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

[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.

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

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.

Re:more for non-DRM

[CRCulver]

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.

Not all sound engineers are as dedicated to the art as you suggest. Okay, sure, if one wants to listen to something recorded in a state-of-the-art lab by consummate lovers of both the music itself and clean audio in general, then one should invest in the right conditions.

From my own collection, I'll take the world premiere recording of Boulez's Repons as an example. It was recorded in the projection space at IRCAM, one of the world's foremost music and acoustics research laboratories, and I only listen to it from the CD on my home stereo system, which isn't the most whizbang, but the best I can afford.

Contrast this with Rush's 2002 album Vapor Trails , a musically strong release which was recorded in poor circumstances and remastered in worse. The clipping that plagues every track in the album has long been criticized by fans (see the Amazon reviews for further info). So, since the guys who engineered the album didn't aim for clear audio, I feel no shame in putting this in 160 kbps Ogg Vorbis and listening to it with merely average headphones on my portable MP3 player.

As has already been said in many places in the discussion, lossless is probably going to be a draw mostly for classical (or, in my case, modern-classical) fans.

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.

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

[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.

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

Re:FFS shut up already

[denoir]

Audiophiles have consistently been failing double blind tests when it comes to lossy vs lossless audio compression.

Now, if you wish to sell stuff to audiophiles, then players supporting lossless compression are excellent - they will buy it (along with anything you claim, on whatever grounds, will improve the playback quality).

If you however want to bring better music quality to the general population - make them get better headphones.

Re:FFS shut up already

[markov_chain]

I'm with you on this one. Even CDs are inferior to studio tape when I listen to them on my magnetically levitated speakers hooked up to the stereo with gold-plated cables. The tape heads are gold-plated too. The whole setup sits atop a few tons of sand bags and is located in an underground chamber enclosed in a steel Faraday cage.

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: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.