Slashdot Mirror
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.
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,
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.
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.
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.
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
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
You listen to some old records, and I mean old ones from the 1960s, and the sound is infinitely superior. The last time I listened to Sgt. Pepper on vinyl, after years of listening to it on CD, I was just blown away by it. Those old engineers, with the limited analog equipment at their disposal (Sgt. Pepper was recorded on 8 track equipment), performed miracles. That entire body of knowledge has evaporated, and now, even for old catalogs, the words "digitally remastered" send chills up audiophiles spines.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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
I've bought five or six ear buds in my lifetime, spending anywhere from $5 to $30, and the earbuds that came with my ipod are significantly better than any of them. I own better headphones, to be sure, but the point is that ipod earbuds are definitely not $0.50 cheapies.
Actually, Sgt. Pepper was recorded on four-track, which makes the results even more incredible. The Beatles didn't start experimenting with 8-track until "Dear Prudence," I believe.
Maybe you're looking for "The Death of Dynamic Range", which gives plots of a number of samples of music, from Bryan Adams' 1982 album which peaked at 75% of full scale, to Willie Nelson's 1988 disc which had *one* 100% peak, through to Amy Grant's 1992 album which had multiple clipped peaks and The Rembrandts (1995) with its continual hard clipping at 96%(!), finishing with the "audio carnage" of Ricky Martin. http://www.mindspring.com/~mrichter/dynamics/dynam ics.htm
Now, if you can't hear the difference, by all means, keep listening to MP3's. Heck, I usually listen to them. However, most people can tell the difference in a blind test.
Go Badgers! -- #include "std/disclaimer.h"
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!
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.
I have six of those giant CD wallets full of CDs.
It took me several weeks but I eventually ripped them all to my media server as FLACs.
It took a few days straight for my shell script to conver them all to MP3s.
Now I have files that play on my ipod (with shitty headphones) and I have files that play on my Myth box over my ridiculously overpriced stereo.
To me this is win-win, but I also recognize not everyone feels like building a mutli-terabyte SAN in their guest bedroom just to serve music.
(Sgt. Pepper was recorded on 8 track equipment),
Nope, Not even 8 tracks. It was recorded on multiple 4 track machines. In one of the great hacks of all time, All the tapes were marked for their starting point with grease pencil and one track of the master machine recorded the the line current. They used the 100 volt outs from a Macintosh amp to drive the capstan motors of the slave machines. This kept the machines in sync. The engineers (and I do mean engineers complete with with lab coats and pocket protectors)at EMI really did work miracles with what machines they had to work with. EMI was very slow to adopt new technologies. While the Beatles worked on SGT Peppers with 4 track machines, the Beach Boys blazed the Pet Sounds trail with 8 track machines. Or so the story goes. I must admit I wasn't there.
Something i only became aware of after having done a real, double-blind ABX test, is that anyone who says things like "the CD sounded more alive" has never done a real, double-blind ABX test.
If you had, you'd have failed the first time (at probably 96kbps) and then read up on and trained yourself what to listen for: things like pre-echo and ringing on the high frequencies. The "liveliness" of the recording is not really identifiable past about 96kbps - 128kbps with a modern codec.
Jeremy
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
Theodore Sturgeon said it all: 90% of everything is crap.
actually it was recorded on 2 four track machines sync'ed together, which makes it triply impressive for the time
Live Electronic Music
When I was a teenager I hated the shite music my peers were listening to.
It's only now I'm older I've discovered the good music that was around when I was a teen. There's good music released now - but there's still a lot of kiddie pop that's utter shite, just as there was when I were a lad.
I must admit, I fail at seeing.
If I look specifically for the difference, can I see it? Yes. If I glance at the two, do I notice it? Sorry, no.
The guy I sit next to at work can. I was comparing two screenshots, he immediately identified that one was far better than the other. Me, I was sat there wondering how he'd even worked out which was which.
I can't complain, means I get higher framerates for the same money.
Some tests have shown that musicians and "audiophile golden ears" that prefer vinyl can indeed (contrary to some popular belief) distinguish it from CD in double blind testing. But... they can't distinguish CD-Rs recorded from vinyl source from vinyl.
What they miss from vinyl, that "warm"/"musical"/"full range"/"analogue" quality that sounds better, is actually distortion characteristics of the vinyl/LP players.
In my experience, one of the biggest problems with the music industry is as follows:
When you buy a CD from a store, there have been many many people who had a hand in it getting to you... difficult to put a specific number but I'd guess it's around 50 different people (label manager, presing plant worker, distribution liason, shop worker etc).
Every single one of these people gets a salary out of the sale of the music - EXCEPT for the musicias. They get a share from the proceeds after everyone else gets paid, if the product sells well enough. Most often they get nothing, except for the original advance (often enough to pay for a few month's rent).
Most of the risk is passed on to the musicians, who can only expect to get properly paid if they blow up, and sell lots and lots. Obviously, they have a chance of doing REALLY well (the pressing plant guy is not going to rich if the product sells out).
The irony is, people buy the product ultimately because they like the music, and really once the mastering engineer has finished (still VERY early in the process of getting it released) no-one else has any effect on the music... if the distributor messes up it doesn't make the music sound any worse.
This problem is particularly hard on the instrumentalists / backing singers in the band, as the set-up of the performing rights system in most countries greatly favours those who write lyrics or music.
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.