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Speculation On a Lossless iTunes Store
DrJenny writes "C|net UK has up an interesting blog post predicting that within 12 months Apple's iTunes Store will include a download center for lossless audio. This would be a massively positive move for people who spend thousands of dollars on hi-fi gear, but refuse to give money to stores that only offer compressed music — they could finally take advantage of legal digital downloads. The article goes into details on how Apple's home-grown ALAC lossless encoding relates to FLAC, DRM, and the iPod ecosystem."
Hope this happens. After transcoding my CD collection to FLAC to arhive it, I now regularly batch re-encode to smaller and smaller bit rates using new releases of lossy encoders. AAC has gotten much better (esp AAC-HE) over the years to the point for a portable player, 48kbs is perfectly acceptable to my ears. With a 16GB iPod Touch, I could see buying music from the iTMS in some lossless format and transcoding to get my entire collection all on a small, flash memory player.
Most CDs have about 10-19 songs and range in price from $10-$15 (at least the mainstream ones). That works out to usually $0.99 a song. The last album I bought was Timbaland: Shock Value. 17 good songs for $12.
Lossless audio is going to involve some large file sizes, and with that, comes increased costs--bandwidth ain't free, and storage/delivery of these files is not going to be cheap or easy. This all translates into fairly expensive downloads.
So for Apple to seriously consider this, they're going to have to figure out if there are enough audiophiles out there willing to pay that kind of money for downloads.
Personally, I kinda doubt it.
Gifts for Geeks - Stuff that really matters!
Once, when my band was recording to a digital medium (a RADAR 24-track hard disk recorder, for those keeping score), we captured some tracks at 16bit, and some at 24bit. All other parameters in the signal chain were held constant.
I did not expect to hear as big a difference as I did. 24b absolutely crushed 16b in the oh-so-unscientific terms of listening enjoyment. Everything, especially the cymbals, sounded clearer, less harsh and brittle, more defined. We had to throw away some good 16b takes because they sounded so much worse than the 24b recordings.
Don't be so quick to discount the difference that a little extra dynamic range can make. Sure, you might not notice when you're listening to your iPod in your 89 Chevy Cavalier with the burned out left rear speaker, but it's not as hard to tell as you might think.
Cretin - a powerful and flexible CD reencoder
Very well put. It's one of the things that makes the delta-sigma modulation at very high sample rates used in eg SACD interesting. Of course, it would help if the data stream were easier to work with, which is why I think 24/96 or even 24/192 is superior overall.
The problem gets even more obnoxious if you care about the flatness and phase response of your filter. The one time I've done data acquisition work that cared about such things at 20kHz, we ended up using a 250kHz sample rate in order to give the Bessel filter room to operate. (We could have gotten away with marginally lower, but not enough lower to avoid buy the 1MS/s ADC system. We had 4 channels, so we ran at 250kHz.)
You're probably thinking of silver, not platinum. Silver actually conducts better than copper, but it's both more expensive and it suffers from corrosion. Gold is not a better conductor than either "out of the box", but after a bit of time and oxidation of those silver and copper contacts, it becomes better than both.
Long story short: a scientist will tell you silver is the best conductor, followed by copper, followed by gold. An engineer making something that needs to work more than a few days in the lab will note that gold is actually the best conductor of the three when put into real use, at least for those exposed contacts. Your silver or copper contacts are going to sound crappier than my gold ones all too soon...
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
You do know that most studios record on 16bit 48khz equipment, right? That 4khz doesn't make much of a difference. In fact, most studio masters are slap-dash affairs. Bad mikes, bad recording equipment, inadequate space, etc. All that crap puts all but the very best masters far below what CD Audio is capable of. In this real-world context, there is no point at all to formats like SACD and DVD-Audio. What people actually WANT is pretty clear. People want CDs with a 5.1 Dolby Digital mix, or an equivalent surround system. The studios have been highly-resistant to introducing such a format because it costs 10X as much money to master surround sound recordings as it does plain stereo.
I really don't understand all this audiophile crap. Most of the sources are so lousy there is little point in trying to optimize your equipment. This is sharply contrasted with videophiles, because the movie studios actually bother to master their DVDs (and before that, LaserDiscs) properly. The same is generally true of Blu-Ray and HD-DVD. pull it down to something that doesn't require DVD-type storage for a single album. This makes no sense. Lossy compression can introduce nasty effects and can kill your range. Even the best psychoacoustic models (like LAME) still have serious problems with certain tracks. An uncompressed album fits in 650 MB, far less than a DVD (9 GB). Using FLAC or a similar codec would get that down to about 350 MB, less than many of the video downloads on iTunes.
The RAW equivalent for audio would nice, but lossless would be what it would take for me (and everyone I know) to buy online.
If any of you remember cassettes, low end MP3s are about equal (IMHO).
I haven't bought / downloaded any music because of this factor - it's just not good enough when I can purchase the CD and deal with it from there.
AAC is pretty damn good, but no, I can tell the difference for the most part and well, really, come on, get real - they already SELL it lossless, it's not like you're twisting knobs to transfer it to the hard drive.
If anyone can get the majority of the Corporate Music above the line brain dead to listen, it'll be Jobs, and Team Apple, both of them.
~hylas
I know two audiophiles - professional audio mixers, to be exact, who absolutely have golden ears. They listened to a CD of an album master and frowned like something was wrong. The "image" wasn't right; "smeared" somehow. Turned out they could hear the difference between a master CD and a copy of the CD. The difference? Clock jitter. Yes, they could hear the effects of clock jitter. Both of these guys are legally blind which apparently sharpens other senses.
Most of the stuff on
This applies only to me, of course, as I was the only test subject however here are my findings:
I can stastically distinguish up to 256kbit/s MP3 vs FLAC.
At 320kbps my rate is around 65%, which is not sufficently higher than 50% to declare that it was distinguished (over my 20 tests).
The following equipment was used:
Sennheiser HD650
Benchmark DAC
Fed using Emu 1616 from computer.
Using my ZD5's from ZaphAudio (www.zaphaudio.com) which I built, I had less accuracy due to noise level in room.
Tests were done double blind using Foobar's ABX test application. Test tracks were Mel Torme - Sleigh Ride (Jazzy Christmas with Telarc), Herbert von Karajan - Beethoven's 9th (Mvmt 4) and Rachael Yamagata - Worn Me Down.
At least for me, FLAC is not by any means an absolute neccisary. The portability options for conversion to other formats is a huge factor looking forward however. I am sure that those with Ipod earbuds would have less resolution capacity, however my ears are not by any means extraordinary.