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.

Comments

Re:Sounds we can and cannot hear.

[dgatwood]

I don't know about guitars (I've never heard one compressed that wasn't too buried in the mix to identify), but I can't stand the way AAC screws up cymbals. Anything that naturally has no tonality tends to be massacred by lossy compression. If you can't hear the difference, you probably can't hear high frequencies.... It is annoying to me even with cheap earbuds in a quiet room. In noisy environments, I can't hear the difference, of course, thanks to the masking effect of everything else. Whether you can hear the effect or not depends largely on whether you are actively or passively listening to the music.

Honestly, I don't mind the earbuds. The proximity to the ear makes up for most of the low frequency loss associated with a small diaphragm, so they sound acceptable. They aren't God's gift to man or anything, but they aren't nearly as awful as you make them out to be. Now computer speakers... those tend to be universally abhorrent. No bass response whatsoever, so they sound like tin can telephones.

As for the $20 speakers with subwoofers, they get rave reviews mainly because most people have never heard good speakers. Compared to a set of 6 inch drivers, yeah, they probably sound great. You actually have deep bass response. Compared to a pair of properly tuned 3-ways with 12 inch drivers, they sound like ass because you have probably a couple of octaves of upper bass to lower mids that are mostly missing because it's too high for the sub to generate it and too low for the tiny 4 inch (or smaller) main speakers to generate it. Compared with my studio monitors, they're laughable. The problem is that most people have never heard speakers with drivers over about six inches... maybe eight. Oh, yeah, and most people don't have any hearing above 14 kHz anyway, so those tinny little speakers sound good to them. :-D

Re:Sounds we can and cannot hear.

[X0563511]

http://flac.sf.net/

Re:192KBPS seems OK

[scalarscience]

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.

Actually most vinyl masters are typically filtered above 12-16KHz (depending on the mastering engineer and the cutting depth, the number to be run from each master plate, etc) as well. In fact Vinyl's low end is also 'rolled off', and then put through a filtering process twice (known as the RIAA curve) to insure that the low frequencies are attenuated on the vinyl plate then restored on playback. I would say that vinyl and analogue recording mediums in general tend to 'gel' the sounds together into a cohesive whole, while digital mixing and reproduction systems (CD for instance) tend to retain the separation between sounds and in some cases even increase this separation. Part of this is the drastically reduced noisefloor in digital systems (the higher noisefloor in vinyl playback would be considered to have a "masking effect" on things the ear might otherwise hear for instance) and part of it is due to the way Tape and analogue circuitry tends to have a compression effect on the dynamics of the overall waveform. Compression in this case means reduction of transients rather than loss of 'bit' data. There are other aspects to this discussion that the article completely ignores as well, such as the rediculous overuse of dynamic compression & limiting in modern commercial music, the fact that Pro Tools and modern systems are often used to simply 'fix' poor performance which (imo) still translates into a more lackluster product than one where the artist(s) got it 'right' in a single or a few takes, with little or no need for editing. Also note that Wav & Aiff are simply two different ways to store audio, one popularized by Windoze the other by Mac. Either format is perfectly suited to storing whatever data you have present in a variety of encodings, samplerates and bit-depths.