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

Lossless is compressed

[nurhussein]

...just with no quality loss. Perhaps the question is "Does portable music have to be lossy?"

Re:Lossless is compressed

[SQLGuru]

If the music is digital, it is by it's very nature lossy. To convert sound into a digital format, you must sample it. No matter how small your sample, there are gaps between them. The gaps are lost when you digitize the music.

But yeah, from a digital perspective, things can be compressed such that the original is reproducible ("lossless") or an approximation is reproducible ("lossy").

Layne

Re:Lossless is compressed

[TheMeuge]

"But last time I checked, all sampled music was PCM, and that's lossy by definition."

Your ears are pretty lossy too. Anything recorded using 192kHz/24bit has more dynamic range and a lower noise floor than your ears do... not to mention the fact that no equipment exists that can do better than ~100dB of dynamic range, and SNR of <0.1%

it depends

[gEvil (beta)]

It depends on how you intend to listen to your music. If you're going to be listening to earbuds while you're outside or working out at the gym or whatever, then compressed files are fine. Enough ambient noise will be getting through that you'll barely notice any compression artifacts, if at all. However, if you intend to listen to music through a nice set of headphones or speakers in a quiet listening environment, then you'll want it to be as uncompressed as possible. The same generally applies for music with wide dynamic ranges, such as classical/orchestral music.

GIGO -- Garbage In, Garbage Out

[eutychus_awakes]

Well, the poster of this article obviously doesn't consider CD quality to be "lossless." How far we've come from the OLD audiophiles who wouldn't touch anything that wasn't a meticulously cared for LP -- or better yet, reel-to-reel tape in your home rig.

How much longer before we consider 128-kpbs MP3's to be the "standard" for quality music, especially as we're moving to more and more of a "download on demand" compression crazed society?

Won't anyone think of the children!

Re:GIGO -- Garbage In, Garbage Out

[Lumpy]

If the sales numbers are right for XM radio and Sirius radio, 64Kbps will become acceptable.

Both the sattelite radio services have incredibly horrid sound. anythign with high frequencies has twinkle and other nasty artifacts that are so prevalent it renders it unlistenable to most people who like clear music. I have went back to FM at times because Sirius and XM suck so bad.

Now we have robot radio stations around here that are mp3 based and LOW bitrate mp3 based at that. My daughter was listening to one of them and I asked, "when did you get a XM raio in your room?" she let me know she was listening to the new Rock FM station.

Current state of music is swirling the toilet. I havent heard a decently mastered CD in decades, radio and supposed "CD QUALITY" Digital FM and Sattelite all sounds worse than 128kbps mp3's on a $6.00 mp3 player.

All around the music quality stinks. Even if I could buy a uncompressed high bitrate version, the mastering at the studios is so sub par it wouldn matter.

Why Wouldn't You Compress It?

[VaticDart]

A better question is why wouldn't you compress portable music? Audiophiles make up a very, very small portion of the population (Americans' idea of good sound seems to usually mean lots and lots of base), and the vast majority of the cans out there (earbud or bigger) don't yield any quality difference between an uncompressed or losslessly compressed CD track and a 192 kbps MP3 or AAC (I have no experience with WMA or Real Audio's format). I use Ety ER-6is with my Nano and AKG 240Ss at home, so one might say I'm a minor, minor audiophile, and I really have trouble hearing the difference with quality cans between a 192 kbps file and the original CD track. With any of the stock earbuds that come with various DMPs I have trouble hearing the difference between the original CD file and a 160 kbps file, and sometimes even lowly 128.

So yes, some people out there would pay extra for a digital file that is uncompressed or losslessly compressed, but as most people use crap cans or speakers, most of those people would be wasting their money. If you want maximum fidelity, stick with the physical CD or vinyl.

Re:We need a new Hi-Def Audio format

[gEvil (beta)]

I remember talking about MP3s with an audio engineer friend about a decade ago. As an engineer, he said that he would prefer MP3s to be mastered for the format, which means any limitations of the MP3 and other compressed file formats would be taken into account to minimize/delete any perceivable quality loss. For instance, the cassette version of a recording is mastered differently from the CD version, since tape has different audio qualities (the same also applies for vinyl versions). They don't just stick the CD master onto cassette tapes. On this point, I fully agree with him. However, it seems that all of the AAC/MP3/WMA files that you can buy are sourced from CDs, rather than being mixed especially for the format.

Intervieww is an ***HAT?

[BigBuckHunter]

From TFA

The sheer number of variations in compression technology. The array of audio file formats includes Apple's AAC and Dolby's AC3, as well as WMA, OGG, FLAC, AVI, and others.

AAC is not "Apple's". WMA is a container, not a compression codec. OGG is a container (usually used for Vorbis and FLAC), not a compression codec. FLAC is both a container and lossless compression codec. AVI is a container and not a compression codec. The man complains about audio quality, yet 4 out of 5 things that he discusses have "nothing" to do with audio quality.

For his own use, Mr. Goddard, like Willens, favors WAV, a "lossless" compression format that renders sound accurately but has some drawbacks - notably the tremendous amount of storage space it requires: some 50 to 60 megabytes per song, versus about two for an MP3.

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

I believe that this guys priorities are a little messed up. We should be focusing on lowering the noise floor, increasing the dynamic range, increasing the sampling rate, and getting the music industry to stop producing albums that are ultra compressed and "loud". You're not going to get decent fidelity out of an iPod when it is limited to 16 bit output and a 44.1/48khz sampling rate with a -90db noise floor. We need 24/96 players with a -110db noise floor, and a decent set of ear buds. Not that it would matter for consumers that listen to the typical tizz and boom being produced today.

BBH