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Does Going Digital Mean Missing Music?
arlanTLDR writes "The Seattle PI is running a story about how the MP3 format is the sign of a musical apocalypse. Apparently, many top music producers are 'howling' over the fact that files in a compressed format contain 'less than 10 percent of the original music on the CDs.' Is this just sensationalist FUD, or is there something to the assertion that listening to an MP3 is like hearing music 'through a screen door?'" The article mentions that the iPod and its cheap earbuds bear some of the responsibility for rendering this degradation in sound quality less objectionable.
I remember AM tube radios.
Now quit complaining and get off my lawn.
You will be surprised at just how much of that 90% of sounds produced our ear cannot understand.
Kevin Smith on Prince
Clearly, all that hard work to polish the recorded sound isn't really very important to people.
Doesn't bode well for the planned obsolescence system and it's efforts to shift us to new hi-def hardware.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
Just a sign of the times, I guess
This sig left intentionally blank.
I prefer to think of it as having curtains or veils between me and the music. MP3s have enough information missing that they get sort of "crunchy." I don't know how else to explain it.
10% of Britney Spears or the Aguilera Monster is fine with me, although 5% would be better.
Seriously... 6% of any given Britney Spears song is still sufficient to cause internal hemorrhaging. The other 94%, if added back, would just be salt on the wound.
load "$",8,1
Saying that MP3s sport less than 10% of the music of a CD is just plain stupid. Perhaps 10% of the data, but frankly that would only be a low bit rates. That is a little like saying that radio is destroying music because it is not CD-quality. Everybody has a different tolerance. For me 128 just won't do it but up that to 256 and I can't tell the difference. These people are just dinosaurs afraid of the future. I'd take a high bit rate 6-channel AAC file over a CD any day of the week,
It's just whining. There have been numerous double-blind ABX tests, many done by the folks over at Hydrogenaudio.org, comparing MP3 files to AIFFs, and with the right codec and right bitrates (depending on the type of source material), it's possible to get an MP3 that only the most refined ears can discriminate from the original. [1]
a ssical/mp3test.html. While well-trained ears could discriminate between 128kbit MP3s and PCM, they could not reliably tell the difference between 256kbit and PCM, on average. This is just the tip of the iceberg.
Of course, it's quite possible to make an MP3 that sounds like a tin-can telephone with one end held underwater, and I'd argue that many of the consumer-ripped files floating around the P2P networks fall into this category, but these files only exist *because* there aren't legitimate, professionally-made, DRM-free MP3s. (And because some people like getting stuff for free and don't much care about the quality when they do. But I do think there is a market for and profit in digitally-delivered music, for the people who can do it right.)
As more music begins to be distributed as MP3s, sound engineers will doubtless (if they have not already) begin studying the codecs and encoding procedures in order to wring the most quality out of a particular bit rate. Many amateurs and enthusiasts have already done this, and there is a sizable body of work devoted to the topic -- including the LAME encoder itself.
Also, looking towards the future, while CDs have pegged the standard for digital music as 2 channel, 44.1kHz, 16-bit PCM, there is no reason why an appropriately-crafted MP3 file cannot *exceed* it in terms of quality. The Apple iPod already supports (slightly) higher sample rates, I believe, and if consumers desire it [2], there's no reason why modern digital formats cannot encapsulate very high-definition audio.
The only people who I hear whining about MP3 are those with either an ulterior motive and a desire to try and keep the industry from moving away from a distribution model that revolves around physical objects, or those who just don't understand the technology. (There are a very small core of audiophiles and techies who seem to dislike MP3 because they prefer some other format, usually either for ethical/political reasons or technical ones, and there certainly is an argument in favor of using lossless formats in lieu of MP3 for distribution, but overall MP3 strikes a good balance between quality and portability. [3])
[1] One 'competition' that pitted serious self-described audiophiles against modern codecs is described in detail here: http://www.geocities.com/altbinariessoundsmusiccl
[2] Which is a big 'if.' The buying public, to date, has shown little interest in high-definition audio as such. The only exception to this is multichannel audio, but that only in movie soundtracks for surround sound.
[3] This does raise the question, though, of why the legitimate music-download sites don't take a cue from the late, great, AllOfMp3.com and just allow the *customers* to choose their format of choice for their downloads. There's really no particular excuse not to at least offer a few different quality/size options, particularly for popular music that is going to be enjoyed in a variety of settings (automobiles, portables, home stereos -- each lends itself to a slightly different EQ and compression).
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What kind of screen doors do these people have and where can I buy one?
-John Fenley
I dunno that they have any right to complain when they are the ones making it so difficult to get even these 10% MP3/AAC files. They wcould be selling DRM free FLAC files to those of us who cared about such things. They could be selling much higher fidelity recordings online for that matter.
I like the cut of your jib son. Fucking brilliant!
Mark
If music is only stored as an MP3 than yes we will be loosing some of the music. Flac would fix that. Now to the question, are MP3s and cheap earbuds ruining music? I would say the lost of dynamic range in modern CDs, the nightmare that is Clearchannel, and the general decline in the quality of music are much greater threats. Let's not forget the draconian tactics of the music industry also seem to come into play. It has gotten to the point that I hate the record companies and just don't want to pay their prices.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Bad mixing. I can't find the link right now, but many people have complained about how CDs are being produced by mixing things loud and the sound getting clipped. Add to that most consumer CD players completely process the CD signal to hell and gone then they play it through cheap-ass head phones so seriously, the consumer has already lost a lot of quality. Most listeners won't notice the difference because of their playback set-up.
Of course, some people are now going for the "super bitrate" MP3s ripped directly from CDs, but they are the rare ones.
Also, if the mass market really wanted higher audio quality, don't you think any of the CD successors would have taken off already?
The bitter lessons of a veteran coder: http://bitterprogrammer.blogspot.com
Whilst it's true that lossy compressed audio can't sound exactly the same as the original, it's worth bearing in mind that people will listen to their portable mp3 player in places where the background noise is sufficient to drown out any imperfections the compression creates.
To do something right, you often have to roll up your sleeves and get busy.
Ogg Vorbis (aka .ogg)
Perhaps it's a little bit simplistic, but it's a better format than MP3 and has better compression.
It's really not that hard to introduce an option to use ogg on ITunes or anywhere else.
The only thing MP3 has is its ubiquity. Kinda like DTS (Digital Theater Sound) to Dolby Surround Sound.
Well, nuf said
because cd's are always perfect: http://georgegraham.com/compress.html
"The difference could be as fundamental as which brain hemisphere the music engages." -original article I was unaware that the ability for me to enjoy music was based on which part of my brain processed the noise. I don't know, I'm kind of liking how my left brain is processing music. I think I'll let him have his MP3 formats. I'll leave the walking and talking to my right brain.
because CDs contain only about 10% of the sound from analog recordings.
Anonymous to ward off "grumpy old man and his vinyls" modding.
"It turns you into an observer," Meyer says. "It forces the brain to work harder to solve it all the time. Any compression system is based on the idea you can throw data away, and that's proved tricky because we don't know how the brain works."
Did that make any sense to anyone in here?
1) The sound reproduction is appalling; even a $10 pair of in-ear headphones leads to a vast improvement in the sound.
2) Even if iPod is hidden from view, the white earbuds scream 'Please mug me, I have an iPod'
3) If you're worried about losing the conspicuous consumption 'status' of having white earbuds, then ignore rule 2), and go listen to Brian Eno on a street corner in Compton.
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
This is propoganda planted by the RIAA. The last gasp.
These are the same people who compress the recording so they only use 10% of the dynamic range of the CD (the top 10% if you were wondering) because they think it sells better.
If they are worried about the degradation in quality from MP3s - the apocalypse arrived well before that. It was when some budding sound engineer said I can make your CD sound louder and all the producers said - Yeah! Louder is better! Who cares if the quality goes to pot.
While the 90% figure may be overblowing things a bit, there is a noticeable loss of sound fidelity when converting to a compressed format. In fact, it's actually quite impressive that the loss is not even more noticeable than it is, and that is a testament to the brilliance of the original MP3 algorithms, which have been tweaked and honed to make the quality even better.
The fact remains, however, that most listeners, in most situations, don't care. For one thing, popular music has, since the 50s, been designed for listening to on cheap equipment. The dynamic range is enormously compressed, the sounds are often fuzzy to begin with, the voices are straight front and center. This can explain the dwindling popularity of classical and jazz, and the rise of the louder, simpler, more beat-oriented music like rock, rap, or pop. Note that I'm not saying the music is of lower quality, but that it can be reproduced "faithfully enough" on lower quality equipment.
I don't have any statistics, but I would bet that most music listening happens while the listener is doing something else: driving, working out, coding python scripts, etc. In those circumstances, an average listener is not going to notice a little swishiness in the cymbals, or lack of crispness on the trumpet's timbre.
Those who care (like me) will shell out the extra bucks for higher fidelity. Those who don't care, which are in the majority, will use whatever technology is most convenient.
My guitar chord generator.
...the iPod and its cheap earbuds... I agree that the one Apple puts in the box are not that great, but how many actually still have the original earbuds? I am careful with mine and still end up with a new pair every 1 - 1.5 years. My sister, who is quite careless with hers, goes through a set about every 3 - 4 months. I think the fact that the original earsbuds are so crappy is one of the reasons they break/wear out so quickly.No worries! If you want high quality stuff, like sound board recordings of live shows of decent artists that aren't controlled by the RIAA, it's out there in SHN/FLAC (lossless codecs). It's just not what most of the consumer market wants for a variety of reasons including size constraints, the fact that the music has little depth as it is, and it takes too long to download.
That's not the only revelation contained in the article.
Here's what I learned about FLAC: "It reduces storage space by 30 percent to 50 percent, but without compression."
This is a rather impressive breakthrough which most people might not know about. Of course, I still dream of the car that travels without motion, but so far technology has failed me.
It was only in the last couple of years that I started to notice the difference in quality between different bitrates of MP3's. Then CD's started to sound bad. I swear my girlfriend's cheap turntable sounds better than my audiophile CD player.
Is the concern overblown? Maybe not with 128kbps mp3s (as opposed to say 256kbs ABR kind).
However, these same producers compress the living bejeezus out of their music during the production, killing all the dynamics. So frankly, the effect of a lower-bitrate mp3 isn't quite the castration of full-on sonic fidelity that's portrayed in the TFA.
10% of original music is an overblown claim, because the music is not just filtered down, but is also compressed. In truth, the article should be comparing against equivalent lossless audio compression formats, which yield about 60-70% of the original size (so does that mean that a FLAC file contains 60-70% of the original music? No!)
The bit about the compressed music affecting the perception in a different manner is an interesting one, but I really struggle to see how the difference can come through the average consumer equipment. It just doesn't. For example, things such as SACDs or high-quality vinyl records allow the recording to retain a lot of the "air," ambience of the room, which gives a perception of larger-than-life sound, makes it sound more full, gives it an impression of better dimensionality, really puts you there. But shit, you can only hear that on high-end equipment with the entire signal chain made out of quality components, and you sure as hell won't hear the difference on a consumer system.
Most people also do not listen to the music in an environment that allows for such an engaging listening experience.
I too am sad to see the consumers ignore higher-quality audio (as I want that higher quality for myself, being an audio geek of sorts), but I completely understand where they are coming from.
I have some stuff I ripped from vinyl at 64-256kB/s(vbr), sounds better to me than the CDs (which you only have to rip at 192 to get 100%).
DONT PANIC
This reminds me of the fuss that currently exists over HD-TV. People gasp at the quality of the picture, but don't notice the lack-of-quality of the content. It's the same with music - people focus too much on the equipment, and ignore the music.
I've got a beautiful violin recording from the 20s or 30s. It's very low-fi, scratchy as hell, but the playing is magnificent. Ask any jazz fan whether they'd prefer to listen to a well-used John Coltrane LP, or Kenny G in 192 kHz / 24-bit, DVD-A.
People, listen to the music -- not the equipment! Otherwise you're a hifi-collector, not a music fan.
No, it does not.
:)
MP3 reduces the file size a lot by lossy compression that eliminates sounds you cannot hear (it's not like the Fraunhofer institute is filled with fools, you know). Lower bitrates will take away more parts you can indeed hear, but a high bitrate VBR MP3, at least _I_ cannot distinguish from the original. I must admit here, ofcourse, that I don't listen to classical music, and it is said the difference is heard best with that. However, there are a lot of things to consider. Sure you can listen to MP3's on your cheap-ass player with cheap-ass earbuds and complain it sounds like crap. Compare that to a high-end soundcard and Sennheisers, that makes a very big difference. I wonder if these people complain about losing half their data when they ZIP files. They should remember, it's not the size the matters, it's how you use it
Sucks that we can't all be rich record execs who can afford the multi-thousand dollar equipment needed to get that other 90% of the music that we are *missing*. Most people are held back by their stereo set-up and not their 256 AAC files.
Animoog.org
Not that it directly affects me -- the yahoos currently ruining the studios never had their hands on the stuff I listen to.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
If you want to experience all that there is in music, you have to be in a very special listening environment. Among other things, there has to be just about zero ambient noise. As noise increases, you have to resort to compression or you will lose sounds that are weaker than the noise.
It is said that Phil Spector http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Spector, one of the most successful music producers of all time, made a point of listening to his music on a crummy car radio. That was where most teens listened to music and that was where it had to sound good. The same logic applies to MP3 players. Most people spend much more time listening to their MP3 players than they do listening in the quiet of their living rooms. Music that sounds good on an MP3 player will get listened to. Concert quality music that sounds bad on an MP3 player might get listened to once before it gathers dust forever more.
So, for all you musical purists out there, suck it up dudes. Fighting against the MP3 format (and the players) is like King Canute trying to push back the tide.
Meizu M6 8GB player, cause it supports FLAC, and it sounds AMAZING. I haven't touched my ipod since (at least after I figured out how to convert all my audible files to mp3..) and it's half the price of an 8GB nano, and it plays videos too. I didn't think there would be that much of a difference, but if you've got the right headphones it is clearly superior. Never going back to my ipod and itunes again.
"Thank you for using Stop-n-Drop, America's favorite suicide booth since 2008"
So lossless audio codecs are less value for your money than the original even if you can put twice the amount of information on a gigabyte?
Oh, and with compression you have something like 99,7% of the valuable information in 10% of the data.
Less is more, more or less.
If you mod this up, your slashdot background will turn into a beautiful sunset!
Are these the same people that voluntarily threw away the full db range of the CD just to make it louder?
Whatever the perceived quality loss of mp3 (and tests show it's minimal), it's completely irrelevant. Whether the format, the sound is run through a noisy amplifier in a music player, television or cheapo integrated stereo, gets the bass and highest tones overly boosted, then squeezed through tinny-sounding earphones or cheap integrated speakers.
And that is just fine. Yes, you can build a great sound (note: not music) experience by spending an enormous amount of time learning about audio technology and spending a very significant amount of money on great gear that work well together. And of course almost nobody bothers - it's too much work and wayyy too much money. And frankly, music generally doesn't need it. Your tunes will be as enjoyable to you almost no matter what equipment you use to listen to it. People used to find all-mechancal gramophones perfectly acceptable, and for a long time music was heard - and greatly enjoyed - when belted out by rank amateurs that couldn't carry a tune in a bucket.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
to tell the difference between an AIFF and an MP3 at 256kbs or beyond. Maybe dogs or bats could, but not the average human...
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
I own plenty of 24/192 albums that are as good as it will ever get- digital is not the problem at all, the problem is everything around it. #0- Nobody under 50 has heard music sound good, and those over it don't care anymore (so nobody has any idea what they are missing) #1- Sh!tty speakers #2- Sh!tty speakers #3- Sh!tty speakers #4- Horrible mastering that absolutely ruins music (eg: loudness war) #5- Horrible mastering that absolutely ruins music (eg: loudness war) #6- compressing to MP3 when disk space is free, there is 0 need for using an mp3 #7- EAX, Dolby prologic, all of that crap upmixing for surround It all boils down to young people having absolutely no experience with quality when it comes to music or playback equipment, the industry pushing for cheaper when infact it is clear that the cheapening of music in all instances is destroying the industry, and they don't want to do a thing about it. I bet that 95% of college students are listening to music on either ipod earbuds, or logitech/creative computer speakers. They are all HORRIBLE. And about those double blind tests- well no wonder its hard to tell, the music is maximized or compressed to static already, the listening equipment is awful, so ya no wonder.
Like the subject says, in most cases, you can't even tell. It's not that an MP3 is as good as the original, it's that so many people have such crap speakers (and perhaps other gear) that the difference is negligible anyway.
On a good setup, the difference is pretty clear (even w/ 256 kbit MP3s), but on things that most people listen to, you're just splitting hairs.
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
There's probably a sweet spot somewhere between MP3 and CD where you would not notice the difference.
Clearly MP3 is good enough for most people. To use the car analogy: sure, a Rolls Royce might be technically better than a Toyota, but where is Rolls Royce now? Does Rolls Royce actually deliver a vehicle that is useful to anybody?
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Ten percent of five minutes is thirty seconds, and most full songs are shorter than five minutes. I call fair use on that!
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_an d_entertainment/music/article1878724.ece
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
...are that much better right? The mastering that makes everything sound flat and un-dynamic just so that things sound 'loud'? I could maybe agree with this if we compare some classical/jazz music records to their mp3s, where even if I encode with the 'extreme' setting in lame I can surely hear a big difference on my (nice) stereo (on my ipod they sound the same of course), but for today's top-40 etc. mp3s at over 192 are plenty.
Personally nowadays I think nobody ought to buy any top-40 anywhere but on itunes, since it will sound the same (aka, crappy) and it will be cheaper (since you can just get the one decent song and not buy the filler), but for classical/jazz there is no way I would buy anything but physical CDs (or, even better, DVDs).
-- the cake is a lie
I think they're comparing the size of a hard drive, to the size of dyed flying discs.
sometimes, nothing.
If music is only stored as an MP3 than yes we will be loosing some of the music. Flac would fix that.
Ogg too is better, but don't count on the MAFIAA to bring you quality music. They are still trying to figure out how to get their radio empire back. That includes intentionally distorted and low quality music shoveled to you by a select and advertising funded few and everything else bad you noticed. Vista gives them some of it, but no one is buying that. The other way is the new is a compulsory SoundExchange. If we don't stop them, SoundExchange will eventually buddy up with M$, Apple or some other sell out and lock everyone else out.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I suggest you read Slashdot
By the same rule, CD's are already missing just a hair under 100% of of the original music - any given bitrate never being a perfect reproduction of a true waveform.
If you're going to argue "perception is what counts, not raw percentages" for your format of choice (CD), then you have to use the same rule for the one you dislike (MP3). By that standard, if you ask an average listener to compare live to CD, they'll likely say it's greater than 99% quality... and they'll say the same between CDs and higher bitrate MP3s.
If either the quality of the source or the quality of the output medium is bad, the other end can't compensate whatsoever. (put garbage in, get garbage out).
This thus means that if the output medium is not very good, the source only needs to be equally good. Improving the quality of the source won't give any substantial benefit in the output. Certainly not when the "speakers" are $0,50 headphones. This is why the sound of MP3's is "acceptable". (add some reverb effect and other DSP's and the sound, to many, quickly sounds "better", when it just has more effect.)
If you play an mp3 on B&W speakers with similar quality amp (say Musical Fidelity or Rotel), I can't imagine no one wouldn't be able to hear the difference. It probably also depends how much you've trained yourself to listen to detail in music.
When people mention "losless quality", but the amount of information is reduced by 90%, there are definitely areas in the sound where this loss is more significant than in others. Someone mentioned hi-hats and guitar solos. I suppose that higher harmonics are probably suffering a lot from the mp3 reduction, which usually don't come out very well in cheaper systems, but still add to the sound overall.
I did an mp3 compression experiment with Coldplay "clocks". When compressed via mp3 to 128kbps, it sounds awful. Very noisy, and the note beginnings aren't clear. They sound TOO SOFT. Instead, when compressed to 320kbps, it sounds MUCH, MUCH better, and the "ding" effect when each note is hit, is heard much more clearly. The explanation is that a piano note contains a lot of high freq. harmonics (even if it's not a high note), and these are lost in the mp3 compression. Now, most MP3 music found on the internet is 192kbps, and the last time i checked, a lot of it was encoded at 128.
And that's WITHOUT taking into account the dynamic range loss in modern music (eew).
In short: Yes, the quality loss can be recognized by a human - specially one with music training. Of course, if you're the type of person who plays his iPod too loud with his earbuds, then your ear is already damaged enough so you won't be able to tell any difference. Too bad for you.
True, decently encoded mp3s are barely distinguishable from their CD counterparts to the vast majority of listeners.
Also true, even poorly encoded mp3s are capable of sounding vastly superior to the collection of cassettes and 4-tracks, which formed previous generations of portable music. Still, the record companies charged more for those formats than vinyl and the music producers didn't complain about their paychecks back then.
The real difference that is affecting the livelihood of music professionals these days has less to do with the quality of the format than the quality of music produced these days. That and the end of the music industry's archaic and monopolistic distribution model.
Couldn't the RIAA have found a better spokeperson for their argument than Phil Spector?
Phil Spector, as a producer, is best known for the Wall of Sound--creating an effect by cramming as many instruments into the studio and on the master tape as possible. I suppose his music would be an edge case in data removal--if you could actually hear every detail in his recordings, then the Wall of Sound would really be overwhelming.
But the Wall of Sound works best in mono; it doesn't fully work in stereo. Hearing more detail makes it less effective, and that kind of music tends to get called "overproduced" regardless of merit.
Spector is also responsible for producing the original Let It Be. Spector laid an orchestra on "Long and Winding Road" that, in remastered Redbook CD detail, drowns out every other non-vocal instrument on the track and nearly swamps Paul's vocals.
In short, the man often puts more detail in his tracks than the average ear can hear, on purpose.
There is also the problem that Spector is on trial for murder right now. This makes no difference to the validity of his theories, but it would have been nice if the RIAA had tapped a famous producer who was not at risk of going to San Quentin.
There is a fine line between recklessness and courage... -- Paul McCartney
one of the tags on this story has it right-- FLAC, or something similar is a great alternative to raw CD audio. Flac renders 3 to 4 minute music tracks as about 15-20MB files. Sure you can get a 3.5MB file if you use mp3, but as mp3 is a lossy format you do lose sound quality, whether or not you notice. FLAC is a lossless compression format, it is open source, and at 15-20MB is is much more compact than a 100MB raw audio file. With 60GB iPods and hard drives measured in hundreds of GB I don't see FLACs file size as being an issue-- at least not for long.
Well..um...my 5.3 system cost me 12,000 dollars, and it goes to 11!
So there!
After doing a second comparison, 320kbps still sounds WAY TOO LOW quality for piano music. ...guess nothing beats the real thing, eh?
This is propoganda planted by the RIAA. The last gasp.
They have apposed "perfect" copy from the start because they knew non-physical distribution meant the end of their broadcast and recording empire. They will do everything in their power to keep their control of the market. That includes making digital music suck like FM radio and limiting internet distribution of music. Vista and SoundExchange give them most of what they want. People are not buying Vista but musicians will not be able to escape SoundExchange if we do not shut them down.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
shhh! Not so loud! if you wake them they'll make all the non-drm tracks flac and start charging $10 a song!
Get a web developer
The C't (German IT magazine) test from 2000 was great: http://www.geocities.com/altbinariessoundsmusiccla ssical/mp3test.html
OK folks, let's get real... I'm both an Apple fanatic and an audiophile, and I can tell you, if you want audiophile-quality playback and without 'missing' anything in the music assuming you've purchased the CD, then you need to be listening to that music on a stereo system of no less than $10,000 (U.S.) purchased from a professional sound shop. Forget that $1000 Sony, Pioneer, Fisher, Bose integrated amplifier with 5-speaker surround sound. It ain't gonna matter. When you start looking at the individual components and their specs, and how they integrate together, in addition to considering Transparent Cable interconnects and speaker cables (they have band-pass filters located at the terminals), then you have the beginnings of a decent system, not even a good one. In fact, if you can afford American-made stereo components, then you can walk about with a BIG STICK! Some of the best-sounding audio equipment in the world is designed and 'Made In America' if you can afford it - and I cannot! - 'nuff said...
To make the best sounding MP3s, download iTunesLame and start making the best-sounding 320 kb/sec MP3 that the algorhythm can make. If that isn't good enough for you, you can always copy the original AIFF file off of the CD and drag it into iTunes, or use Apple's Lossless format to have the same quality at 1/2 the disk space.
My point is, make the best possible sounding MP3 file you can, because eventually, you will upgrade you MP3 player to something better and you will find that upgrading the quality of your MP3 library is a very arduous task and a waste of time. Hard drive space is cheap, and getting cheaper. Just make the best sounding MP3 you can make, and be happy with it. Actually, most people are not missing all that much from the MP3 format. Even I, an audiophile, don't analyze every nuance of a music I listen to in MP3 format - I just ENJOY IT, hell, Journey, REO Speedwagon, and Van Halen aren't going to sound any better on my iPod as opposed to the radio in a 1976 AMC Gremlin or 1981 Chevy Chevette.
MP3 format was designed for maximum music quality with music loss and compression - keep that in mind... You want to hear the 'real thing' without loss? Then go to the recording studio or the concert with no hearing loss.
Music format is a function of the audience. I first heard this in Alvin Toffler's "Third Wave". Symphony music was derived from Baroque Chamber music because the size of the audience grew. Big Band was that because the radios transmitted sax and trumpet well.
Now, with iPods, the audience is one earbuddy. Music will adapt to match this medium, sound foibles and all. Ask yerself... Do you think that Frank Valli and the Four Seasons would have been a hit on a 5.1 system? Do you think that Tom Scholz would have taken umpteen years mixing Barry Goudreau's rhythm guitar if we didn't have a midrange speaker in our $1200 cabinets?
Besides, anything is better than a skipping CD.
Christina Aguilera is a really talented singer and performer. Over-produced sometimes, but she's good. Just because someone is popular doesn't mean that they suck. It is just a highly likely coincidence. Flame away. :D
Actually, double-blind tests have a long and varied history in the wine industry.
... whether that's due entirely to tester bias, or also to poor QC on the part of the winery, is an open question.)
Many people credit a certain 1976 blind test of wines for launching the California wine industry, and proving that Americans could make "serious" wine as well as (in fact, better than) the French. There was a repeat in 1986 and 2006, with similar results.
And a few years ago, Trader Joe's "Two Buck Chuck" won a 'double-gold' medal at a California wine fair during a double-blind test. (In other tests, it was usually last
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
If the vast majority of users can't tell the difference between a 3 megabyte 128 AAC file and a 15 megabyte FLAC file, why should the music industry spend the extra money on the bandwidth to provide it?
... and shouldn't any copyright violations be for a lot less, since only 10% was copied? Better yet... Doesn't 10% fall into fair use?At the rate that dynamic range in most recordings is heading for full signal, does it really matter? CDs are almost to the point of being un-listenable because of how discs are being mastered. Not only have the Spears & boy bands won, but now they are trying to make that crap LOUDER!
Live concerts are the only way your going to get the "true" music, and even then, acoustics can suck and gear can turn crappy. Stuff you buy on CD can be fruity-looped, multitracked, or "digitally enchanced" which again, is not the "true" sound. If the drummer screws up, and throws the guitarist off and the vocalist stumbles, that's how it's supposed to sound. People have taken "True Sound" to mean something between the ideological and personal taste of how the music *should* sound, rather than what it really sounds like. Digital monkeying-around allows the idealism to become reality while the "True Sound" remains unheard. I myself cannot tell the difference between a song on the radio and one from an MP3. I'm just not that demanding. I can tell you if the beat is too fast or too slow (as opposed to what I'm used to hearing) or if the key is different (than what I'm used to hearing), but other than that MP3s sound great to me.
boycott slashdot February 10th - 17th check out: altSlashdot.org
Dude! I should start reading ALL posts before posting! I've just posted the same joke! hahaha :P
Well, at least it is funny! :)
"Ogg too is better,"
Ogg is still loses some of the data in the recording. Flac loses nothing.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
There is the implicit assumption that before MP3s, people were listening to music in less 'destructive' devices. The assumption is that people were listening to music without losing as much as the 90% of detail/data that the iPod experience gives.
The reality is that most people previously listened to music through devices which had the same, if not worse drawbacks:
- car radios - where the background adds so much noise
- radio - where the degradation in quality again adds a bunch of noise
- audio cassette - where repeated listning degrades performance
- vinyl - you are trying to tell me that scratches were part of the 'original' sound
Perhaps the industry experts are comparing the experience of listening to beautiful monitor speakers to an iPod. My god! There is a difference
Agreed; 128kbit MP3 files, particularly CBR ones done with old encoders (the original Fraunhofer code seems particularly crummy, and was used until recently in some commercial products), are pretty terrible. Even rock or electronic music can have noticeable artifacts. The real question isn't "are there compression artifacts," it's more "do most people care?" Although there are definitely people who flat-out don't care -- particularly when they're only going to listen to music in the car, where the difference between the noise floor and pain is only 30-40 dB or so anyway -- I think there is a sizable, frequently under-reported, group of consumers who are desirous of quality but only when it doesn't come at a premium in terms of cost or complexity.
I think it's when you get into 192kbit or higher VBR MP3 files (slightly less for AAC and other, newer formats) that you start to lose a lot of people, in terms of their ability to discriminate that from the PCM original. At 256kbit, encoded with LAME, it's only a very small fraction of audiophiles who can (and then, I suspect it's only when they've practiced extensively). Above 256kbit/s, IMO it turns into a diminishing-returns proposition (and you might as well go for lossless formats if you want to archive for later recompression).
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
>> hell i have friends who like the over compression of FM radio.
you need to get some new friends
music - http://www.subatomicglue.com
That and the codec settings. If they used LAME 3.97 -V 2 --vbr-new these articles wouldn't be popping up every so often.
As for the "digital purists," oh please, if they really gave a damn about sound quality, they'd raise holy hell over dynamic range compression and leave MP3 alone. You lose most of the "content" long before the stuff gets ripped. The MP3 encoder just uses what it's given.
"There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge." - Bertrand Russell.
It should be retired. We now have good lossless formats, and enough bandwidth / storage to handle them. We also have much better lossy formats, like AAC, which give us a good bitrate while preserving more of the sound. MP3 has nothing going for it, technically. All it has going for it is widespread implementation. Fortunately modern hardware has enough CPU and ROM space to be able to ship with multiple players. If you put MP3 head-to-head against any other modern audio codecs (AAC, WMA, Ogg Vorbis), MP3 will generally come in last in a listening test.
My 12 year old bought that album - it has freaking NOISE added to it, just for art's sake for crying out loud. If you haven't heard it (and I suspect you never will on the radio) read some of the reviews.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
...you'll need to make an apple-to-apple (no pun intended) comparison. Get a reference platform on which to do the test -- be it the $1300 5.1 system setup, or your ordinary home stereo with CD player that can play back MP3 files.
1) Rip a couple of songs from your favorite artist, and burn the MP3 files into another CD.
2) Play the original CD on your reference system
3) Play the MP3 CD on your reference system
Then you'll be able to tell if there's any difference, either in your perception or appreciation of the music.
My favorite reference CD for these type of things is by Silje Nergaard, specifically the Brevet album. Awesome fidelity on that recording!
The Wknd Sessions - Malaysian and South East Asia independent music
while compression does remove many frequencies from the uncompressed track, only about 90% or less of those frequencies ARE FUCKING AUDIBLE IN THE FIRST PLACE YOU -ASSHATS-
10x compress of the music does NOT == 10x less music.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
The article says that mp3's represent less than 10% of the original music. Huh? Yeah, mp3 is a lossy format, but does anyone associated with this article know anything about compression algorithms? The problem does not stem from mp3 - we need only look to the source of displeasure - the extreme dynamic range compression of CD's themselves. That is what has changed in the last 10 years. And who can we blame for this? The very same music producers that are complaining about the strawman that is mp3. Data compression is not the real issue here. The real culprit is the music compression designed to make everything sound as loud as possible. As to the assertion that only 10% of the music is represented. Let me refute that now. The bit rate of uncompressed wav is about 1400 kbs, so 10:1 (data) compression gives roughly 128 kbs. Now, if you listen to an mp3 at 128 kbs, tell me is only 10% of the music represented? What does that even mean? The "10%" figure is so ambiguous, it could mean anything to anyone. Same with "listening through a screen door". I have seen very few double-blind or ABX listening tests comparing compression formats, but the few that exists always show that, while people have some ability to detect differences at 128 kbs (on normal audio systems), it's definitely not obvious to the casual listener. And that's probably 99% of the crowd buying mp3's.
Yes, because it's obviously the audio quality that matters, not the construction of the song itself. Who cares about interesting harmonies, flowing melodies, or thoughtful lyrics?
The real damage being done is by people playing their music so loud and for such a long period of time. I can't recall any sources, but I do remember hearing about earbuds being especially bad, as the speakers are so close to the eardrums, compared to headphones, where the ear and ear canal can block and mute more of the soundwaves.
What good is sound quality when people are half-deaf already?
8-tracks and cassette tapes were perfect...
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
I freely admit that ClearChannel and the four-company record label oligopoly have both been bad things for the music industry. But isn't the RIAA proof enough that the music industry isn't something that any of us should mourn? If ClearChannel is helping to kill it -- if ClearChannel is standing right in front of us, plunging a butcher knife into the music industry over and over -- then I say all we need to do is point and laugh.
The death of the music industry doesn't seem to be doing anything to slow musicians down. Not the real ones, anyway. Maybe I just live on the fringes, but more and more I'm hearing about how the major labels are struggling, cursing, and biting their nails, while at the same time independent labels are experiencing a boom time. It's certainly been true of punk and metal for a long time that the really important new artists are all going to be on indies. Some of the best rock bands of recent years -- bands that 20 years ago might have been deemed "radio rock" -- have emerged from the indie scene. And lately, more and more hip-hop artists have been releasing so-called mix tapes (many of which violate copyrights, bringing hip-hop proudly back to its roots) and putting out records through independent labels (and I don't mean "bespoke 'independent' subsidiary of Interscope created as a vanity imprint for a particular artist," I mean real indie labels).
Meanwhile, other people sign to major labels and what do they get? In effect, they get to go into debt via a whopping big bank loan that someone else gets to spend to record, release, and market an album and a tour package. And then every penny of that loan has to be paid back by the artist before the artist sees a dime. Why do these musicians put up with it? Because they are not really musicians ... they are wage earners who made up their minds to go and work in the music industry. They don't see anything wrong with being the equivalent of a character from Office Space, working 9 to 5 in an industry than churns out factory-manufactured pap like Velvet Revolver, Audioslave, 50 Cent, Limp Bizkit, Avril Lavigne ... made-to-order music cobbled together in a studio by cynical marketers who don't differentiate music from any other disposable consumer good. The so-call artists don't care because they get to buy pretty clothes and date pretty girls, and that's it. So who needs 'em? If that's the music industry we're talking about, let's let it die.
The real damage done by the recording industry cartel, unfortunately, has been to the independent retailer. Very few mom n' pop record stores can survive selling CDs that Best Buy and Wal*Mart are going to discount 30 percent. MP3s are also doing damage to indie retailers' sales, for sure ... but MP3s are surely only another nail in the coffin. The damage has been done by the industry itself, which is more reason to say "good riddance."
MP3 (or pick your format) as a channel for legitimate music distribution is still only in its infancy. Who among you is going to tell me that digital downloads aren't going to continue to play a bigger and bigger part in music distribution of all types, though? It's a shame that this might effectively pull the rug out of the customer-friendly, independent retailer scene before it really puts the screws on ClearChannel et al, but nobody is better positioned to take advantage of the changes than the people who aren't paying off their student loans on their MBAs by getting piggy-back rides from other people's music.
Breakfast served all day!
Quality was something that you had in the 1960's with high-end stereo systems. It was something your parents had, or maybe your grandparents.
The first step down the road was the transistor radio. Most of them had very small speakers and incredibly poor cases, at least as far as sound quality went. Cassette tapes generally were played on similar instruments again with tiny bass-starved speakers.
Car radios suffer from problems as well, so you weren't finding any better quality there. Some people invested large sums of money in quality audio for their car, but nobody I knew.
Then we had the "boom box". Bigger speakers, lots more bass but still nothing great. Coupled with the fact that these were used to play AM radio stations and cassette tapes. Nope, no quality there either.
CD players came along but still young people were using either the "boom box" to play them or some kind of portable player with headphones as bad as the iPod-style ear speakers.
So, where were young people ever exposed to anything of any quality? Maybe at a concert... except there they had huge speakers over 10,000 screaming fans in some venue chosen for its size rather than acoustics. No, I'd have to say that "quality" is a completely foreign concept to most people with disposible income that are purchasing music-related things.
There might be other formats than MP3 available, but MP3 is what is available for free on the Internet. The quality sucks, but so did the radio, the cassette, the speakers, the headphones and the ear speakers of today. I really don't see any difference.
And, I'm betting that neither do the people buying and downloading music. Over and over, it comes down to music not really having much value which is why it is all free today.
Just to be technically correct...Ogg is a container format not a codec. Ogg is most often associated with the Vorbis lossy codec, but FLAC was originally written as the Ogg lossless format, hence why the reference FLAC encoder has an option to save as "Ogg FLAC". Vorbis or Ogg Vorbis is the more correct usage for clarity.
Momentarily, the need for the construction of new light will no longer exist.
The author of the article evidently labors under the delusion that lossy compression is the only kind there is. Consequently I see no reason to take anything he says seriously.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
I agree that MP3 can be made to sound decent but OGG, AAC, etc. have surpassed the sound quality at similar bit rates. I encode all my music to Ogg with a quality setting of 6. Note I can still tell the difference but it seems very subtle to me. For example, I just tried another test with a FLAC encoded CD and an OGG encoded CD. On a pair of low end Sennheiser earphones (~$60) you can still hear the difference. However it is much better than a MP3 sounds at the same bitrate. Listening again makes me want to go back and rip everything in FLAC after my next disk upgrade. Here is hoping widespread adoption of something better than MP3. Wouldn't it be nice if iTunes, etc. would support FLAC or some other similar lossless format.
This is nothing new, only the technology has changed. Most people have always listened to music on crappy equipment. 8 track tapes were quite popular until they were replaced by cassettes -- and they both suck. Does an iPod with stock earphones really sound any worse than a 1980's Walkman with stock headphones?
In the 1950's and 1960's many people listened to music played on portable record players, most of which had ceramic cartridges. In the 1970's people listened to music on cheap stereos with a record changer, tape player, and tuner. In the 1980's and 1990's the stereos got smaller and CD players replaced the record changers, but they were still crap.
A question and old flame used to ask.
/.-ers ... with some of today's so called artists less is more.
"Honey does this dress make me look fat?"
I'm sure you know the rest of it.
I'm with the other
Hope is the currency of fools
Seriously, the people who say they can tell the difference would never pull it off in a blind comparison.
Wanna bet?
Although I don't see what the issue is. I don't buy MP3s and I don't use MP3s for my own stuff. If they're not selling FLACs then I don't buy. Simple.
What is this, whiner's week?
...um, on second thought, that's not going to work either, is it?
The only way you're going to keep control of the listening experience is by renting users their devices and using DRM to keep them from compressing it.
This reminds me of Michael Moore's rather novel objections to the Sicko leak. His problem wasn't that piracy would effect his bottom line, but that he intended the film to be seen in a theatre, and not on an mobile media player.
Well, guess what, buddy - if I paid for the thing fair and square, I don't care what you think (not that I'd care even if I didn't pay for it, but that's just me). I'm going to make my own decisions about how I enjoy my copy of the music you created.
Try being a little less of a tightwad and control freak about my life.
While I appreciate the desires of audiophiles to save the world, I'm quite happy with them leaving my formats the hell alone. If there is enough demand, I'm sure lossless versions of music will be available (possibly at a higher price-- call it the "snob tax"?). In the meantime, leave me and my convenient compression algorithms the hell alone. Many of us *like* being able to fit a bajillion minutes of music into a paperclip.
:P
Besides, in a few years these 20 year olds who can actually hear the difference between an MP3 and an AIFF will be as deaf as the rest of us.
Yeah, I apparently misread the URL and had it in my head that it was from 2003. Thanks for the catch.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
The problem with such discussions is that everyone is more or less right. Music quality is such a subjective thing. Some people can't tell the difference between two garbage lids clanged together and cymbals and they like it that way. Other cry like babies at a minor tonal imperfection. Some are snobs and some are true die hards. In the end, the mp3 player is the modern equivalent of the transistor radio. It's a tote-around to provide a pleasant distraction while doing something else. It does its job admirably.
Do mp3s through ear buds sound as good as music played on high end or even mid range equipment, no, not at all. Anyone who expects that is fooling themselves. Especially when you can get a two gig player for under $100.00
Does going digital mean missing music? No.
But writing for a modern daily means picking the most sensational quotes, and maybe even changing their context. The reader will never know.
Journalists distort more than that sweet orange Boss pedal!
The poster who said you can hear the difference between 320kbps and a CD is right on. The problem is that iPods are NOT a quality sound system. Few portable players are. The more esoteric units like the (older) iRivers might qualify, and the iAudio M5...but the silicon chips used in the iPod certainly are not. This is not a flame or a troll; look at the specs. Compare the iPod's (fairly atrocious) Wolfson audio chips with the iRiver's UDA1380. Actually, there IS no comparison. You won't hear the difference with the cheap ear-buds that come with the iPod perhaps, but throw on a set of Grados with a clean headphone amp, and the difference is like night and day. To be fair, the Shuffle's Sigma Tel STMP3550 was a welcomed improvement. Still, it's the limitations imposed by the ear-bud 'phones that make the biggest difference.
:-/
Now, the human ear can be amazingly adaptive...years ago I drove to a high-end stereo store in a friend's car. His sound system wasn't too shabby. In the car's environment it sounded, well, fine. But after listening to some Martin-Logan speakers for an hour, returning to the car's audio system was pure hell. Suddenly it WASN'T "fine." It was awful. But you know, by the time we got home, it sounded okay.
And it's this kind of "lowest common denominator" acceptance that TFA is talking about. I've never understood why people would pay money for compressed music. I understand the storage limitations and the trade-offs that are required to house your entire music collection on only 40GB, but why would you not pay for the uncompressed CD (or at least FLAC downloads), especially when you know, as a music enthusiast that the technology is only going to improve? Once you have the uncompressed CD, you can always re-encode with newer, better codecs in order to fit into the same amount of storage capacity. For that matter, as storage capacity improves, and you know it will, you won't even need to compress your music.
But, as long as people listen to mid-range players with mid-range sound transducers, especially in noisy environments, they will continue to be satisfied with the music industry's 128-256-320 kbps compressed offerings.
At this point I would normally launch into a rant about DRM and actually PAYING for less freedom for your music, but that's a different argument.
"I might have made a tactical error in not going to a physician for 20 years." -- Warren Zevon
Just like if photographers were saying people are only looking at 10% of the photograph, and we should be looking at BMP/TIFF files instead of JPEGs.
Miss Music.
sometimes, nothing.
MP3 does just fine at low volumes. In fact it does better than you might expect since when the signal is only low level, it needn't concern itself with encoding as much. You can see that even in lossless codecs. A properly mastered classical piece with lots of dynamic range compresses better than a pop piece that's limited to shit.
However it's BS and you should know it that MP3s are the cause of this. They were limiting music all to hell WAAAAY before MP3s came along. It mostly happened because of radio and other low-fi playback. Despite the fact that radio is heavily compressed, they wanted more since people prefer things that are louder (or brighter).
Also if you think taking music with you is a fad, you've got your head in the sand (or perhaps stuck in another part of your anatomy). People have wanted portable music for a long time and walkmen were plenty popular. Digital just makes it more accessible. It's not going anywhere.
The problem with the double-blind tests is that they start off by asking the wrong question. Namely, they ask the participants to tell the tester if the two samples sound different. This is a fine test if you aren't interested in reproducing the intent of the original sound but only the consiously notable sound of it.
The whole point of the article is that even when your brain is unable to conciously tell the difference between two sound samples they may subconsciously affect you in different ways. It is well known and has been for hundreds if not thousands of years that different tonal patterns evoke different emotions. The Church used this to help put congregants in the right mood for a sermon. Most churches today still do. Organs are a fairly interesting device from a musical perspective because they produce a clean tone with the base note and very pure harmonics. Couple that with appropriate building acoustics and you can produce an amazingly beautiful sound.
When you listen to an MP3 or an AAC you are not hearing the original source material. What you are hearing is essentially the output of a program which has transformed the amplitude over time graph to an amplitude by frequency over time graph and then decided which 10% of the amplitude/frequency pairs to store. It is then played back by using that as input to a synthesizer which is basically like an organ but with infinitely variable pitch (frequency) instead of discrete pitch (one key for each note on a particular tonal scale) and infinitely variable amplitude (any volume for a particular pitch).
With a good enough algorithm most people, including those with well-trained ears, will not be able to consciously distinguish the two sounds. But that does not mean that these people don't subconsciously react differently to them. One way to measure that might be to measure brain activity in various regions of the brain, which is exactly what this article mentions. The problem is that that type of test is always going to show a different reaction which is something the makers and users of audio codecs often don't want to hear.
If you are the type of person who enjoys listening to an album for the way it makes you feel I suggest you try listening to something you like in WAV format or with a lossless codec like Apple Lossless and then sometime later after converting it to MP3 or AAC. I personally feel different after listening to something like Dark Side of the Moon on a lossless codec vs. MP3 vs. AAC. Granted I'm not going to store everything as ALE on my iPod because it simply doesn't have the space for that. But anything which has a definite album feel to it gets stored in ALE. If you think about it, ALE or FLAC can do a bit better than 50% compression (2:1 but often 2 and then some to 1) and MP3 and AAC are typically 10:1 at 128kpbs with a 44.1kHz 16-bit 2-channel source file. Once you start bumping the bitrate of the encoders up a few notches to say 512 or 768 you wind up in a situation where you could have the exact original data with about the same level of size reduction.
This analysis of course completely ignores yet another aspect of digital recordings which is that PCM audio is already not entirely true to the original analog waveform. If the interest is capturing and reproducing the sound as it was heard by a person present at the recording then PCM at the low bitrates and low sampling resolutions found on CDs is not going to cut it. One technique is to increase the bitrate and sampling resolution until the effect on the interesting part of the waveform becomes negligible. That is what a format like 192kHz/24-bit does. Another technique is to sample at an insanely high frequency but only record the delta (i.e. did the amplitude increase or decrease) in 1-bit. That is what DSD as used in SACD does, sampling at 2.8224 MHz with a 1-bit rate.
One notable feature of DSD is that dynamic compression occurs at higher frequencies yet the frequencies are able to be reproduced accurately. Contras
to reconstruct something really really close to what the original sounded like. I mean, all of life is an approximation. don't you get it?
;)
are formats like mp3 perfect? come on - its called LOSSY COMPRESSION. you knew this going in, right? if you want bit-perfect you should use shorten or flac or similar that offers no loss. if you are ok with roughly half space compression, go for it.
but then again, the music was 'lossy' when it was mic'ed at the studio. and it ran thru some (probably noisy) analog preamps and some hummy cables (sorry) and into a mixing system and some digital processing, MORE COMPRESSION, all kinds of evil. then finally down to 2track (usually). and you listen to all that 'stuff' that now gets poured out 2 (ideally) point source speakers. ok 5. ok 7. (whatever!)
and then some nut talks about a 5' power cord costing $500 and his system sounding BETTER because of it. and 'transparent' cables.
put it all into perspective. example: as you grow old, your hearing changes; what you heard at 5 or 15 or 25 or 55 isn't the same. why get so worked up about insignificant things? if you go to a doctor and get your ears cleaned, you'll hear much more of a difference (for a while) than any stereo upgrade.
when you listen to the music, do you hear the chords? can you tell one song from another? can you recognize the song you heard and all its live versions?
stop obsessing about minutiae. be reasonable - use decent gear but don't go overboard. diminishing returns and all that.
and if they start saying that you're only hearing part of the music, well, as long as its the part that counts, who cares
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
While it is true that MP3 ( or cd, ) doesn't really have the same quality of sound as ultra high end analog, it is 1000x more convenient, and sounds 'good enough' to get by.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
from the Music industry's point of view. You will buy the MP3. Then buy the high quality Vorbis or whatever. Then buy the 44khz stereo lossless. Then by the 98khz five channel lossless. There you go, four times the sales!
And take may word for it, except for the jump 44khz to 98khz you can hear the difference (once you get to know the music). Children, who's hearing can go up to 30khz or higher, can hear the jump from 44khz to 98khz too, and some very young adults may still be able to hear a difference. But not for too long!
... one FM station to listen to which plays a horrifying mix of country and pop, ... and intersperses the musical content with the farm report, insanely badly produced local commercials, and (mostly incorrect) weather predictions.
Gee! If I didn't know any better, I'd swear you were listening to WKRP
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
AM radio is probably a cut above most concert music. Whether a stadium or a bar, very few provide a good listening experience. And even under good condition and a proper music hall, you are still at the mercy of where you sit relative to the guy mixing the speakers. And that assumes the guy on the speakers is not a doofus and there's no pickup or feedback. And of course there's this huge conflict between loud and accurate music you don't have on you stereo.
Yet concert music is certainly among the most enjoyable and for years, until roughly the Who got it right, musicains struggled the capture the energy and sound of the live concert in the recording studio. Most still can't do it.
so
"accurate music" != "good sounding music"
if I'm out walking my dog in the park with my eye pod or cruising in my car with the windows down and the roaring breez competint with the radio, the music sounds 10,000 times better than on my couch. That's why those AM radios sounded so good.
The fact that more people will listen because compressed music sounds better makes it better.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
I can hear the difference. I am also 37 and can hear the mosquito anti-teenager noise, but not so well that i find it any more grating that the high pitch noise of a tv or monitor.
... - NWA
If I had it to do over again my collection would consist of FLAC.
I listen to the ghost in the shell soundtrack and Dark Side OF The Moon (the first cd i purchased back in the 80s) to gauge the over all audio quality of whatever technology is i'm testing. The depth is lost when its converted into MP3. I notice no difference in the FLAC files.
I understand pirating mp3s and other lossy formats, but I dont understand buying them with the extra BS of DRM. If you are going to buy music, buy the CD and rip it.
On a side note... Rap died with the introduction of the word bling. Hip hop is now just a cheesy lame duck now. Shallow self indulgent fairy tales with subpar beats.
They got a wacky wack record put o' wacky wack crews Yo what about the lyrics? That shit's wacky wack too with a fucked up style and a fucked up show Hey yo Ren, what about the scratchin', is it def? Fuck no! The mothafuckin' record is a mothafuckin' wack The mothafuckin' cracka jack needs to step the fuck back
It is easy to tell the difference between music that's been digitized and a live performance of unsynthesized music. But I still listen to my music from a less-than-stellar radio that tends to hiss and crack more often than it plays actual music due to poor reception and dirty power. I listen to the interpretation and the performance as much as I listen to the sound itself. The sounds that are missing I fill in with minor effort, as I've heard live performances enough times to be able to hear what it should really sound like. The same applies to music on mp3's, CD's, etc. Of course, if I wanted to archive the music I own, I'd do it in a lossless format. But that's more for the purposes of archiving the music than for retaining sound quality.
Now, I'm sure most people live with iPod headphones because they just don't care that much about their music. Heck, most people listening to those things can't hear the full spectrum anymore. But I know there's got to be at least a few audiophiles out there who do the same thing I do.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
You know there are other audio formats in existence besides mp3. Maybe if you don't like the quality, you should stop using that format, and possibly convince others to stop using that format as well.
Somewhere down the road people got stuck on this 1:1 relation between digital music and mp3. The format is stale, move on.
--postmodern
Back in my day, I listened to music by feeling the vibrations on the floor.
--Ludwig van Beethoven
psycho-acoustic compression of audio was really devised as a band-aid for low bandwidth connectivity. its a tragedy that in 10 years time, when storage costs (disk + memory) and bandwidth have changed so dramatically as to render such compression as archaic, we will still have a couple of generations thinking that its the de facto standard for storing music on digital media. sigh. double sigh. triple sigh.
While CD's are much better sound quality than an mp3 file, it all depends on the system you listen to it on. On an iPod, no one's going to notice the difference between a flac file and an mp3 because it will all sound like shit coming out. With a nice set of speakers/amplifiers, you can tell the difference, but even coming off a CD, there is some loss of the original music. Even better than a CD would be the vinyl. I don't know about any of you, but I prefer to listen to music through vinyl, as it has a much clearer sound (assuming you treat your equipment/discs right) and it loses much less of the original sound. Even still, nothing compares to live in concert.
01110000 01010111 01101110 00110011 01100100
Think about it: St. John the Divine sings his narrative interludes, with different music for different scenes--ranging from an ominous, very Dylanesque "Ride of the Four Horseman" (something along the lines of "All Along the Watchtower") to something like "O Fortuna" at Armageddon. Any thoughts on the Antichrist's theme song?
This could be a thumping good time.
Regarding the citation of studies that seem to show that high-bitrate mp3's can't be told from uncompressed stuff: Asking people to judge is the wrong methodology. We're aware of a whole lot more stuff - both unconsciously and, interestingly, consciously (see Ned Block's current article in Behavioral and Brain Sciences) - than we can name or enumerate. Good music often works its effects through those channels. It sneaks up on us. Except when it's compressed, it often doesn't sneak up.
I sometimes spend hours listening to Sirius, which is compressed but not too badly, through a good stereo. (The compression artifacts on Sirius are much less than on XM, btw.) It's satisfying in a sort of surface way - but the depth and viscerality of the experience isn't there the way it is spinning vinyl, or the minority of CDs that are well-engineered.
For comparison, we've all noticed how live music can just be better (when the PA's well run anyway) than even a good recording through a high end hi-fi. Well, it's not just the crowd and the visual spectacle. It's better even with your eyes closed. And that's because all those subtle harmonic interactions - stuff you can't name even if you're a good musician yourself - are there far more richly in the live venue. Well, as a CD is to a live venue, so an mp3 is to a CD. The surface of the music is still there; you can enjoy clever lyrics or a good beat or hook to a real degree; but the magic is drained out of it.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
Treat mp3s as advertisement for CDs. Treat CDs as advertisement for live shows. Charge accordingly. Mp3s should really only cost whatever it costs to host them and pay for bandwidth. Why would anybody want something encoded in a manner they might not like, and tagged and indexed likewise? Cds should be like $5 - $10 tops, Better if $3 - $5.
I have been using 256 encoded Ogg Vorbis for quite a few years now. It is noticeably better than mp3...especially at the crappy encoding rates that some of the teenagers try to rip their music into. Seriously, a 96 or even 64 bit encoding scheme is optimized for size not quality.
I suggest the recording industry (RIAA) start a TV campaign telling kids that can't do simple math that they are supposed to always pick the highest quality recording they can. When they can't download things that way, then they'll at least have to buy a cd and do it themselves.
Who is this that even the wind and the waves obey Him? Surely this computer must submit also!
1. Listen to the music live as it's being recorded.
2. Encode the recording different ways.
2a. Be fair. If you use FLAC, use 320K MP3, not 128K.
3. Listen to the recordings without knowing which recording is which encoding.
4. Guess right which is which.
To be rigorous, the encoder, the person selecting the playback and the listener should all be different, and the playback person should not know which encoding is which either.
Almost everyone will fail blind comparison as long as the recording qualities are good enough. A good MP3 is good enough quality to fool them. A VERY few people will be able to tell the difference. They will almost certainly have very good extremely high frequency hearing (20 to 22 kHz) and if they aren't very accomplished musicians and/or recording engineers, they should be. Most people don't even have good xHF hearing. If you can't tell there's a TV with no audio output running somewhere else in the house, you don't. If you can tell because it plugs up your ears, you do. If you think the TV is screaming, you have excellent xHF. Up in that hertz-stratosphere is where the difference is.
The article was written by a fairly amateurish journalist when it comes to selective quoting, editing and juxtaposition of assertions with authorities. I would trust him if he knew what he was talking about. He clearly started with a conclusion and set out to support it. He failed.
Get serious... "preferred by Grateful Dead fans"? What kind of journalist would try to make that assertion seriously as evidence of authority? A bad one from the San Francisco Chronicle. Read the by line rather than fault SeattlePI.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
To my middle-aged ears, 192K BPS MP3 sounds fine. It doesn't have the phase-shifter effect found on 128K bps MP3s.
If you are younger in your teens or twenties, use 320K bps to get all the high frequencies that may be present in CD recordings. High frequency hearing diminishes with age.
CDs are heavily filtered above 16KHz-18KHz to avoid digital aliasing and this affects the sound. It's why musicians say that vinyl sounds better. Plus musicians get full audio range very loudly and clearly from their stage amps. Johnny Winter says that CDs sound like shit. He has been standing 10 feet away from an amp playing the sounds that come from his guitar for 40 years. Compared to that, well yes, everything else pales in comparison. You probably won't hear any difference.
What the top-flight music producers are really saying is "look, we get $50,000 - $100,000 plus percentage from every no-talent fuck band that walks in our studio off the top. Whether they sell ten or ten million albums, we still get ours. And this MP3 shit is causing people to not buy albums like they used to because instead of five friends buying the same 100 albums, now five friends buy one album each and make near-perfect copies for each other. So the record companies aren't signing as many no-talent one-hit wonder bands than they did ten years ago and this is beginning to affect our bottom-line as producers. And, as producers our greatest concern is to bring great music to the album-record-CD buying public, and we have to issue a statement saying that MP3 sucks. So there it is."
The real question here is why do the record companies demand that the bands that they sign use a top-flight $100,000 (plus percentage of sales) producer? Because it's the only way that they can be assured that they will get the same crisp homogenized Clear-Channel sound that will most-likely get profitable record sales from each of the no-experience bands that they have signed.
Of course the band pays the $100,000 to the producer up front out of their advance and they have no choice over who the producer is or what he (always a he) does to their sound.
The big issue here is the centralization of musical recording distributorship. This is a 20th century phenomenon. The best musicians and bands sign to one of a half dozen or so companies. The company then records the band, makes the recording sound good, embeds the recording into the medium (vinyl, tape, or CD disk) and distributes it around the world. This worked for 100 years. But it's failing now due to both technological change (home recording studios and MP3 distribution) and overwhelming levels of greed and corruption on the part of the record companies. All well documented on Slashdot over the years.
But the music contained in these computer files represents less than 10 percent of the original music on the CDs. In its journey from CD to MP3 player, the music has been compressed by eliminating data that computer analysis deems redundant, squeezed down until it fits through the Internet pipeline. That's correct it deems the information redundant, but the important thing to keep in mind is that it is correct. While there is some loss of information the mp3 format, it really does mostly eliminate redundant data that can be reconstructed in your mp3 player, aside from that it eliminates sounds your ears literally can't pick up. So I guess the moral is don't play mp3's for your dog.
Democracy Now! - your daily, uncensored, corporate-free
Scratchy LPs with skipping grooves, damage from worn needles and sluggish drivebelts: A Musical Catastrophe!
Muddy 8-tracks with slipping drive wheels, scrambled album order, songs chopped in half, and ghostly intertrack crosstalk at -10dB: A Musical Cataclysm!
Hissy cassettes with more white noise than audio signal and 3 feet of tape tangled in the capstain: A Musical Debacle!
Music survived all those fiascoes, and it will survive a little digital compression as well.
Digital, by it's very nature, HAS to lose something over analog.
.wav or .aiff file, the differences are pretty startling.
Think about a smoothly curving slope - now picture a staircase. There's the difference between analog and digital.
Now take that already degraded signal, and strip stuff out to make it smaller.
I have been recording, both at home and in the studio, for over 30 years. The one thing I know for SURE about MP3 is how badly the stereo separation suffers. Not to mention warmth, clarity in the highs, etc. etc.
Next to just a straight
I've got a 10-year old kid with an iPod, and after hearing it - I feel sorry that he isn't getting the kind of fidelity I was treated to.
M.
Yes, but FLAC uses up 18 MB for a 2 minute, 45 second song. I know you can't wring an endless amount of compression out of an audio file without destroying data, but I can't detect much difference between a high-quality OGG and FLAC.
This entire argument is both specious and irrelevant.
That producers would be in an uproar about the loss of fidelity caused by lossy encoding is pretty ridiculous. Why don't they instead address the loss of quality caused by producers, record company flacks, and especially mastering engineers who insist on bitpushing the crap out of almost everything released in any digital format since the mid-late 1990s?
The loss of dynamic range in current recordings is plain as day. CDs [and everything else encoded from them] used to actually have some dynamic range. Nowadays everything is so limited [in the dynamics compression sense] by the time it gets pressed to a CD or encoded to anything you'll find at an online store that things like listening fatigue are totally commonplace.
When the producers start asking questions like, "What did that album sound like BEFORE its dynamic range was reduced to a head-splitting 4dB?" - then I'll start taking their arguments seriously.
The loss of decently-done MP3 encoding is nothing compared to the complete mutilation caused by bitpushing. There are so many albums that have come out in the past 8-10 years that leave me asking, "What did this sound like when the band and engineers actually mixed it, before it got destroyed by the producer, record company, and/or mastering engineer whose only criteria are make it sound louder?"
To me, music is like a mathematical formula; it's an assembly of tones, pitches, lyrics, etc.
I don't care if the handwriting's a bit sloppy, so long as it's valid, and it doesn't require me to assume that pi equals three.
- RG>
Hey pal, this isn't a pleasantforest, so don't waste my time with pleasantries!
I can't hear anything in between 8 and 15 khz anyway. ... all the bloody time in both ears, at about 70-80 dB. ...
Actually I *can* hear something in that range
There was this shitty support band in 1995, who found the "real" 11 on their gear
This is a matter of the audiophile vs. the kid with the walkman.
I completely agree that mp3 format is very lossy. When you hook it up to your expensive sound system with full dynamic range covered, it sounds like turds on a blackboard.
That's what these producers are bitching about. I agree with their valid argument.
That is not the point though. The people who download mp3 files are not audiophiles. They want to hear the songs, not the music.
I have a very large collection of jazz records. Real vinyl. I also have a very large collection of jazz mp3s on my ipod. Sometimes you just want to hear the songs.
I have the headphones to be able to tell the difference between 16/44 and 24/96. I have the sound card that supports it. I listen to flac files a lot. but, sometimes you just want to hear the songs.
sometimes you just want to hear the songs. Music is not dead, dying, or even sick.
and from what I understand, mastering engineers have been destroying music for 20 years.
They're using their grammar skills there.
Beyond the interview with the legendary Phil Ramone (think: Billy Joel 1977), this article contains all levels of FUD and other crap.
My favorite includes the *awful* definitions of various audio files/formats/technologies. No mention of MP4, either.
WTF does it matter to the average PI reader what "Red Book" means? It's not mentioned anywhere else in the article!
Crap crap crap crap crap crap crap!!!
Makin' money, makin' friends, makin' whoopee and wearin' Depends
Just so people don't get discouraged reading your remark, I believe you can get audiophile quality playback without buying the $10,000.00 stereo system.
I would start with a pair of Sennheiser HD-600 headphones and a good headphone amp. That is almost free in comparison, and the sound will blow most people away.
While the variable bit rate codecs are getting much better than the early ones, I no longer bother with mp3's. I just compress everything to FLAC these days - it does not get better than playing a data stream that is half the size, has lost nothing AND is an open standard.
Sorry, but I disagree completely.
A couple of years ago I went out and spent about £600 (= $1200) on a CD player, amplifier and speakers, I spent a lot of time listening to different set ups in that price range and not only was there a definite difference between the systems I listened to, but there was a much greater degree of clarity than on any cheaper system I'd previously owned.
My experience is that once you go beyond this amount of money, the improvements in audio quality lessen the more money you spend. Sure, there may be a lot of merit to spending to $10,000 for a hi-fi but then it's totally pointless unless you put it in an acoustically perfect room.
As for American hifi, go back some 20 years and some of the best priced hifi around was American-made Marantz stuff - I've not kept up with hifi too much in recent years so I don't know how they fare these days.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
I worked in sound for many years. If the rigger/system engineer is good, almost all the seats will get virtually identical sound. At this point, the front of house engineer can mix for what he hears, and the audience will hear the same thing. Unfortunately, the riggger/SE is not always good. I have worked with both kinds.
Leaving aside the feeling of community when you're among like-minded fans, here are some key factors:
I acknowledge the possibility that there is something to the 'subconscious reception' argument, and that it's possible that some recording methods lose some content in the recorded material that's just not picked up in ABX 'sound quality' tests.
However, I'm not sure I buy that any methodology that just involves listening to one version and then the other and trying to find some sort of difference in emotional response, serves any purpose. It would be just too easy to get the placebo effect (or just plain-old confirmation bias) in there, if you know which version is which. That said, it would be interesting to try and study that hypothesis in some more controlled manner.
I do think that we probably agree on one thing, and that is that CDs are not and should not be the 'gold standard' of audio reproduction; live sound should be. The ultimate goal of a sound recording/reproduction system ought to be the ability to reproduce something that is indistinguishable from the original recording as it would be heard by someone actually present for it. (Admittedly, this only works for 'recordings' of something that actually occurred; things become more murky when you're dealing with synthesized music or sounds.)
Although I admire the simplicity of the audio engineer's credo that "if it sounds good, it is good," what constitutes 'good' is pretty vague, and it's easy to think that something sounds 'good' in your living room, just because it's recognizable. But that doesn't mean that it holds a candle to the real thing, and by not going for that goal the result is always going to be mediocre. (It's possible that even if we do go for that goal, the result will always be mediocre, but hey, at least we'll have really tried.)
I understand your point about PCM vs DSD (as an aside, are you aware of the history of DSD, particularly with regards to the DBX-700?), although I'm not sure that PCM has caused the sound-engineering decisions in the current crop of popular music as much as tastes and marketing pressures have. Music that is perceptually "louder" gets heard more; on the other end of the spectrum, music that's too quiet to be heard in a noisy automobile gets turned off. Even classical music on FM radio is pretty heavily compressed (in the analog sense).
Also, I think what really killed DSD was not so much an acceptance of its limitations but an elimination of some of the more egregious problems that it suffered at the beginning. The brickwall filters on the first generation of PCM recorders were truly hideous, particularly for folks coming from analog tape. Compared to a Sony PCM-F1, the DBX-700 was miles better. But the PCM systems improved (fairly rapidly) over time, and engineers learned new techniques and abandoned some old ones, and there just wasn't enough reason to justify the additional complexity of DSD. Had PCM systems not improved, I think DSD would have stood much more of a chance. It's not that people didn't care about quality at all, it's just that PCM and DSD stood, and continue to stand, on different sides of the quality/cost curve.
It's not impossible to edit in DSD right now (there was talk a few years ago about being able to do it in ProTools but I'm not sure it ever happened -- but there's no technical reason why you can't), it's just that nobody has really made a compelling argument why it's needed.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
There's no point comparing MP3s to CDs without stating the bitrate. We all know low-bitrate MP3s sound like crap, but I've done my own tests on 320kbit/s MP3s (with some fairly expensive stereo equipment), and even switching between them and the original source, I couldn't pick it.
Oh, and it'd need to be a blind comparison too. Misleading judgments due to the placebo effect are very common (see: Monster cable).
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
That's just a bunch of pseudo audiophile dogma, and it's pure crap. Something along the lines of superstition.
For $100 you can get an amplifier with 0.02% THD, which is about as good as you can get, and for another $100 a pair of very good full range speakers.
You can even go cheaper... Skip the amp, and plug a $50 pair of full-sized headphones (eg. Senheiser/Aiwa) directly into the preamp/line-out of a decent quality CD player, or very good sound card (eg. $25 SB Live).
Your $10,000 option won't do any better...
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
At bitrates of 192 and up, you'll get better sound quality with MP2. Toolame and Twolame both do a good job of encoding MP2, and more importantly, MP3 is backwards compatible, so any MP3 decoder will play the MP2 files just fine.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
I was completely with you on this one, right up until:
However, most people can tell the difference in a blind test.
That really should read:
However, most people with expensive stereos that consider themselves 'audiophiles' can tell the difference in a blind test.
People with expensive stereos that consider themselves 'audiophiles', however, do not constitute "most people". And everything I've ever seen or read doing any kind of blind test came to essentially the same conclusion: that "most people" simply cannot tell the difference. If you've seen or read otherwise, I'd love to see it myself.
Personally, I'm basically in the same boat as you. If I pay attention, I can (usually) hear distinguishing bits to where I can tell. But I noticed too that if I'm just listening to the song as the whole, rather than the individual components, I rarely ever notice a difference. And I think that is more than likely why most people never notice a difference, either.
Perl - $Just @when->$you ${thought} s/yn/tax/ &couldn\'t %get $worse;
"Vinyl/DAT/reel-to-reel/(insert esoteric, dated format) is better Just Because, and if you have anything less than $30/foot oxygen-free gold plated lamp wire pulled right out of Richard Gere's ass connecting your amp to your $5000 speakers, you're rotting holes in your brain."
But you know what, dude? I can't tell the difference, and it doesn't fatigue my ears, because I have reference cans and I listen at the right volume.
You guys are worse than PS3 fanboys.
Wrists killing you? Not in 2 weeks. Learn Dvorak.
Above a certain bit you can't hear a difference. Some, who desperately need to be snobbish about SOMETHING, claim otherwise, but who cares about people like that?
You're one of them witches! I know! Using your wicked magic to trick us while stealing away most of our music! Trickery! Treachery! Compression is the work of the devil!
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
Anytime you compress something (music, video, image, etc.) something is lost that cannot be restored by decompression. It is the nature of the beast.
There is a world out there today that desires to preserve the high fidelity of their music. We're talking a world that still uses tube amplifiers and a new generation of vinly LP -- the 180-200 gram vinyl. Variable reluctance and moving coil carts are still the top of the HiFi chain. Vintage turntables like the Technics servo drives are still in high demand. These people listen to their music on full sized systems through full size speakers.
While it is true that MP3 and iTunes made music portable, they did so at the expense of quality. It is good to see both worlds in existence but the portable world is gradually leaving the HiFi world behind. It is interesting that while CD sales are dropping, LP sales, as small as they are, are actually on the increase, according to the RIAA.
Banjo - The more I know about Windoze, the more I love *nix
Actually, your dollar is compressed into a dime, split up and some fraction of that goes to the artist...
-- My Weblog.
Here's the problem, IMHO. For iPod usage into crappy headphones, mp3@192 is just fine. So why bother pursuing anything better? There is some (minimal) effort to get flac onto my iPod, but even that's too much. Most of the bigger mp3 players (I'm talking the ones that manage your library, like Amarok) are DESIGNED so that the file type is not readily apparent.
At the same time, people who might know what they're talking about w.r.t. recording processes seem to imply that the source recordings suck anyway. I'm not taking that Dylan quote (paraphrase: "hasn't been a well recorded album in 20 years") as gospel, but he certainly knows more about recording than I do, so it's at least commentary from a knowledgeable source.
Plus, Dylan is as likely to have as much control over that process as anyone. You seriously think that $popGroup is going to pay attention to their mastering? You seriously think that Rush (see links elsewhere in this thread) is HAPPY about getting their sound clipped? Most bands don't care, and the bands that do (or bloody well ought to) apparently don't have full control over the process.
I love music. It's the industry that's driving me insane. DRM, bad artists, bad recordings, bad (flac-less) portable options. I'm well aware exceptions exist. It's ok. I've got plenty of back catalog to work through. I am, however, worried about music in the future. I just don't see upside in any of the current business models.
ceci n'est pas un sig.
Britney Spears is no longer a popular singer. At this point she is nothing more than a train wreck whose every folly is covered up and down, front to back by the stalkerazzi, which keeps her in the public eye, but her days as a legitimate performer are long gone.
Hey! Phil Ramone, if you buy me a $300k... heck even a 20k system....and the studios provided original bit-for-bit copies masters to listen to, I would forgo listening to my compressed audio from an iPod. Wait, i still need another $30k for my car stereo...and what about when I ride the subway...hmmm...on second thought, my entire record collection in my pocket isn't so bad after all. When I listen to my 96/48 transfers of an LP on my 5000 dollar "project studio" gear I still don't hear any difference to the 192 AAC I ripped from my CD of the same track. But what do I know about recording dynamics, you have the grammy.
The only reason the mass public consumes this format is because that is the product the labels are pedaling. At least with all the money the labels and producers collect they can afford to listen to their grammy winning records on component equipment in which any given piece can cost more than one year of my salary.
I don't know about the 10% part, but MP3s do not sound good...decent maybe, but not good. For my iPod, I encode my CDs to AAC 320kbps and even that's not great. I don't necessarily consider myself an audiophile, but, due to my work, I definitely hear things better than the average listener.
That's "Free Lossless Audio Codec", not "Code".
If reducing storage space by 30-50% isn't "compression", what is? I do not think that word means what you think it means....
And it's news to me that you can't burn a full audio CD from a playlist of MP3s. It may not be exactly the same CD bit-for-bit, but it's still an audio CD.
Someone's not doing his research, and his editor deserves to know it.
I think once you reach 192 kbps data rate with VBR in either MP3 or AAC compression, it's very difficult to tell between the original and the encoded version unless you have high-end audio equipment that most audiophiles can't afford anyway. I've ripped Jean Michel Jarre's current album Téo & Téa at both 192 kbps and 256 kbps VBR high quality MP3 encoding and could not tell the difference on my 2G iPod nano played back with Etymotic Research ER-6i in-ear headphones.
In the noble pursuit of technical correctness, I don't think it's true that FLAC was originally written as the Ogg lossless format. My understanding is that it was originally (Oct 2000, according to the SF registration date) written separately, and later (Jan 2003, according to the FLAC news page) also incorporated under the Ogg banner.
Actually, the worst losses come from the 16-bit linear range of CDs, not the bit rate. The dynamic range isn't big enough. When you're listening to a soft passage, you're really listening to 8-bit audio or worse, because the high bits are all zero.
This doesn't affect rock or hip-hop much, but it can be heard on symphonic works.
Let us not forget that even though 'crap' applies to every generation of music, the most recent generations have been subjected to far greater mass marketing, production and exploitation. This certainly translates into the quality of the music, I'm sure.
Being a super star musical act no longer requires any sort of talent and being found can easily just be luck of the draw, more so than any other generation. This increased musical exploitation undoubtedly results in a greater percentage of... junk.
I agree with your sentiment though - Every generation thinks their music is the greatest and the one before it thinks it is garbage - whether it really is or not.
Fact: Everything I say is fiction.
it doesn't make a whole lot of sense- the same argument could have been applied to double sided 1/8 inch tape (audio cassette) from the initial 2-4 inch master or 33rpm records as compared to 12inch 45 rpm ones- it doesn't matter the media it is always the amount of compression you apply to the content that matters- if all you can get is 96 128kbps mp3's- yeah, you are getting crap- but wouldn't you say the same if you were to make 10 rpm records and squeeze them on a 12 inch disc?
Forget that $1000 Sony, Pioneer, Fisher, Bose integrated amplifier with 5-speaker surround sound. It ain't gonna matter.
Invest in some good test equipment. It is true most of the equipment is matched in quality to the typical MP3, but the noise level, phase shift, THD, crosstalk, etc on some of the upper lines of the stuff from Japan is nothing to scoff at.
Bose is built on reflections and echos to fill a room. They were not designed to be studio gear.
If you look you can still find stuff with less than 0.005% THD, good damping, no measurable crosstalk, and very low noise. My current reciever has a main power amp with 3DB points at 5 Hz and 100 KHZ. 20 HZ to 20 KHZ is flat within 0.1 DB. There are not any CD's that will chalange the reciever's limits.
Most consumer grade Walmart stuff is 0.01% to 0.1% THD or worse. Many don't even spec the response or distortion. They do a peak power rating instead of an RMS power rating. Most true 30 Watt amplifiers will blow the socks off most 250 Watt peak rated amplifiers.
The truth shall set you free!
OMG, I just tried a little experiment, and I am shocked by the results.
.. and converted it to mp3. Goddamn ! the resulting mp3 file is just shy of 3MB in size.
...... to ...... 3MB
I just took a song off a CD - which is roughly 30MB of raw 16bit wav file
Holy Virgin Mother of Kazan !!!
30MB
That must mean that over 90% of the original CD quality music has GONE - VANISHED - REDUCED - DECIMATED - DESTROYED - CONSUMED - FUCKED OVER by this mp3 format !
I had no idea that mp3 did this to music - its simply criminal. I hope that all God fearing citizens of this great nation get together soon and take out a lawsuit against this shaitanic abominashion known as mp3.
Yesh, we should shoe thish mp3 thing immediately !!.
Music is recorded in 24-bits and then dithered for CD. With file-based music there is an upgrade path to get the full 24-bit audio to the listener within a few years from now. With CD you have been listening to less than half the music for years now. I have a small project studio and it is 24-bit 192 kHz not 16-bit 44.1 kHz like CD.
What about AM radio? Or even FM you are missing a lot. What about the horrendous scratches on LP's? How about the music you miss when a CD skips?
An MPEG-4 AAC 256 kbit/s track aka iTunes Plus is the single best consumer audio format ever. It has the fidelity of a CD without the skips. We got used to the skips so much that people often ignore them in a direct comparison bit that is bullshit. Go into an arbitrary CD collection and play a CD and it will skip at least once almost certainly. Every CD collection always has a song in it somewhere that won't play because of scratches. That is no damn good once you get used to an iPod. Another way the MPEG wins is in the amount of music a listener hears compared to CD. People turn on music and leave it
This article is so much bullshit.
Then they're delusional. Most people can't seem to tell when a track has been double encoded and squashed to mono, let alone tell the difference between a clean 128kb MP3 and a CD. Most people's stereo systems are EQ'd as if by a monkey with tinnitus. Or they listen in their car where you've got more road noise and air hiss than even the worse analog cassette tape. Yeah, under ideal conditions some people can tell the difference, but that' not going to make or break "music".
Man, twenty years ago everything sounded like ass anyways. I grew up with records that skipped like little girls, and my Dad used to pile nickels on the playhead to "help". I loved it anyways. If anything, it seems to me that music started dying when people had access to ultra-high-fidelity goods. (Not saying it's a cause, but if you want to correlate stupid things).
I'm a musician (at least some would allow). I have pretty good ears (my musical output notwithstanding). I can _barely_ tell the difference between a CD and a 128kb MP3. If the idea of audio compression in general bothers you, you must be living in a soundproof room with amazing reference speakers instead of a girlfriend. Which is better than what I'm doing, but hey.
Cheers.
...then again, not likely to be something most people would ever experience.
The test is worth taking, except that you really can't do it easily.
Go to a club, concert hall, any large listening space with decent acoustic treatment and time-aligned properly arrayed
sound system, and try and compare a reel-to-reel copy of a master tape to a CD of it (and the MP3 if you want).
On those large installations, the bigger the room, the more those differences are magnified, and become truly
painful once you notice them, like screechy nails on a blackboard. And experience does show that these factors
affect how people react to the music, and so on. Passing the same CD or MP3 through tube electronics on playback
does seem to help in making the music have some sort of 'coherence' and smoothness again.
The audio professionals quoted in the article have access to studio technology that is superior enough that
they can most times tell the difference, and would prefer if the listeners were given the tools to do so as well.
As with any culture of mediocrity, it becomes hard to argue against it once everyone has gotten
their hearing so used to severely compressed audio playback that they've never even experienced a properly
tuned listening system. I'd agree that on headphones or in a car, it is not a huge factor....
It is a stunning testament to what a misunderstood stepchild audio really is, when digital cameras keep improving
their resolution yearly at a pretty impressive clip, but audio gear makers went the other way and actually decided to
reduce the fidelity of what was a standard 25 years ago (that is, Red Book Audio as 16-bit 44.1 kHz files)
All for the sake of convenience.
Then again, as a generational thing, it is pretty obvious that however much some people might have used to communally obsess over
"Dark Side Of The Moon", "Abbey Road" or "In The Court Of The Crimson King" huddled around their stereos looking for the sweet spot in
the 70's, this just isn't the way most young people are relating to music today, and certainly doesn't appear to have the same magic hold
on listeners. The engineers and producers quoted in the article are all children of that past era!
Whatever. There are plenty of good solutions available today for those who care enough about decent sound to do something about it.
Like the Korg MR-1 DSD portable recorders. And so on..... For casual listening, it won't make a difference. For other applications, it might!!
To each his own.
Z.
MP3 is EXACTLY like listening to music through a screen door ... one that lines up almost perfectly with the screen door built into the combination of your ear canal and brain. That's why it works so well.
`which fortune`
So, do you own a Macintosh and a McIntosh ?
When they came for the communists, I said "He's next door. Take him away. Goddam commies."
Once you start using good gear, you'll start to side with the recording industry on this one. Well, not completely. 256k AAC is good enough for me, but anything less is almost tortue to listen to.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I haven't tried MPEG-4 AAC 256, but I know that there is a moment or two in some songs where (assuming familiarity with the uncompressed track and top of the line headphones) one can hear something missing in 500kbit vorbis. I'm sure 256kbit AAC is good, but it's not lossless. There will be just enough pre and post echo to be distinguishable once one is familiar with the original, and some complex passages will have some modulations obscured.
The problem is that you can't hear these things unless you're familiar with the uncompressed track. It just sounds like it was recorded on a slightly lower quality mike - not like noise. How can you tell the difference between a mediocre recording and compressed sound? You just can't.
As for the sampling rates and bit widths - these days with perfect digital filters and noise shaping dithers, you can't hear the difference unless you're a child (with small ears that can hear clearly to 20khz and past) and playing at concert volume. I mean, serious, ears will ring for hours afterward, volume.
The type of music that can be recorded effectively by these digital formats is rather limited. The requirements for producing a quality recording of a Symphony Orchestra or Opera are much higher than what's required for recording Hip-Hop(most of which consists of a Casio drumbeat with a "vocal" line mixed in).
This isn't a generational thing at all. People learn to recognize music by listening to what thier culture produces. It's basic psychoacoustics. A person accustomed to Hindu Folk music would probably find the works of Wagner or Bach to be somewhat jarring.
Heres the rub...
Today's youth are deliberately being psychoacoustically trained. Trained to perceive music that is CHEAP TO PRODUCE as quality music. This good for the record industry, as computer generated music is CHEAP. Furthermore, it's easy to compress into a digital format. All this saves the record company money while destroying peoples perception of music as anything other than a computer generated drumbeat mixed with a bunch of cute slogans disguised as lyrics.
We certainly could come up with a digital format capable of adequately recording a Symphony Orchestra. Why havent we?
There are some who are audio purists - but despite their exotic sound systems they're fooling themselves - there is no perfect audio reproduction, there's not even a way to perfectly record it. All real audio systems are made up of compromises; all arguments about audio quality revolve around those compromises.
Me? I use an IPod Nano with a set of Etymotic ER-4P canalphones. Is it perfect? No, but it's amazingly good. Much, much better than you'd expect (yes, those expensive phones are worth every penny). Much better than what the stereo store is selling for five figure prices. Would uncompressed files make it better? Yes - actually, the IPod supports uncompressed music already. But I make the compromise - compress the tunes a little so that I can carry a larger library. It works for me.
The biggest sonic problem I experience? Lousy recordings on record company CDs. Clipping, huge amounts of compression, distortion - how could they release that album in such poor condition? But they do - and wonder why people don't buy so much anymore.
You know how they talk about the dynamic range of CDs being 96db? Pop a current pop release into a system with VU meters and watch the meters as it plays. Those needles will be stuck between -6 and 0 the whole time; 6 whole db of dynamic range. And the people that sell this crap have the nerve to claim that MP3 files don't have all the sonic benefits? Bozos...
This sounds like a great reason for me not to ever get an expensive stereo. You just saved me some cash.
You know, Sheet Music has much higher compression ratio to the performance than even very low bitrate MP3. Are they howling about that as well?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Go ahead and laugh at me but my Bose 901s I still use from the 70s still kick my ass. A good 100 watts tossed into them for the bass and you are golden.
Adjust the volume for that sweet wall of sound sound and it is hog heaven.
I won't get into the loss of harmonics with digital here. Stair steps at any sampling rate can't reach analog. It just can't happen.
But the Bose reflective qualities... 5.1 with two speakers.
qz
This is like complaining that because of jpg we no longer look at anything appropriately. Get real.
Seriously, those are the same people that sell us music compressed to a 3dB dynamic range. Having them complain about the effects of the other compression is fucked up. If they are so picky, they might as well sell songs as 24bit/192kHz FLAC or Shorten files, which would beat every medium sold in the record stores.
Fight hunger. Filet a politician and send him to a 3rd world country of your choice.
which is about as good as you can get,
And that's just as dogmatic as the GP, just going the other way. Sound quality is a continuum: you can keep improving a sound system by throwing money at it. Diminishing returns do apply, and at the high end there's lots of bullshit to wade through. Not all components show the same amount of improvement for X amount of dollars: the quality curve flattens for CD players and amplifiers sooner than for loudspeakers.
$100 does not get you a 'very good' pair of full-range speakers. I recently tried buying a set of inexpensive speakers for use with my computer; I listened to about 15 sets in the $100-1000/pair price range. All $100 sets sounded horrible. Sound quality generally improved with price, but rather nonlinearly. Personal preference also plays an important role here.
The least expensive loudspeakers I could live with were a $200/pair set of bookshelf speakers. Full-range loudspeakers at that price offered more frequency range, but had a very uneven frequency response. Decent full-range speakers started at about $400/pair, iirc.
For $100 you can get an amplifier with 0.02% THD, which is about as good as you can get
Amplifier quality is about more than just THD. THD and noise are easy to get good specs on. Things like phase response and crossover distortion are much more difficult (=expensive) to get right.
What I feel really amazing in this posts, is that people talk about CD as quality music! Fantastic!
I suppouse they never heard the quality of old vinil or magnetic tapes records. (I said 'old' just because there are a lot of 'new' vinils that also crap from a sound quality perspective).
Fourtunately, we still have live music.
What's in a sig?
It's sad all right. It's sad that many convenient music playing devices still have only 4-8 gig of memory (including the iPhone). It's sad that MP3 CD players still only play seven hours of music at good quality MP3 compression. It's sad that I still need two CDs to store a single audiobook on compressed MP3 (mono 64kbit) to listen to on a road trip. One thing that's not sad is that we still use compression for audio.
The real sign of musical apocalypse is a band called Fallout Boy. If you haven't heard them, puncture your ear drums thoroughly so you never happen to; you're just going to have to take an anonymous coward's word for it.
Hi all
As someone who creates music on computers I can tell you that there is a big difference between lossy compressed and uncompressed tracks. I was quite shocked the first time I did this, all the subtlety I had created in the track was gone, I then became miffed. I can't be bothered looking up the other steps you go through, but acceptance came after listening to the compressed track after not hearing the tune for a while - it was still a good track and it didn't really matter.
I suppose as creators/producers/engineers we get hung up on the details and then the music gets played in a car with the bass RIGHT up, or through a crappy tv speaker, desktop speakers or headphones with limited range. Generally people don't hear much of the music you lay down anyway - how many people can make out what individual brass instruments make up a stab in a particular song and in doesn't really matter anyway..
Brian
20 years ago, Marantz stuff was Japanese-made. They haven't been American made since the 1960's, apart from a couple of valve amplifiers in the late 1990's.
Would your real name by any chance be Lestat?
ISO certified == THX certified
Its been around for ages... probably the first form of expressive art. Soon, people will only make music for the love of it. Saying its an apocalypse for music is like saying the printed press was an apocalypse for writing. Its just going to change things drastically.
... anymore. Be it a CD or MP3. The most quality increase one can get out of better headphones.
There is a huge difference from vanila iPod headphones to new Sony earbuds MDR-EX51LP for 30 and even greater to the open full size Sony MDR-SA3000 for 300. There is not such a great difference between portable CD player and iPod.
The reason is quite simple, electronics is already good enough, acoustics for the mass market is still mediocre.
However, when I play the same MP3 from a PC through a 24bit 96kHz card, digitally connected to a 24bit capable receiver, the difference in quality is noticeable mostly in crispy highs. But this adds at least about 600 to the price, being non-portable. I know, 24 bit is not in the MP3 itself, just wanted to let you know what my better set up is.
...a stunned silence fell upon the hall.
At 192Kbps, I can hear the difference in audio quality when it is enhanced by DFX. You guys should check it out.
Yes, that's how I decided what bitrate to use. To be honest I couldn't reliably pick MP3 320 from 384, so I use 384 just for safety. Test music was a piano - on 128 it was laughable, and not frankly a whole lot better on 192.
from subband.com, makes even the worst mp3 sound like the real thing !
If MP3s contain only 10% of the music, how come we're being charged 100% for the copy? How come we're sued for the full commercial ammount?
Ask these questions and see them swap to a different spokesman...
Loudspeakers don't have an SNR
I've used 20W rated speakers (B&W DM5) with 300W amps for 25 years
Don't talk bollocks.
If music is compressed, limited and clipped like it is on many records today, there really isn't much argument for the need of an extra quality carrier. The quest of the artists, producers or record labels to GET THEIR MUSIC LOUDER THAN EVERYTHING ELSE, causes the dynamic range of music to be sacrificed in order to bump the sound as close as possible to the zero dB boundary. This loudness war causes severe digital clipping, and the distortion you get from it is much MUCH worse that what you get from the MP3 conversion with a decent bitrate.
Not only that, but the music loses every punch, melding all elements in one flat sound, tiring your ears. It's the same with the super audio CD. why needing a carrier with more bits and higher sample rate if you're even using what's available on a CD today?
- Loudness War
- everything louder than everything else
Really, there's no need for ultra high fidelity equipment or sound carriers if the signal is broken by design at the factory!I challenge you to listen to your compressed ipod sound on the same volume as that live concert. I wonder if you still will think it's better. It probably won't be very good for your ears though! live convert volumes rarely are anyway.
The reason people think compressed music sounds better is actually a short term effect: because it sounds louder at the same volume setting. Think of "turning the volume knob to 11". However, if you tune the volume so that both appear to be as loud (perhaps you can use a sound pressure level to measure this), then you will notice the uncompressed music has much more punch and is much more pleasant to listen to, while the compressed music will sound very flat.
Go ahead and laugh at me but my Bose 901s I still use from the 70s still kick my ass.
f ormats.htm?print=yes
I'll admit they didn't sound too bad when properly installed and used with the EQ to straighten out their quirky response curve. Just don't use them without the proper EQ.
Stair steps at any sampling rate can't reach analog. It just can't happen.
Dude, again, invest in some test equipment. Analog has a noise floor. Most digital has steps way below the analog recording medium noise floor. Stair step artifacts contribute a much lower noise in the mix than analog tape hiss or turntable rumble. One of the advantages of the original uncompressed CD format was much better dynamic range (killed to sound loud nowdays). Look up the CD Redbook spec. To reduce the stairstep noise, there was a pre-emphasis that could be switched on further improving noise in the high frequencies since they have much less power than the lower frequencies. In multi-track analog mastering and mixing the noise adds. In digital, in mixing and layering, no additional noise in introduced. You are not recording tape hiss on a tape.
Do your research.. What is the S/N ratio of studio tape? What is the dynamic range of a CD? Besides the convience of a digital workstation, there are technical advantages to digital mastering and production. Analog has it's real world limits.
There is some discussion on that here.
http://www.dsprelated.com/showmessage/2587/1.php
This information is gleaned from here;
http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/jan98/articles/cd
"Older DAT and other digital recorders sometimes used a system of 'pre-emphasis' on recorded material, with a corresponding 'de-emphasis' on playback. Pre-emphasis boosts the high frequencies prior to A/D conversion, while de-emphasis removes the boost after D/A conversion. De-emphasis circuitry is built into all CD players to provide compatibility with any material recorded using pre-emphasis. However, the emphasis bit must be set to 'on' in the track's Q code so that the CD player will know that it should use the de-emphasis circuitry while this track plays back."
In a nutshell the stairstep distortion can be reduced by boosting the high frequencies prior to A/D conversion so the portion of the digital step noise (quanitization error) is a smaller part of the S/N ratio. De-emphasis on playback reduces the high frequencies back to original levels and reduces the noise by the same amount.
Unfortunately modern CD's are not mastered to take advantage of the quality possible.
The truth shall set you free!
That is nonsense. You are still listening to 16-bit audio. The fact that the high bits are zero is entirely the point: because it is 16-bit, it still has 8 bits left over for the quiet parts. If it were really 8-bit at that point, it would need to stuff that into 4-bits.
I agree however if 16-bit CD encoding had a seperate channel for volume, so that it could compress the sound into the full 16 bits and record the compression amount in the volume channel, dynamically readjusting to normal volume on output, but that has practical limitations as reducing the capacity of the medium (a big deal in the eighties), and reduction of the S/N ratio (if you record at higher gain, you get more noise). CD Audio is a compromise, but so are all recording methods. CD Audio is just the most acceptable compromise at the moment.
Mart"I know I will be modded down for this": where's the option '-1, Asking for it'?
... with the music producers. The mp3 format is a bastardization of music. It cuts out 90% of the original work, so therefor the mp3 copy is not a duplicated master. So when I listen to an mp3, I'm only hearing part of the music. And if I were to be charged with copyright infringement, I would say, well no, it's not an exact copy, it's only a 10% representation of the real thing. So I guess this whole RIAA thing is just blown out of proportion!
FLR
This whole complaint is garbage. The MP3 is not the first low-fidelity (or variable fidelity) format to reach major acceptance. The iPod (or DAPs in general) is not the first hugely popular device to have low-fidelity either. The 8-track was garbage, the cassette was garbage, some types of vinyl weren't exactly great, AM and FM radio are garbage, most Walkman players were crummy, and people have been using cheap headphones with portable devices for ages. Nothing is new here, people just like to complain about the latest big thing.
My Photography - http://ian-x.com
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You say MP3s are super low quality? Kids these days don't know what they're missing?
If true, that should boost the value of actual CDs, music on DVDs, and *especially* live performances.
Business model: give away the MP3s. Sell lots of CDs cheap. Sell DVD music and concert tickets for a premium, the real fans will pay for it.
Or you could go on suing everyone to stay afloat.
Just a thought anyway.
Can we just clear up the difference between "losing" and "loosing"? When you encode at 128kbps, have you "loost" quality?
Sorry. It's my pet peeve. I feel better now. Thanks for listening.
I don't get this thing with bass. I wish it would get out of fashion already.
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
in addition to considering Transparent Cable interconnects and speaker cables
No! No! No! Don't waste your money on ultra-expensive "interconnects" (audiophile marketing droid speak for RCA cables) and speaker cables such as Transparent, Monster, etc. It's been well documented time and again in double-blind listening tests that these wires don't do anything *at all* to improve the sound. Heck, the President of Transparent wouldn't even agree to a double-blind test, after initially saying he'd do one.
I'm not saying that the 24-gauge zip speaker wire and cheap molded RCAs that come with most audio components are worth anything, or should ever be used; but you don't have to pay thousands to get suitable cables. Just make sure they're of a suitable gauge for the length of the run you need (to overcome the wire's resistance), and that they have decent insulation and they're not so cheap that the terminators are likely to short out on the ends when bent etc.
For a thorough de-bunking of the audiophile claims of "cable superiority," see Roger Russell's excellent site. The lamp cord versus Monster Cable speaker cable comparison is a classic.
The bottom line is that you can't cheat physics, though the "expensive is best" crowd would love to believe it, and continues to pay thousands unnecessarily. But hey, it ain't my money.
.......melding all elements in one flat sound, tiring your ears......
Indeed, true for most modern pop music. But this is not only in the recording process, but intrinsic to the types of music listened to by the majority today. In classical music, such as some of my old LPs there is much more of a dynamic range from a pianissimo solo flute passage to the triple forte of the full orchestra in the finale. Encoding some of these into AAC files onto an iPod doesn't materially affect the dynamics and listening pleasure. Also much of the modern music is originally produced electronically, rather than by purely acoustic means.
Music is in itself a highly subjective art that everyone perceives differently, depending on mood, age of the listener and who knows how many other factors. The saying "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder" applies. So yes, if the signal is broken at the level of the live performance already, the recoding can never be better.
All theory is gray
Does going digital mean missing music ? MP3's contain less than 10% of CD music. Am I missing something here, are do you listen to analogue CD's ? Its digital being converted to digital, there is no "going digital" involved in the process anywhere.
I don't suppose the RIAA would consider charging us 10% of current album prices considering we're not getting 90% of the music.
...They won't?
Didn't think so.
That's not really what I'm aiming at. But I largely agree.
Chances are that your old classical music LPs have been compressed for dynamic range too. But that was simply due to the fact that an LP simply doesn't have the dynamic range required to fully record classical music. So the compression was a technical matter. Compare it to the need of tonemapping to display a perfect HDR image of a physical scene on a monitor or print.
Today however, pop music is compressed for dynamic by design, simply to make it sound louder than other songs when played at the radio or from a jukebox where the volume knob is left untouched. Compare it multiplying your image by a factor ten simply to show it "brighter" than on the monitor next it. It will "appear" brighter if you don't look too closely, but it will have lost much detail simply because it clips to your monitor brightness.
Modern pop music may not have the same dynamical range as classical music, but it still has more potential than you find on most of today's CDs:
(a) live performances _do_ have the punchy bass drums and highlighted snares lacking on the album, because the PA can deliver what's requested without clipping. Unless your band is called Cradle of Filth (they suffer the EVERYTHING LOUDER THAN EVERYTHING ELSE syndrome even on stage).
(b) pop albums of 20 years ago don't suffer this problem. They still have lots of headroom. Even trash metal records (Metallica - Kill 'Em All) behave very well with lots of dynamic range and lots of headroom. Yet, the moment they are remastered, that's totally gone. There's suddenly clipping all over the place. It's still the same music!
So it's not the music. It's the mastering.
I believe that the crappyness of today's music isn't because it's any crappier but that it is more homogenised. Before, you heard a lot of experimental stuff (generally crap) and lots of genres (of which most were crap). But not ALL of it.
Now, you have little or no experimental stuff and unless you like Boy Band RnB or Nigga Rap (where ghetto black speech is used, irrespective of the colour of the originator) you are SOL. If you DO like them, then you'll like some of it but not all. And the variation within means that you never get any real highs. So it all seems more dreary and after a while, boring (read: crap).
Evey now and then something new will come along (Nora Jones, Lilly Allen etc) but it will be hyped and aped so often you'll go off it damn quick and it's crap again.
You used to get some TERRIBLE stuff along with the great stuff (average: crap) but when you're only getting the average (all crap) you aren't any worse than before (crap on average) but you aren't getting anything worth it.
Music quality arguments aside, does using only 10% of the "original music" count as fair use?
If at first you don't succeed, call it version 1.0.
The CD medium is in general, "better" than vinyl. When converted back from digital to analog, the CD produces a more reliable sound than vinyl. However, audiophiles insist that vinyl sounds "warmer" or better... and it does... but not because of information on the disc.
Vinyl is a physical medium, and when you master for vinyl, you need to balance the sound or the needle will skip. There are physical restrictions on how you can encode data in vinyl, and that limits the use of the medium.
CDs, storing binary data, will happily store whatever you throw at them. From a technical perspective, that makes it "better," but it also allows crappy mastering.
However, as other posters mentioned, the Loudness War effect has created the problem. Since on first listen, the loudest mix sounds best, and the loudest mix stands out on the radio, in order to get work as mastering engineerings, they have to mix the noise loud. So while the audio on a CD is theoretically 16-bits, by cranking all the sources up, you ignore all the quieter capabilities that add depth.
This essentially means that while vinyl tracks were mixed across a wide range (a requirement of the medium), the CDs that are produced normally compress the audio into a small range. This loses the details, but sounds "better" when aiming for catchy tunes on the radio.
So when people say that vinyl sounds better, they are correct. If a track is being released on CD and vinyl, it will often be mastered separately for each medium. While the CD will produce the studio's "desired" loud version exactly, the vinyl version may be mastered with a more dynamic range.
MP3 is criticized for ditching these details, because it is lossy in terms of ditching the sounds that you "don't hear." Well, one of the reasons that people can't tell in an A/B comparison... there ARE no details. The details of the recording was already destroyed in the mastering engineer's Pro Tools setup when they compressed the sound and made it "loud."
The music industry has made ZERO effort to product dynamic audio projects. SA-CD and DVD-A offered the increased capacity to product detailed tracks that could still sound "loud," as well as create a product that would be MUCH better than MP3 could offer. But instead, they tried to raise prices on CDs to $18 and price the SA-CD/DVD-A versions at $25 or $30. Had they adopted SA-CD and produced all hybrid CDs at the same price point as CDs were selling at before, they might have gotten an adoption of SA-CD... If they had ignored Napster (1997 was their peak sales, and the year they shut Napster down, post-Napster their sales have never recovered) and encouraged people to keep trading low quality MP3s while selling SA-CD with CD versions for compatibility, SA-CD might have taken off.
Look at the movie industry... while they are concerned about piracy and have engineered all sorts of options to protect them (down-resing analog, etc.) if the future works out one way, they are doing HiDef transfers for the movie stations, have embraced HD reasonably well, and are releasing their content on HD-DVD and BluRay... The better quality they offer, the more inferior getting compressed files off Torrents seem.
The home theatre is becoming increasingly common in upper middle class homes... The fact that the music industry hasn't been able to capitalize on this is pathetic... SA-CD and DVD-A BOTH offered 5-channel options.... but the studios wanted to "prevent piracy" so required people to use 7 audio cables to connect instead of a digital format, and dragged their heals on a digital path to the receiver. They didn't want hybrid discs in the belief that they would make more money selling each disc twice... etc., etc.
They shot themselves in the foot.
The sound quality point is pretty moot in my mind. More power to the people who are concerned about the higher reaches of sound quality, but I like that I can carry a vast portion of my music collection - all of it if I invested in a larger memory stick - in my phone/camera/mp3 player. This beats a 12 lb. binder of CDs or a pickup full of vinyl. In addition, I have had much less problem with corrupted mp3s than I ever had with scratched CDs and vinyl. Sound quality is great. I would love better sound quality in mp3s. But in my life, the convenience of the mp3 format so greatly outweighs any sound quality issues that I would listen to lower bps recordings on old mp3 codecs before going back to CDs.
I love music. If it sounds good, it doesn't matter the format. MP3s have worked well for me, and I haven't had lot of problems with the format. I have had more trouble with burning audio CDs from MP3 format.
I think people like something to argue about. Additionally, I think people from different generations hold some sort of nostalgia for outdated tech. However, I don't think people should allow this to deny the benefits of newer technology.
Honestly, not everyone is gifted with the same set of ears. My husband can hear frequencies that I can't and the same with me. Sometimes its frustrating to know that he hears something different in a piece of music than me.
I think regardless of the format, people, quite often, will skew what they hear with what they imagine they hear and what they are thinking. I think this accounts for why my husband often rejects new music I show him...only to love it later and wonder why I didn't know about it when I did because I showed it to him. lol!
To me as long as music is not critically impaired, why do I care really? The matter is honestly inconsequential.
Truth like surgery, may hurt, but it cures. - Han Suyin, Chinese Physician and Writer
£12-£30 depending on what you want. Sounds far better and louder (so less amplification needed).
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
files in a compressed format contain 'less than 10 percent of the original music on the CDs. -- That's because an MP3 generally only consists of one track, rather than the 10+ on the original CD.
We've secretly replaced Slashdot with new Folgers Crystals - let's see if it notices.
> but her days as a legitimate performer are long gone
Sorry youngster, she never had a day as a legitimate performer (well maybe in the mickey mouse club). Her only purpose once she reached her teen years was to sell teeny boppers crap music and provide visual jack off material for dirty old men.
a audio cd is redbook 16bit/44.1Khz
most studios record at 24bit/92Khz (if not higher) and are then resampled/dithered down to redbook.
so, the resulting mp3 is really about 5% of the original studio recording.
the history of the world
To me there seems to be some problems with the psycho-acoustic models that are being used for mp3, because those artifacts make my ears feel itchy. To me it sounds low resolution, especially cybals and other high frequency audio. It sounds pixelated and annoying, low and midrange sounds ok, but the high end sounds so annoying and obvious that listening for problems in the low and mid-range is irrelavent.
The other thing is the capacity of flash devices keeps increasing and the fact that most car stereos have usb port I wonder if mp3 is useful any more, is there a point to having a massive music capacity, when you can have slightly less quantity and much better quality especially when the capability of technology increases. A 4Gb flash is enough for roughly 6 cd's at full resolution, or 12 at half resolution (approx fm radio) without lossy compression such as mp3.
Another thing is the psycho-acoustic model, why is the ambient components of music not important, who decided that? Those seemingly redundant components of music are very interesting components of the piece, the echo, reverberation and some harmonic components are the character of the music. With all due repect to engineers, they are not musicians or producers. Writing and producing music is not a science, it's an art. Engineers involved in the production of equipment to produce music are constantly striving to create equipment that is capable of accuratley recording the musicians and producers intentions. Sampling rates on the recording side are increasing, 96khz sampling rates at 24bit are common place for recording and many other technological advancements, but the use of the technology, placement of microphones, type of microphones is similar to the way a painter uses paintbrushes.
I would never listen to mp3's on my home hi-fi. High-fidelity music is a joy to listen to, and high resolution hi-fi sound is astounding. To draw the oposite analagy, at what point does lowering the resolution of a picture make it unviewable? It's the same with sound and that's the choice the listener has to make.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Nobody but anal retentive audiophiles cares that MP3 is lossy compression. The experience of listening to a given song isn't really affected, above a certain quality. I'm usually quite happy with 192 Kbps MP3s, and most people I know just download whatever they find, which often means 128 Kbps. Whoever thinks this makes a real difference to consumers should wise up before they waste a lot of fucking money and effort on nothing.
Yes, the default iPod buds are cheap, and to me uncomfortable. Just picked up my second pair of Apple In-Ear buds, the first one is pretty ratched up after 3 years of use and travelling everywhere. If I ever buy headphones, it will have to be Bose wrap around or something equally ensconcing. At home I have 400+ watts of THX speakers, so I don't really feel like being called cheap just because my Shuffle downgrades to 128kbps. At work I only listen in one ear anyway.
in addition to considering Transparent Cable interconnects and speaker cables
BWAHAHAhahah HAHA haa. I really hope this was a finely crafted troll.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Most people like to CDs on really bad stereo systems, they have bad amps and poor speakers. Do the execs care about also ? Or just want to moan about MP3 ?
I think people would be surprised how good a CD can sound with a descent system which has great speakers or buy some nice headphones.
Radio with its myriad problems. Vinyl records with scratchy needles. 8-track tapes with lots of fuzz. Cassette tapes with hiss, pops, and stretching. CDs with sound that isn't "warm" enough. Now MP3s with all of their shortcomings.
Yet somehow we've managed to muddle through and enjoy recorded music all this time, in spite of the ongoing degradation of music. Strange, isn't it?
Having created dozens and dozens of mix tapes in my youth, I'm much happier with the sound quality of MP3s. Am I "missing" music by using MP3s? Probably. But do I miss the music I'm missing? No.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
MP3 uses wavelet compression, which represents the sound as a series of superimposed wavelets (a simple wavelet is an enveloped sine wave so that it's amplitude reduces away from the middle to 0). The shape of the wavelet affects the type of signal that is reconstructed well, for instance wavelets with sharper edges will represent abrupt changes better. The use of one wavelet type means that you can't compress audio with both smoothly varying sounds and suddenly varying sounds. This is what gives you the compression artifacts. It's the same with JPEG, sharp edges get smoothed and rippled.
Exaggerated bass. Putting a lot of drivers in close proximity (cluster) increases bass bass output, and engineers usually don't fully cut it back out. Everyone loves huge bass when it's clean. Home speakers typically produce very little clean bass."
The answer for home: Klipschorn . Mine are actually the 50th anniversary ones, but, WOW....the sound. I even have them paired with a Klipsch 15" active sub. No problems with good sound and bass at my place.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
recorded audio is a reproduction of a live event, no matter how much money you throw at it. it is always going to sound as if you are listening to it from another room through a window. on the high end side you get a better window. toward the low end you still have a window; it is just in a less than ideal location or has a pane of glass.
i'm sure there are exceptions. hendrix's electric ladyland comes to mind. i'm not sure if he eliminated the window or just distorted it into an unrecognizable element.
obviously i'd rather not have my recorded music playing back in a mono telephone sound quality or like those idiots that get stopped in traffic in front of my house with overamplified one-note bass, but at some point you just have to be satisfied with a "close enough for a cigar" quality.
Serenity now, insanity later.
"...something is lost that cannot be restored by decompression."
I compress and decompress executable files. If anything was missing when I decompressed it, it wouldn't work again. Idiot.
There is lossy, and lossless. Buy a fucking clue.
I got news for people, the noise from tubes is an artifact of equipment, not part of the music.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Louder isn't necessarily worse, except with MP3 it really is. I'd say there's something to be said for loud music, just not on the pure basis of it being loud. I think the bigger problem is that artists have lost *dynamics*. Fortissimo on its own is okay- listen to Pink Floyd's Animals and near the end of the record it approaches the volume of a lot of modern music, but there's no contrast, there's no piano or sotto voce to tell listeners what normal sound is. :3
Then again, are CDs inferior to vinyl by definition, since you lose frequency ranges on the compact disc that are available in vinyl format?
+5, Truth
That's why I only listen to my iPod using oxygen-free Monster Cable wires to my earbuds.
Seriously, how can the sound quality out of an iPod be any worse than the sound quality out of my generation's iPod: a third-generation copy on a cheap Radio Shack cassette played on a squeaky Walkman?
Don't fear the Reaper, dude. Rock on!
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
I gave student tours through M.E. labs this summer. We went into our DAQ labs and we talked about the need to use proper sampling frequencies and the trade-offs of over/under sampling. I tailored the conversation to reflect what goes on with MP3s and I asked,
"How many of you encode your own MP3s?" and was ABSOLUTELY shocked to see 1/30 kids actually knew what I was talking about.
They don't know records,
They don't know that CDs represent a loss of quality in comparison to records,
They don't know that MP3s represent a loss of quality in comparison to CDs
They don't even know what an MP3 IS (i.e. a lossy way of encoding music)
The music industry has now created a generation of kids that think MP3 = Recorded Music
IMHO, this is a mistake and does the recording artist no favors. This could ultimately lead to cheaper recordings by the artists because if certain frequencies are going to be lost due to encoding then they don't have to build such elaborate recording studios. I'm not sure if this is by design or not but it really does stink.
Ultimately, it doesn't even matter as they (dem young kids) listen to their music on earbuds which stink anyway. They won't notice the difference until they compare it to the original with a good speaker system.
Sooo, ultimately, it doesn't matter anyhow...
Of course there is music missing. Thats what happens when you convert analog to digital. However, today's digitizing technology makes the omitted part unnoticable. CDs are lacking parts of the music! However, what a user chooses to compress is subjective. I used to be OK with low resolution compression, but now my min grade is the quality Apple uses in its DRM protected music. Which the average ear won't have any problems with.
I can't believe someone is complaining about music quality today after more than 20 years of digital music.
Many argue, including myself, that the 44.1KHz sample rate established in the compact disk digital audio standard is far too low to accurately represent many musical sounds. While in theory, frequencies up to 22050 Hz can be represented by 44.1KHz sampled digital audio, they are not represented accurately. There is a phase distortion effect in any digital recording system which increases as a function of frequency. This phase distortion effect is particularly marked in the last octave of the frequency bandwidth, in this case 11.025KHz - 22.05KHz. At this time, professional audio equipment is readily available which can be used to digitally record audio signals at 192KHz providing far greater fidelity for rich, high frequency sounds such as cymbals.
mp3s can, at best, provide a convincing perceptual replica of the digital audio signal they represent, including all of its limitations.
10% of the music, measured by what? Weight?
.WAV file of silence is just the same size as music.
More likely by bits, of course, but how is this determined?
Compression is all about removing redundant or unheard bits.
The bit-comparison is fairly meaningless... a
Truly remarkable, plenty of new stuff there.
Pandora.com, it's free too.
Surely you already knew about it....
I think the bad assumption here is that the use of MP3 files is an all or none proposition. I buy CDs and then rip them to MP3 for convenience in my car or ipod, neither of which are really very good soundstages for musical appreciation --especially with the top down.
If I want to hear the highs and lows I listen on my 15 year old Technics home stereo AND keep the volume low enough so things don't get washed out by the amplifier. However, if like most people, I just want the companionship that music really is, I listen on my ipod. It is those instances, where I don't mind that the ends of the range are missing.
Now, if I couldn't get a non-compressed original, that would upset me.
Democrats and Republicans are like AIDS and Cancer, I want neither!
I'm a musician, have played in bands, have done recording of various types (multitrack, reel2reel mastering, digital) and have known a number of audiophiles (and enjoyed their systems) over the years.
This argument is similar to the debate years ago surrounding speaker cables. I wanted to get to the bottom of it, so I set up a test. I could not detect a difference between using expensive 'monster' cable and cheap lamp cable for the same set of speakers (although it is true that the potential for induction/crosstalk increases in the non-shielded cable - a smart deployment of the wire, seperated from power and crossing at right angles when needed, decreases the likelyhood of interference - and doesn't cost an arm and a leg).
Similarly, with a high quality headset (high and low frequencies beyond 'standard' headsets) - I can't tell the difference between a CD and a MP3 of the same song played through my system. Taking a step farther still, the sound is certainly better for that particular music than was possible via Cassette Tape or over the FM radio back in the day.
Short of hearing a live performance of the song - MP3 is as good as it gets - and certainly audio equivalent to CD when uncompressed. The argument from the article is a fallacy as far as I am concerned. Now it may be possible that someone with extraordinary hearing could detect details between CD and MP3 formats - maybe. But I am not one of those people.
I get the feeling from my own experience that these folks may be manipulating the outcome inside their mind. The human mind is capable of filling in the blesks - jhst as yiu rahd tneje wouhs tkat are sjwlhed incorrectly - by filling in the corrections in your mind. This is no different that what could be happening in your mind with the so-called differences allegedly heard between the different formats. This is certainly as valid a theory as that put forward in the article (that MP3 compression is heard differently than CD quality by the brain - and thus could effect our emotional experience of the music). Both signals are translated to an analog signal that powers the speakers in any case - and going back to my tried and true old recordings - I can't hear a difference. (Read this to learn more about mp3 compression and psychoacoustics)
I will say this - the quality of recordings has gone down - and not because of MP3s. I know this because my old albums and remasters of old albums are better on average than the new stuff that is coming out today - on CD or not doesn't matter. I hear a lot of rookie mistakes - particularly clipping/overdriving of recording levels - that are not present in the older recordings. That is not to say there aren't any good recordings today - they just seem to be few and far between.
This is much to do about nothing IMHO.
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
It's a bummer to see people settling for the low bit rate MP3s when some of us are trying to steer fans towards higher data rates. For my upcoming releases I will be putting out DVDs, ie 96khz/24-bit data instead of 44.1khz/16-bit CDs. I'm hoping that if that data fidelity difference between iTunes MP3 and CD isn't enough to make people buy the physical goods (which I think is still a better experience with liner art etc) the DVD-audio clarity and visual ambiance on the DVD will help turn some more sales....
Music for coding. Genetic algorithm driven visuals. http://www
I've noticed what I believe to be an important and prevalent consequence of technological innovation: many recent technological advances entail lowering the qualitative expectations of consumers. For example, the average quality of cell phone calls is significantly lower than anything that would have been deemed acceptable by a land-line customer twenty years ago. Even using a high-end cell phone, you often have calls where there's lots of static, words get "dropped"--or maybe your whole call gets dropped because you're in a poor reception area. Airplane trips have gone from a near-luxurious experience to something like being run through sheep dip. Audio quality, as discussed in this thread, is another clear example of quality suffering at the hands of technology.
Time was when "audiophiles" spent thousands of dollars on then-exotic "hi-fi" gadgetry to achieve a sound that was a "life-like" as possible. (As I recall, some of my friends thought that listening to a recording of a steam locomotive on their hi-fis at top volume was the ultimate auditory experience. I never quite figured that one out.) The ultimate objective of those who were truly "into sound" was to extract every note from their cosseted vinyl recordings with ultimate "fidelity".
Then came the Compact Disk--a development greeted by apocalyptic horror on the part of many audiophiles. I'm aware that this topic has been discussed ad nauseam, so I'm not going to pursue at great length the question of whether CDs per se deliver sound inferior to that of vinyl. All I know is that I've listened to CD and Vinyl recordings of the same musical performances, and the vinyl sounded distinctly better. Maybe this is due to inherent technical limitations of the CD format--or perhaps the studios who produced those CDs just didn't exercise as much care in their making as they might have.
Now we have yet another quality regression: MP3. Nobody is going to tell me that a 128kbps recording of a decent piece of music sounds as good as that same piece played from either a vinyl or CD recording on high-quality equipment. I know that for a fact because I've compared 128 and 256kbps recordings on mediocre equipment (my car stereo), and I cold tell that the 256 sounded way better than the 128. I'd be lying if I said I tried comparing 256kbs against vinyl on good equipment, but I have a hunch that the vinyl would win.
Where am I going with all this? Well, probably not where you think I am. I recently MP3-ized my entire collection of Vinyl and CD recordings (at 256kbps), and the MP3 recordings are the only thing I listen to any more. Why? One word: convenience. I can carry a lot of music around with me on my little 130Mb USB disk. I can stuff many hours of music onto my MP3 player that I listen to at work. I can do the same in my car. At home, the stereo stands idle...I'm always listening to music via my computer's MP3 player while I play games (who needs to hear explosions, anyway?) or read. In other words, I'm willing to trade quality for other benefits, such as the ability to organize my entire music collection into playlists, to instantly find and play whatever song I feel like, or to be able to listen for hours and hours of music without having to get up and fiddle with finding a disk and putting it on the player.
Likewise, I've always got my trusty cell-phone clipped to my belt--it's better to have a static-riddled conversation than not be able to talk to a person at all when time is of the essence. I sure think the airlines suck, though. (Actually, that's a red herring--the quality of airline travel cannot be said to have been improved in any way by technology in the last 20 years.)
As another telling example of sacrificing quality for convenience via modern technology, consider this posting (or article or whatever the heck you call it). A few decades ago, I would have written a carefully polished essay. Now I toss off a piece of schlock while my employer thinks I'm working. Now that's progress!
Great men are almost always bad men--Lord Acton's Corollary
That is correct. I was using the common usage of Ogg. Ogg can contain Vorbis, Flac, Speex, Theora, and goodness knows what else. Just as a Wave file can have many different compressed and uncompressed formats.
However most people when they say Ogg mean Vorbis Ogg. Now if the iPod would just support all of the standard Ogg formats I would be very happy. Speex would be great for podcasts and books.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Just about every "improvement" in media seems to involve making the quality shittier and shittier.
Claiming that 90% of the sound is gone is ridiculous, though. A 256k mp3 sounds quite good. However, a real improvement would be to start using a 24k/96k source for the compressed audio instead of limiting audio to the same 16k/44k range.
Video, however, is just in sad shape. YouTube is a sick joke - it is silly to see things like the CNN YouTube debates in the day and age of high definition television.
I think you are both confused about binary notation. If 1111111111111111 is your highest level then half that value would be 0111111111111111, not 0000000011111111. You wouldn't be reduced to 8 bits of effective resolution unless the soft passsage were only 1/256th as high as the loud passage.
You won't save anything by having a "volume" channel and a "signal" channel. If you put 8 bits of volume next to 16 bits of signal then you've got exactly the same thing as a 24-bit signal.
Actually, there's plenty of lossless stuff available on the net. There's newsgroups that cater to lossless recordings and websites (like Magnatune) that offer them for paid download. These are where I find lots of the stuff I enjoy. I like some modern western pop (like Pink, White Stripes, Yeah Yeah Yeahs) but for the most part I avoid it because I don't like the rules they play by. This isn't a big deal to me as there is a very big world of great music out there.
But note I didn't say I dont download MP3s - I said I won't PAY for them. An MP3 to me has zero value - you can never be certain how it was ripped and the sound quality most always is just not there.
It's inevitable I'm missing out on lots of good stuff. There's no way any human being could ever keep up with all the good music available in recordings - there's new stuff and there's a century of existing recordings, all available in some form or another. It would take several lifetimes to enjoy it all even just one time through.Life's just too short to obsess about such things.
That's not to say that classical sounds good on an MP3, only that the theory you present can't be the whole story.
FWIW, I record all my files in flac, but that's because hard drive space is cheap, so why take the risk with a lossy format?
I find mp3's ok to listen to, but then I have never understood some people's reasons to spend stupid money on hi-fi gear. I love my SACD/DVD-A player, but apart from the number of channels I enjoy mp3 and wma just as much.
Pro Coffee Drinker
Yes, Shakespeare did care if people copied his plays without his permission. He made his living off those plays, and he got a bonus from having them exclusive; he didn't get paid for unauthorized performances. This didn't stop people from copying his plays without his permission, but most of those copies are strange compared to the reconstructed definitive versions.
There is a disadvantage to restricting copies, of course. Some of Shakespeare's plays only exist in the authorized First Folio editions, which were published well after his death, and also after some play-censoring laws got passed. I'm convinced that we would like and understand As You Like It better if there were some foul quartos of it floating around.
There is a fine line between recklessness and courage... -- Paul McCartney
These music producers better be careful. Digital trading is supposed to be different from tape trading because things can be copied without loss of quality (and therefore more dangerous). Now if people only trade poor quality copies on the internet ...
Saints preserve us from wanker audiophiles! Especially those with journalistic credentials (they usually have no technical background!) The so-called "missing 90%" of the orginal sound is stuff the ear can't hear in the orginal mix anywhere. The real problem is in the occassional bad encoding that causes a bit of bad aliasing (the metallic sizzle evident on some MP3s) but crap about MP3s only having 10% of the sound in them is just bollocks by the RIAA to scare people back to buying CDs. Remember when LPs were "warmer" than CDs? That was bullshit, too. Effing luddites, I despair of them!
"I hope you like Guinness, Sir. I find it a refreshing substitute for, er... food." Col. Jack O'Neil, SG-1
I only own maybe two CDs - one Kate Bush, one from the Corrs. Only got them because they were sold cheap on a college campus.
Everything else I listen to is downloaded MP3s or video. I don't even listen to the radio. Very rarely I listen to streaming Internet music and record some of it.
Most of my listening prior to now was over cheap AM/FM cassette radios from which I recorded the broadcast music and listened to it with cheap headphones.
So what do I know about "high fidelity"? I don't own a $6,000 Harmon-Kardon system. People who do maybe got a right to complain. So? Fuck 'em. Most of the world doesn't own such a system either.
When Internet bandwidth gets higher and disk space cheaper, MAYBE we'll all be listening to high quality lossless music directly downloaded from lossless copies of the original masters.
And maybe not - since MP3's are "good enough" for the ninety-eight percent of the world who aren't "audiophiles".
People make the "good enough" argument for Windows, why not for MP3s?
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
The CD of "Sgt. Pepper's" was designed back in 1987--it's an old remaster. There is strong demand among Beatlefans for it to be remastered with modern tech, but no remastered vs. of that exact album has been released.
Most of the individual songs on that album have been remastered since 1987; most of those can be found on the Yellow Submarine Songtrack, released in 1999. You can tell it from the original soundtrack by the blue cover and the absence of instrumentals. (A few of the songs can be found in their entirety in the 1999 remastered film itself.) If any of you want to compare 1987 to 1999, that might be a good way to do it.
There is a fine line between recklessness and courage... -- Paul McCartney
Please don't stereotype all us geezers (41 here) as not being able to appreciate new music. I for one am a big fan of Andrew Bird, The Arcade Fire, Modest Mouse, Spoon, Tool, Amy Winehouse, Niko Case, etc. Thanks, sincerely the cranky old geezer defense committee, now git off my lawn. :)
Tired of all the isms, don't exploit people as an employer, or a government, mmmmK?
Yes, louder is necessarily worse. Or, let me rephrase that, louder than clipping level is. Which is what you have with almost all music these days. If you want something louder, turn up the volume on your amplifier, don't "boost" the digital signal until it sounds twice as loud but carries only half as much data.
MP3 in itself isn't evil, but it is inadequate for some kinds of music, like gently brushing a high hat, which tends to sound like broken glass even at 312.5 kbps.
I have no knowledge of your 25-30 year old B&W DM5's aside from viewing a few queries posted to audiophile webpages, or newer speakers sold in the UK/EU. In the U.S.A, SNR (Signal to Noise Ratio) has been listed in the technical specifications for loudspeakers for at least 15 years. The exception to this is the manufacturers whose product is so shoddy that they would prefer for their specifications to not be listed at all. In general, a higher SNR, speakers and amplifiers, results in clearer sound, the difference between hearing the drumstick hit the drum and then the percussion versus hearing just the somewhat muted percussion.
With regard to wattage, I too have speakers that can be overdriven. I like a balanced system. There is something nice a sound system that is both loud and clear.
Cheers
"What luck for the rulers that men do not think." - Adolph Hitler