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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.
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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
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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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.
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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?
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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
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
Lossy compression sounds bad on classical music, period, and the same tends to be true for similar sources like solo acoustic guitar, piano, etc. Lossy compression assumes that most of the data is unimportant, which in a dense mix tends to be true due to masking. In a thin mix, though, that assumption falls apart, and so does lossy compression. Of course, that's not the only pathological case where lossy compression sounds bad; it's just the most common case.
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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.
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.
The major problem here is what does the brain activity data mean? Even if you can see a difference in brain activity for a 16 bit/44 kHz PCM file verses a 128 kbit/sec VBR AAC file how do you determine if one format is preferred over the other?
You end up still falling back on subjective measures, it's much simpler to have a large number of participants and then ask them questions like, "Which recording did you prefer?" The data from a properly run survey is much more likely to yield meaningful conclusions than scans of brain activity. We are, after all, dealing with music - a highly subjective art form.
One notable feature of DSD is that dynamic compression occurs at higher frequencies yet the frequencies are able to be reproduced accurately. Contrast this with PCM where the dynamic range is fixed (i.e. 16-bit, 20-bit, 24-bit) but at higher frequencies the tonality is not as pure because it's impossible to represent anything other than a square wave at the nyquist frequency which is exactly 1/2 the sampling rate. Of course, a filter is applied to make that into a more pleasant sine wave. Now consider a frequency that is not exactly 22.05 kHz but perhaps a little shy of that. It's almost impossible to represent this accurately with PCM. The result is that you actually get a slightly oscillating frequency somewhere around the original frequency.
What you are describing is a phenomenon known as aliasing.
I'm not sure you completely understand how the Nyquist-Shannon Sampling Theorem works. It boils down to the fact that as long as you sample at a rate greater than double the maximum frequency you want to capture, you will get no aliasing. This means that if you sample at 44.1 kHz then all frequencies below 22.05 kHz will be represented accurately. If you sample a frequency just shy of 22.05 kHz you will NOT "get a slightly oscillating frequency somewhere around the original frequency".
It is true that DSD has a variable dynamic response that depends on frequency but that works both for and against DSD since higher frequencies tend to less accurately represented than lower frequencies. In fact there is a lot of discussions (PDF file, see page 8, section 3[c]) that conclude that the current implementations of DSD produce worse quality per bit than an equivalent bit-rate PCM sampling. There are solutions to these problems but they are very complex and involve a mix of DSD and PCM sampling methods, so much so that the line between DSD and PCM blurs considerably.
This has a serious effect on how an album is mastered. When the target format is CD the producer can cause the CD player to output extremely loud high frequency sounds though not particularly accurate frequencies. This is reflected in the current crop of music which is often extremely loud and to many ears just sounds like a bunch of noise. Metallica's self-titled black album was one of the first to use severe dynamic compression to make the album sound super loud. Comparing it with modern CDs we can see that that album was relatively tame.
Again you are mixing up sound levels with frequencies. Severe dynamic compression basically limits the number of sound levels which are utilized,
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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"?
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.
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