV to listed to your music when there are a plethora of lossless codecs out there? You can get roughtly 2:1 compression with any of the codecs - heck he could even use wavpack if he was so stuck on having wav in the name. Heck, most audiophiles worth their $3000 interconnects are appalled at the harsheness and "cold, digital" feel of that 44.1khz/16 bit crap that was forced on the public when we got CDs.

Lossless is coming soon to most of us. With the 5.5g iPod at 80GB and the Zune hackable to 80GB as well, all but the top 3-4% of all consumers can fit their entire (legal) collection on a single portable device in lossless compression. I've got about 6500 tracks, most as FLAC rips, and I'm right about 81GB (plus about 40GB in books, but those are all low-bitrate). If I jettisoned the extra downloded stuff I have that I didn't like (but didn't get around to deleting), I'd probably drop to 75GB or so. I suspect that my entire family (three of us) buys less than 5GB worth of content each year. There's no reason to expect that the size of the players, in capacity, will not continue to decrease. As for those with bigger collections...well, just get more portables, or learn to live with a smaller subset on your player (or a higher compression).

As long as the high-qualtiy masters are available, portables can become a calculated compromise. Since my threshhold for accuracy happens to be at about 256kb/s LAME, that's where I transcode my FLAC library for my portable. If I had a car player, it would probably be more like 160kb. Heck, it's practically impossible to hear artifacts at 128kb in my Pilot at 70mph at a normal volume. My wife's 8GB flash player will be encoded in the 160-192 range, becuase I know she doesn't have the gear to hear much more, and she's just not that picky. With good music managers, you can automagically sync and transcode at the same time (I use mediamonkey). Transodeing is a bit slow right now, but as PCs get faster, the sync/transcode process will get better and better.

I do agree that it is a travesty that the online services will not offer home-archival-quality tracks, but I'm probably a top-10% listening geek. I buy all my music on CD, and rip to FLAC. Okay, okay - I've bought some at AllOfMp3.com, too, but I can get lossless there. The key is that the studios will continue to have qualtiy masters - but will they be willing to sell that quality to the public?

Re:Lossless is compressed

[timeOday]

Let's not perpetrate the myth that music can be recorded losslessly in the first place. All sampling is lossy. CDDA specifies a certain sample rate, beyond which you lose higher frequencies, and a fixed number of bits per sample, so you lose precision. For the same bitrate, you would get better results by starting with a high-resolution master and using lossy compression down to CDDA bitrate.

I'm not arguing that a lossy encoding of CDDA is as good as CDDA; it isn't. Just that there's no law of nature establishing CDDA as the gold standard in the first place.

Lossless vs. Good Lossy -- We've Tested It

[hedronist]

A while ago I ripped our entire CD collection (about 1200 discs) to FLAC, a lossless codec. Each minute of audio takes approximately 5.5MB, so it lives on a 750GB drive (x 2 because I mirrored that sucker -- don't want to have to go through *that* again). I then did a batch down-convert to OGG/Vorbis to go onto my iRiver player (no, not all of it). I ripped to FLAC so that if/when better lossy codecs come along, I can simply do batch down-convert without reripping. Note: you do *not* want to convert one lossy codec to another lossy codec; all you will get is the worst of both codecs in one file.

I became curious about just how the various compressions stacked up against each other. I knew Vorbis was better than "normal" MP3 by a long shot, but newer MP3 variations have definitely gotten better. Here are the formats tested: WAV (straight from the CD), FLAC, Vorbis, and about 15 different MP3 variations (VBR, CBR/ABR, 32k to 320K). I tried both down-convert from FLAC and ripped-direct-from-CD (there should be no difference, and I certainly couldn't hear any). This was done on a variety of material, choosing particularly demanding/revealing passages from acoustic guitar, cafe jazz trios, brass ensembles, Beethoven's 6th, piano (jazz and classical), rock and vocalists (Streisand, Baez, Queen - Bohemian Rhapsody).

I did a few tests and verified that I could not distinguish between WAV and FLAC -- no surprise there -- so for convenience the other formats were compared to FLAC as the baseline.

I did extensive A-B, B-C, A-C, etc., etc. comparisons using my main system (Marantz A/V amp with Magneplanar MG-IIIa speakers) and also with Sennheiser HD595 headphones. Below 128k, MP3 is complete crap. Starting at 128-CBR, it got more difficult to hear the difference. At CBR/192 or VBR/medium, I could rarely distinguish MP3 from FLAC, although sometimes the high-hat cymbals sounded like they lost a little bit of brilliance.

Although I'm a fairly discerning listener, I do have high-frequency hearing damage in my right ear. So I brought in a friend who is a serious audiophile. We did a lot of listening and comparing (many hours over several days because your ears get "tired"), both on my system and back at his house.

The Verdict: Vorbis is good, really good. But MP3's produced by Lame at VBR/Medium to VBR/High are also really, really good, maybe even better. MP3/VBR/Medium is approximately the same size as Vorbis/Normal (-q 4.99) at about 1MB/minute -- 1/5 the size of the FLAC files. Although there are players out there that can handle Vorbis, there are many more that don't.

Ps. We're not going to throw out the FLACs, because something better *will* come along. By that I mean 'smaller than' MP3/VBR/HIGH.

Re:Lossless is compressed

[h2g2bob]

Ahem, http://flac.sf.net/

A used for Magnatune downloads (among others), and supported by decent media player software and a handful of MP3 players

Re:FFS shut up already

[hankwang]

Yes, there will be a quality diff between #4 and #1, but it'll be the same miniscule PSNR loss as from #1 to #2. So unless you transcode a dozen times or something it won't really hurt you.

Every encoder will generate ringing and other artifacts. Every good encoder tries to put those artifacts just a bit below the hearing threshold according to an algorithm that has been tested extensively with normal music. However, encoders are generally not fine-tuned to deal with the unnatural type of noise that results from another encoding process, resulting in the noise ending up above the hearing threshold after the second time.

You might wish to check some double-blind test results on HydrogenAudio. Short version: reencoding 256 kbps MP3 to 128 kbps MP3 sounds horrible compared to 128 kbps MP3 straight from the lossless source.

Re:Speaking without detail is useless.

[Bluesman]

You're right, but again we have to consider what people are able to hear. The number of quantization levels that are used insures that the human ear can't tell the difference between two intermediate levels.

It's funny, I have an audiophile acquaintance who swears that records are superior in every way to "digital," and for the same reasons described above. The funny thing is, because of the large number of quantization levels used in a CD, the CD's dynamic range far surpasses that of any record player. More info here

Theoretically, yes, analog would always be superior. But in reality, physical limitations of the stylus on a record player limit that medium far more than quantization limits the CD. Those same physical limits exist in the human ear, too.

So, while digital might not be "perfect" theoretically, it's "perfect enough" allowing for the limitations of the human ear.

Observation on music quality

[spineboy]

I'm a musician in my spare time, and pretty much have noticed that other musicians really don't care much as to the Quality of the recording that they listen to. Recording songs in a studio is an exception, but what I've noticed is that many of my friends just listen to their music on crappy boom boxes, etc. Is it a function of being poor - nope haven't seen that. But what I have noticed is that a majority of "audiophiles" are not musicians. Yes, of course we'll see the few exceptions, to prove a point, but generally musicians are interested in the chord progression, melody, rhythm, instrumentation, etc. The recording quality is the last thing we care about when listening to a song.

Re:Intervieww is an ***HAT? (-1 Pedantic)

[evilviper]

AAC is not "Apple's".

No it isn't, but perhaps he is SPECIFICALLY talking about Apple's implimentation.

WMA is a container, not a compression codec.

Completely wrong. ASF is the container used by WMA and WMV files.

WMA is indeed the name of the audio codec, and WMV is a video codec.

AVI is a container and not a compression codec.

He didn't say these were codecs. Included in your own quotation, he said: "audio file formats."

Wav is not a lossless format. It is limited by in it's dynamic range (bits per sample) and sample rate. Compared to analog or a raw sound source, raw wav/pcm data loses a lot of the sound.

Yes it is. You'll get exactly the bits out that you put in. Your complaints are about DIGITAL SAMPLING OF ANALOG AUDIO AND HAVE NO SPECIFIC RELEVANCE TO WAV.

FLAC and other lossless codecs produce identical byte-to-byte output when compared to wav/pcm.

FLAC is not a lossless format. It is limited by in it's dynamic range (bits per sample) and sample rate. Compared to analog or a raw sound source, FLAC loses a lot of the sound.