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The Death of High Fidelity
Ponca City, We Love You writes "Rolling Stone has an interesting story on how record producers alter the way they mix albums to compensate for the limitations of MP3 sound. Much of the information left out during MP3 compression is at the very high and low ends, which is why some MP3s sound flat. Without enough low end, 'you don't get the punch anymore. It decreases the punch of the kick drum and how the speaker gets pushed when the guitarist plays a power chord.' The inner ear automatically compresses blasts of high volume to protect itself, so we associate compression with loudness. After a few minutes, constant loudness grows fatiguing to the brain. Though few listeners realize this consciously, many feel an urge to skip to another song."
It seems that FLAC does the job quite nicely.
Technology -- No Place For Wimps! Grateful Dead and Jerry Garcia Chatroom -- http://www.wemissjerry.org
I call shenanigans. Double blind testing shows no perceptible difference between a good MP3 and the source material for most listeners most of the time. The real death of hi-fi is the fault of the record companies themselves, and the Loudness War. Who cares if an MP3 encoder drops a tiny amount of imperceptible data when the CD itself has been compressed and clipped to the point that you don't want to listen to it?
Now they know. It amazes me how many of the LP's I own still sound better than the CD versions.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
Who sells music in a loosy compression such as MP3? CDs aren't mp3; itune music doesn't come in mp3. I think the author of the article is making the mistake of calling all digital music mp3. That's like calling all smart phones iPhones and all digital music players iPods.
Absolutely! I refuse to put my money on a lossy format. We should move forward, not backwards... I mean from CD to mp3s? It should be from CD to "Put lossless format here". :(
"The age of the audiophile is over."
How true. I tried to warn people that their hair would fall out and blindless would ensue but would anyone believe me then? MP3's are the devil's work.
Repent and bow at the altar of vinyl before it's too late.
should be "The Deaf of High Fidelity," especially with kids blasting the music into their ears.
mp3 sounds fine to me
i think what matters what is where the sound is coming out from
speaker/headphone quality etc
Norris Normal - Who am I?
I hated that movie. gonna still hang on to all my fat wax, tho
What about MPEG1 Layer2 that most FM radio station use ? Is it the same with mp2 ?
It may be true that MP3 encoders do tend to (but don't necessarily always) make some trade-offs at the high or low frequencies. For example, very low frequency sound may lose stereo positioning, and most encoders employ a low-pass filter to reduce the data rate (or artifacts at a given data rate) by taking out some of the high-end frequencies. However, this has (almost) nothing to do with compression, which is more about adjusting dynamics to make quiet sounds sound louder while trying to minimize distortion in the louder parts.
Compression is a horrible thing, of course, because essentially what is happening today is that even those of us who buy CDs hoping to avoid the artifacts of lossy formats are subject to some random guy deciding during mastering that "hey, this will stand out more against the competition if the whole thing is really loud and unsubtle". But to tie this against MP3 is a very far stretch of the imagination, IMO.
People who think MP3 encoded with Lame -preset standard (about 192kbps) suck and are not trolling should register at Hydrogenaudio and submit audio samples and ABX tests tests. Some Lame developers hang out there, and I'm sure they would like some help in improving their acoustic model.
Yeah.. CD is 2 * 44100@16bit, right? With FLAC you might use it with 7.1(8) * 192000@24bit.
:(){
I usually like harder/grungier stuff, but I've noticed that over the past few years, I've been gradually moving to softer stuff like Norah Jones or A Fine Frenzy or Bob Dylan. I can't help, but wonder if the loudness wars have had something to do with that.
I can't help, but think that softer stuff like that has a much lower chance of being compressed into distortion.
// file: mice.h
#include "frickin_lasers.h"
So shitty music sounds like very shitty music thanks to mp3, now?
Wow... that convinced me... I'll buy only CD's now...
oh wait...
destroying my eardrums with a needle is much cheaper than listening to music that is just shitty... nevermind then...
The article doesn't just discuss the compression rates, but actually talks about everything in the entire industry that flattens sound. It's an interesting concept that I am sure has been discussed for decades, however I've never personally connected these dots before so it was nice to read.
The first thing I think of though is not how can we improve the delivery medium, but rather why are equalizers not considered at all? Especially in digital media where the EQ can be activated from the song's information itself! Use the EQ to bring out the artificial loudness, but leave the details there for the people who want to disable the EQ and just listen to the original piece.
But of course this does not fix the problem they discussed with the band they mentioned had fewer pauses in their songs. That's just an unfortunate choice on the part of the producers, and has actually opened my eyes a bit as to the lack of control an artist has on their own music.
that is all fine and good but my car's CD/MP3 deck doesn't play FLAC soooo MP3 it is...oh and my portable player doesn't play FLAC either
..etc..AND YOU NEED A 2TB NAS DEVICE TO KEEP YOUR FLAC COLLECTION ON...
and of course the file size.. but who CARES IF YOU CAN'T TAKE IT WITH YOU IN THE CAR
personally being (LITERALLY) 1/2 deaf I can't tell the god damn difference between mp3 or ogg files vs CD or FLAC..etc higher fidelity formats anyway.
actually I am happy to see you, however that is in fact a banana in my pocket.
I call BS.
1.: Record producers did try to fit the sound for low-fi at least as far back as the seventies. This was done to make sure the songs were still recognizable on your transistor radio at the beach or on the tape deck in your car.
2.: *My* MP3s sound just fine, thank you.
The problem is that the waveforms of modern songs are increasingly rendered at a uniform loudness, causing listener fatigue (it sure makes me tired). This is well addressed in the article.
MP3 compression is yet another issue.
this isn't about why mp3 compression sucks, it's about how producers are cannibalizing their own tracks to make up for weaknesses in compressed formats like mp3.
I think you resumed in two sentences the whole "audiophile" dilemma. Let's face it, modern recordings suck and no processing will change that. Meanwhile, well intentioned but ill informed people will debate endlessly if vacuum tubes are better than transistors, if analog is better than digital, if lossless compression is better than lossy.
Raising these subjects is flamebait, the people who defend vacuum tubes or analog recordings are comparing their own favorite recordings with modern recordings, not the absolute value of the audio equipment itself.
One of my own favorite musics is a recording of the nine Beethoven symphonies, done by the Berliner Philharmoniker, conducted by Herbert von Karajan in 1962-1963. I have several versions of these in both analog medium, tape and LPs, and also in CDs, which I have ripped to mp3 to carry in my portable player. To rip the mp3 I used the CDs, not any of the analog versions, because the sound is cleaner in the CDs.
OTOH, I have also some other CDs of those same pieces, same orchestra, same conductor, same recording company, done entirely in digital formats. I think they aren't as good as the old ones. The reason? Not because they are digital, but because of the difference between a Karajan in his 30s compared to the same man 20+ years later. Or it could also show the difference between the criteria used by Deutsche Gramophon in the 1960s and the 1980s.
However, one thing I'm sure of is that if a CD copy of an analog recording is better than an analog copy of the same recording you cannot say digital sound is inferior. And if an mp3 copy of a CD containing music originally recorded in analog format sounds better than an LP of exactly the same recording, you cannot say mp3 has intrinsic fidelity problems.
The loudness wars have been going on with commercial radio for quite some time. See the infamous Optimod or Omnia. One of the tenants of processing is to make younger audience music squashed to death (heavy overdrive and heavy clipping) because they apparently don't care about fatigue.....but to a middle-aged soccer mom--the typical targeted demo of the greater majority of stations--the processing gets very fatiguing so they just clip it to death without the massive overdrive, still causing horrible distortion.
Next time you have the radio on, listen closely...those little crackles in the background is not noise from a bummy signal, it's distortion from over-processing the already over-processed song.
Music that's older (recorded when the technology wasn't so hot) comes pre-clipped because they didn't have amazing compression devices to keep everything in check so the varying levels max out. It's not as bad since it were tubes causing the clipping (and they have a softer sound), but it sounds awful.
Anonymous because this is my profession.
...remove anything at the bottom end of the spectrum. There is simply no point as the entire low frequency range can be represented by just a few coefficients.
The authors have no idea what they are talking about and are probably a combination of prejudiced and stone deaf.
There was a time where there was a war between rithm vs melody lovers. Now it seems the war is over (by now) rythm has won, let's go back to jungle, and forget those gentle sounds.
Just remember, the music you hear when kid will stay with you for all your life.
What's in a sig?
You can still hear most of the dynamic range on a well encoded MP3 or Vorbis file, IMHO. If it's present in the first place, that is.
Never mind discussing whether FLAC or MP3 or OGG are the best ; what does it matter if the master has already been sabotaged by marketing, compressed to sound "loud" so that it gets instant attention on the radio? Yeah, sure, it gets attention ; the same way a fire alarm or a fog horn does, by inflicting an ear-cringing reflex. "Compression is a necessary evil. The artists I know want to sound competitive. You don't want your track to sound quieter or wimpier by comparison. We've raised the bar and you can't really step back."
-- Butch Vig, producer and Garbage mastermind Yes, this man truly is a mastermind
to not buy their music :)
http://www.rense.com/general79/wdx1.htm
Much of the information left out during MP3 compression is at the very high and low ends, which is why some MP3s sound flat.
Wait, I thought that the MP3 compression was basically achieved by cutting the sound into overlapping chunks, performing a DCT on each chunk, discarding the less important bins according to a psychoacoustic model and compression the thing like in a ZIP file? If so that means that the frequency scale stays linear, and so there would be little interest in getting rid of frequencies under say 30-35 Hz since they represent about 0.15% of the data in a plain old track sampled at 44,100 Hz.
So the MP3 compression doesn't actually discard the "low end" as they call it, does it? Wouldn't the "flatness" they're talking about be due to how frame sizes affect transient (short) sounds and makes them softer?
You just got troll'd!
YouTube: The Loudness War
Taking stuff apart since 1969 (TM)
The definitive statement on this issue was made by George Palmer of EMI and still rings true today[emi.com]
that your equipment doesn't have wooden knobs.
Also, you'll find your aural experience greatly improved if the wires are of high quality and raised slightly above floor level. I've also noticed marked improvements if you chill the wires(and generally keep the room cool). Cool equipment = warm sound. Who knew?
It's called the auralgasm setup for a reason!
"record producers alter the way they mix albums to compensate for the limitations of MP3 sound."
Bullshit. The record companies are too lazy/cheap to spend extra time doing ANYTHING that requires any extra time or effort. That's why many CDs in the early days sounded lousy. They just took the original analog tapes and put them onto CD with no remixing or remastering. Recording engineers spent decades learning all sorts of tricks to make music sound good when transferred to a vinyl LP and didn't bother to unlearn them when working with an entirely different medium.
Yes, if you listen to songs that are in the Billboard top 20, they most likely have been severely compressed as part of the "loudness war". But,
(a) a substantial percentage of the population doesn't listen to that crap
(b) applying massive compression to everything is not "mixing",
(3) if they actually did remix music to add more highs and lows to compensate for the alleged losses suffered by mp3, the music would sound horrible when played in any other format because the actual frequency loss is imperceptable to 99.9% of all people, and
(d) there are still plenty of musicians who still care about musical quality and who don't do that sort of thing.
I have a very nice, expensive "audiophile" stereo system. 2 years ago I moved into a new house and the stereo system is still sitting in boxes. Now I only listen to music on my computer and mp3 player. A couple of years ago I would have considered this the ultimate blasphemy. But technology has changed. The sound card and speakers on my computer are now quite good. So is my mp3 player with some good (ie rather expensive) earbuds. My CDs (many of them from the late 80s/early 90s) sound just fine when ripped to mp3.
.
MP3 and similar compressed audio standards are to a large part based on the insights of psychoacoustic research, which is in turn based mainly on surveys taken among a large set of listeners.
So when you don't have an average ear, you're positioned out of the target group for MP3, AAC, Vorbis, etc.
In most blind tests, I can tell that there is a difference between 192Kbps-Lame compressed and uncompressed audio,
but I can't tell which is which, or which is better.
What I have experienced over years is that, compared to lossless, listening to MP3 over long periods fatigues me more and is not as much fun. It's a long term effect that no short term blind test like the ones that are run on sites like Hydrogenaudio can reveal.
That said, I think there are other aspects that have a much larger influence on the perception of music.
These are, among others:
- the look and feel of your audio equipment (including the felt value of the equipment and the music media)
- your social surroundings while listening to music
- you physical surroundings
- your overall psychological disposition (self esteem, self consciousness, attitude towards life). this changes when you're getting older.
- nostalgic feelings bound to special music
Hi my bottom seems to always be sore. I am using carrots to stimulate my anus while I masturbate. I have tried switching to parsnips but the botty is still tender. I have tried both butter and margarine as lubricant but nothing seems to help. Can anyone advise what the problem is?
I don't see how MP3s radically alters post production values. Record producers have always sought to compensate for low-fi playback systems, such as radio, by listening to the mix on small, mono speakers, as well as using bespoke studio monitors. All that has happened is MP3 has replaced small transistor radios, as the medium which dictates record sales.
For once, a first post that's RIGHT to the point. I salute you.
(For the record, I rip exclusively to FLAC (with Grip) and transcode what I need into Ogg Vorbis.)
"Good news, everyone!"
I've noticed with quite a few bands that with there early work there great. Then they sign up with some big label and there songs get produced and mastered to shit, polished and shinny shit.
Take the band Hole for example, there first album "Pretty on the inside" is very nice. It's loud and noisy and rough, produced by Kim Gordon (Sonic Youth) and Don Fleming, had one engineer and was released by Caroline Records.
There last album, "Celebrity Skin", would be the polished and shinny shit I was talking about. This album has been released by Geffen Records and produced by well quite some more people then "Pretty on the inside"... I'm quite sure this huge list of producers, engineers, mixers an masters are responsible for the horrible end result.
You can check Wikipedia on this. Next time you find a band you like has started to sound very crappy once they became more popular, you know what happened.
Dont worry, there is no difference.
:)
Losers 'think' there is a difference.
Double blind tests show otherwise.
And yes I have excellent hearing.
RTFA! The article is about how modern records dynamic range is severely compressed to make it sound good on shitty equipment such as with typical iPod ear phones or car radios. In other words: Modern records sound good in the car but crap on $1000 and up equipment (real Hi-Fi). The subtitle has "MP3" in it but it ain't about that bro!
I would suggest against participating in elitist forums like Hydrogenaudio. The regulars there have a history of posting "charade" ABX tests in order to ridicule participants. One of them, Roberto Amorim, has gone as far as suggesting that the site of a Hydrogenaudio bullied target should be defaced. People like the guy who posted the opinion (look below) ``It amazes me how many of the LP's I own still sound better than the CD versions,, would be considered trolls and they would have been kicked out of the forum.
Don't waste time with people who wasted their youth in posting thousands of messages on audio opinion -- you are not responsible of their (obvious and critical) personal issues.
OK I'm not even an audiophile and I can tell the difference between my 128 and 192kbit MP3 rips.. the hihat definitely sounds better in the 192kbps version, which makes sense as say MP3 gets a lot of its compression by cutting out bass/treble first (hihat being very treble-y :P ). Maybe that's more because I'm a drummer than an audiophile, but I definitely prefer the 192kbps rips. The 128kbps really do sound 'flatter' for a lot of songs (some simpler rocky or poppy songs sound fine at 128kbps imo, I guess because most of them dont involve any subtlety, they're all about making a big first impression). If there was no difference then we'd have no need for different file formats. There's a difference between being able to hear low volume and having pitch perfection and that kind of thing. You can have the most expensive instrument in the world and not know how to play it ;) And yeah I still dont consider myself an audiophile, but I dont agree with you (you haven't even linked to the results of your tests).
which is totally what she said
As a hobbyist electronic music composer, I would just like to point out that sometimes, compression/limiting is actually a very important tool.
Basically, people often don't realize that compression/limiting started as a handy tool for the mixing engineer.
Sometimes you need a good way of making something sound louder while increasing its harmonic content, and a limiter can do just that.
Also, when done in proper amounts, compression of the entire track can cause the recording to sound more unified.
The fact that these tools are used for destroying recordings these days is rather disturbing though. I recently got Red Hot Chili Peppers' "Stadium Arcadium" album, and I simply cannot stand listening to it because of the clipping and lack of dynamic range. It's rather sad, because the songs themselves are composed nicely, but are harmed by the doings of a producer. It all sounds lifeless and dull, simply lacking the finesse of a proper instrument recording.
...nothing couple of $400 wooden knobs couldn't fix.
But just for good measure - add some super-clean gold-plated copper cables at $1500 per foot.
That will fix it.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
You need to get some of those speaker baffles made from oxygen-free copper.
It's true I tell you, feller at work's next door neighbour read it in the paper.
It started when radio stations began compressing the sound (not the MP3 way but compressing the dynamic range). People started to feel the difference between their CD's and radio stations so sound engineers began to compress the sound on CD's. If you want to hear the difference try: http://www.polskieradio.pl/sluchaj/ and choose "Dwójka" (it's the only major radio station that I know that does not use dynamic range compression - it's clearly shown when you record it and look at the waveform) and compare it to your favorite commercial radio station.
are we arguing the finer details of an article posted by Rolling Stone? Do we really need to remind everyone how completely behind the times and part of the corporate music structure Rolling Stone has been for the last 20 years? If you really need to discover how incompetent and worthless their "journalism" is, then just read the articles.
You realize something truly analog can't be expressed digitally, right? No codec is completely lossless, so calling one "lossless" is completely arbitrary. Audio that's "lossless" is only lossless with respect to the CD, so lossless means CD quality.
What matters is "how well does this codec which takes up less space compare to this codec which takes up more space?" If you can't tell the difference then the codec which takes up less space might as well be lossless.
Most people who rattle on about lossless codecs, high quality this and that, inductance and fidelity, usually couldn't tell a well encoded 192kbit MP3 from CD quality audio. It's like any other connoisseur who wants to distinguish their own appreciation even above the level they actually experience.
I'd be very interested in a verifiable, peer reviewed, double-blind test demonstrating someone consistently distinguishing between well encoded "lossy" codecs and "lossless" codecs.
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
There are differences. If you can't hear them, I'm really sorry for you. The most obvious difference in most cases is the drums--I suggest you grab any rock band CD and compare it with an mp3 version while paying really good attention to the drums, preferably with a nice set of big, tank-like headphones if you can't notice it otherwise.
;)
I don't think I am what you would call an audiophile but I'm really really picky with what I listen to
Well, to be fair the article is specifically talking about the phenomenon known as 'finalizing', which is a way to clearly boost the
apparent levels by up to 10 dB or more during the mastering stages without any digital clipping artifacts. (a.k.a. brick-wall limiting)
There is no question that a lot of great points were raised in the article, however when it comes to MP3 (the 'other' form of compression)
as a person who has participated in recording, mixing and mastering sessions for over 30 years, and constantly listens to master recordings,
can only say that it is pathetic how bad they sound on large audio playback systems, which some of us have and listen to.
(For example pick a very large loft, or someone's home theater for 20 people, not to say anything of a proper auditorium)
You might not hear it at home, on computer speakers or certainly not your earbuds, but the bigger the stereo, the more it is obvious.
And actually what is the most disturbing is that what is very, very wrong about lossy encoding formats is that it doesn't necessarily affect so
much the frequency response, as it does the 'punch', transients and other intangibles which when played on those large-format systems become
quickly apparent. The same way a graphic designer will not try and magnify this site's jpg logo (415 x 55 pixels, I did check) to a more
adequate 16,000 x 2122 for billboard and poster printing, as there will be obvious and nasty pixelization artifacts, there are similar phenomenons
happening with audio, and they are - at best - poorly understood, and at worst dismissed as being the brainchild of crackpots with too
much time on their hands, the New-Age idealists like those who read John Diamond's "Life Energy In Music" and keep a stack of copies
of 'Absolute Sound' by the bathroom stall.
Suffice to say that the combination of both forms of compression (finalizing, plus lossy encoding) do make for a pretty formidable opponent that
already has greatly affected the public's perception of what 'sounds good' and doesn't. And it's not likely to get better.
Fear not, for those who care about listening to music in more proper manners, there are plenty of options available, from an arguably limited selection
of SACDs of some great Jazz, Classical and Pop, to fantastic vinyl playback systems, or ways to re-process those CDs that are too loud and give them
back some form of dynamic range, which will involve spending time re-mastering them with specific analog//tube//tape-machine type equipment, and is
obviously not a recommended activity for what seems to make the most of today's impatient 'click-click' listeners, the Attention-Deficit-Disorder-addled set.
As for the Hydrogen Audio bunch that keeps doing those double-blind tests and play with oscilloscope and frequency analyzers, I think they should
once try them again, but in a place that holds a couple of thousand listeners, and they may come back around to the fact that even CD-resolution
is quite atrocious to listen to, when compared to something like formats that can actually reproduce the original master recordings in a way they should,
such as DSD or 24-bit / 96 kHz encoded music. (not to say anything of a proper 1/2" open-reel master copy)
So in essence, while some of these people quoted in the article all agree that something's wrong, most of them cannot put their finger on it, as it is
something that is far more in the domain of the perceptual and psychoacoustics than an exact science.
It is mind-boggling that 25 years after the CD was introduced, most people consider progress to be size-reduction and loudness, and all attempt
at making a case for higher-fidelity have commercially failed, but again there are far larger problems looming over our heads today.
As someone who has made a living with playing recorded sounds in very large venues, I can however vouch for the fact that even if people do not exa
I do encode my mp3s using LAME at 192 kbps and even though I would not characterize the sound as sucky, I could detect a difference between the mp3s and the original (CD played on a 13 year old relatively higher end Sony CD Player). The article is on the mark, the bass and the punch of drums at the bottom end is not as strong. I do not detect differences on the high end, perhaps because of my aging ears.
It could be that the mp3s encoded in the latest version of LAME could have closed the gap but it is also likely that the difference is exacerbated by the fact that I am playing the mp3s via the laptop's headphone jack hooked up to the stereo amp. I wish someone would manufacture an mp3 player with better analog output circuitry designed not for headphone / earphone listening but for hooking up to hifi components.
And while you're at it, pick up some of those $900 wooden knobs for your stereo.
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
Well, within the frequency range of human hearing, Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem says that it is possible.
I just ripped my newest CD in different formats using Sound Juicer. First I used the standard setting, 160kbps OGG Vorbis. It sounded good, but I decided to re-rip in FLAC. After all it takes only 5 minutes to rip it, and I have lots of free HD space.
The difference was huge. Even with my poor $150 speakers I could hear the difference. The biggest difference was the bass. My subwoofer was a lot more active, and the music sounded richer.
If you're going to compare CD with mp3, compare the original wav files to the mp3 instead of comparing your mp3 player to your CD player. As it is, you have too many variables. I wouldn't be surprised if there was an audible difference between a headphone jack and a line out, simply because they have to drive very different loads.
While I wish they'd get back to the almost-progy sound and feel of the first three[two] albums, I thought Angel was a great showing. Easily the best "comeback" album I've heard.
--- Do you believe in the day?
Erh... No! Try again. Nobody talked about 128kbps. You brought that up all by yourself.
192kbps is the treshold when you can't anymore tell the difference between 192kbps
and higher bitrate compressed sound or even lossless sound.
Try to compare 192kbps MP3 and CD quality audio.
Make some blind test and you hear no difference between them.
Exactly, the CD itself it starting out with no dynamic range because that's how they're producing them now...well, a majority of them at least.
It's not like they lose the dynamic range just when converting to mp3's. Hell, even old recordings being "remastered" today are being purposely stripped of their dynamic range just to make it "louder".
Some people need to go and actually read the article.
"Leo Fender was in a 'state of grace' when he designed the Stratocaster." -- Paul Reed Smith
Well, I encode all my CDs into 320kbps (aka Studio Quality) MP3s, this is supposed to replace a lot of the stuff -- low & high -- that they talk about in this article.
I think you're just getting older!
That's bound to be true, but the main effect of getting older is to no longer be so easily led by peers and radio presenters and the telly when sampling music.
Like the article said, the 15-year old readily accepts end-to-end loudness maximized crap, whereas the older listener is more discerning. Being older is a good thing from a pro-fidelity perspective.
The problem though is that the music industry produces their crap primarily for those 15-year olds with zero musical appreciation for anything but loudness. That's what has painted us into this non-hifi corner. Blame the music industry's business direction.
Since you pretty well said everything that was on my mind, I thought I'd drop in a few ancillary comments.
I practically cringe every time one of these 'audiophile' flamebait / troll articles appears on /. .. This is one of those subjects with which /. has become a parody of itself. You know the up-modded posts about expensive wooden knobs and fancy cables are just a few lines down the page amidst a Slashgasm of smug, self-congratulatory back-patting by users all to quick to dismiss the finer, more subtle qualities of proper audio reproduction.
Again, this is one of those areas where the /. system of on-the-fly peer review is almost guaranteed to provide sharp negative bias, much of it just repeated from similarly uninformed discussions past. Unfortunately, it's just no longer geek-chic to be all about your music system - and I have no idea when or particularly why it went out of style. Before the proliferation of computer hardware, geeks used to build their own HAM radios and stereos.. a fact apparently lost to the 'objectivist' historical revision of the NeoGeek crowd and /. in particular. Sorry kids, your loss!
Hey guys, guess what? I have an incredibly flippin' wicked stereo here at home - and I built every last piece of analog electronics in the chain, as well as the phonograph and CD transport. It was a great deal of fun to build, taught me a hell of a lot about what does and doesn't work for audio and continues to reward me (and my friends) every time I sit down to listen. And as a plus, I can personally hear (or demonstrate for that matter) just what kind of garbage you're left with when you resort to crappy digital compression methods, recording methods and playback hardware.
So when these articles come up, I normally just sit back and watch the ignorance snowball.. hoping that a few wise comments might get modded up - or modding them myself, if I happen to have points that day. But as the saying goes "you don't know what you're missing"..
Now what was I saying again? Oh hell, just get off my lawn already!
There's a Starman, waiting in the sky / He'd like to come and meet us, but he hasn't got the time.
I wonder if they are going to employ the same compression thingy on TV commercial video signal. i.e. making the stuff brighter than normal. The same might apply on Internet AD too, it will be interested to see how it affect (good or bad?) the end results.
If you intend to mod the above, please have a look at this:
http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/lofiversion/index.php/t13193.html
and this:
http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/lofiversion/index.php/t132.html
See how these people are trying to manipulate Slashdot moderation just to regurgirate their spam.
Another scare tactic article by the music industry and others who make money from it.
With respect to hifi equipment (because you can't hear the stuff they're doing on portables):
For roll off (loss of highs and lows) there's the loudness control and/or equalizers.
This is necessary because the auditory system has roll off at low volume.
For volume, there's a volume control.
Obvious.
For dynamic compression there's dynamic range expanders.
An extra piece of equipment, not cheap but not overly costly. But it has the benefit of pushing background noise like tape hiss below the threshold of hearing. DBX noise reduction is based on this. With a little fiddling you can run your line out through a tape deck that has DBX set to "monitor" and get the same reults (at a set level). Pushing the quieter parts to a greater volume causes overall volume increase. This is the gist of TFA. Almost all audio broadcasts and netcasts are compressed, regardless of the original recording. Some psychoacoustic stereo enhancement techniques also do this. And some portables *do* have this. I expect all these are still available, and probably with improvements since then.
That's speaking from experience selling the stuff, and doing live and studio recording, from almost 30 years ago, as well as radio production and broadcast experience from 10 years ago.
For shitty results from recording engineers' wanking, there's don't buy the shit.
So what's Mobile Fidelity Sound Labs and the like selling now? Simply recordings that haven't been fucked with?
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
I have noticed some mp3's just don't sound all that great. How does one test for range?
RM
When I was a kid a neighbour knew I liked higher quality music playback. He happened to have a cheap Rotel based HI-FI setup. The amp was 27 watts which surprised me as I had assumed more was better, but it seemed plenty loud enough. He put "Momentary Lapse of Reason" (Pink Floyd) on his turntable (a quality record player) and I very nearly had a religious experience.
Since then I've realised that most people have no idea what true Hi-Fi is, and have expensive junk instead. If they heard the real thing they wouldn't bother even with CDs.
Neve and Universal Audio mastering consoles can come with an iPod emulator headphone socket. They basically have the same DtoA and preamps as iPods.
Mastering of music always follows market demands. Pre 70's was tine 3 inch or 6 inch paper cones, 80's was ghetto blasters, 90's was tape/minidisc, today it is MP3 players.
I guess they are quite as "dancable" any more - but one thing is for sure - my cables are atleast three times as "finger snapable" as your disgusting Best Buy Monster Cables.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
the Tape Project - http://www.tapeproject.com/
Two questions for you:
What microphone has a S/N ratio of 146+ dB (needed to achieve your 24 bit resolution according to S/N ~ 6.02*bit resolution+1.761)?
Where can I download 1000 songs for $1?
I've billed myself as an audiophile for many years, and I'm glad to hear that there are some folks around here that share the interest. I also have the benefit of being a computer enthusiast for the last 15 years. Interestingly enough, I just completed my latest set of speakers last night using parts that I asked for for Christmas from my SO ;). Anyway, onto the statement that I came here to make.
/rant
Mp3's generally sound bad. Well, rather than make a broad sweeping claim, I'd more say they have an "mp3 sound" about them. Dynamics are limited (by dynamic range compression, NOT file compression) frequency response is sometimes questionable, although at higher bit-rates is acceptable (320 kbps, and not that sliding crap either, I don't want software telling me what part of the song is important enough to hear properly.) and, as a result, imaging, depth and general palpability are mostly compromised, and I'm sure anyone who has listened to an MP3 on a decent system notices the digital noise in the upper midrange (younguns will call upper midrange "the highs" because they don't know what anything over 8500 hz sounds like).
All that said, I do have a rather extensive collection of MP3's, which I listen to casually. Sometimes I have a lack of sanity, and I flip my D/A converter in the living room over to the toslink cable coming from my PC in the bedroom and listen to an MP3 on my main audio system, the result of which is as un-moving as FM radio.
Those of you who continue to insist that audiophiles hear things that don't exist and MP3's sound just fine, and it's impossible to tell...blah blah blah... to my ears, it sounds like someone saying "Driving a Ferrari Enzo couldn't be that much fun, I mean, it's just a car.." You'll never know how much fun 600 HP pinning you into the seat can be until you experience it. Sadly, we are in a generation of younger people now who have probably never heard a truly decent audio system, so these arguments will continue to fall on deaf ears. Pun very much intended.
Chesky Records "Ultimate Demonstration Disc" is available from the ITMS. Go on, buy it, stick it on your iPod, get a Y cable. Then, buy the real disk from Chesky. Take both of these down to a real audio shop with you (you know, one that deals Krell, Mark Levinson (not that plastic shit in Lexus cars either) Wilson Audio, Classe, Boulder, Bryston.. you know, where the crazy audiophiles shop.. and do a little comparative listen. Hell you can even cheat and add a little quality (or subtract a little fail, depends on how you look at it.) to your iPod first from here.
If you can't hear the difference, I'm sure you'll at least get a chuckle out of the shopkeep.
Windows has more viruses because linux has more virus coders.
Of course it doesn't show any difference. That's because most people do not listen to music any more; it's just noise in the background that they are used to having. No matter how loud the producers make the music, nobody will notice their songs. Face it, music has become a part of the ambient environment, and actually listening to it is the very process that is dying. Hence the death of the HiFi.
go get/build a headphone amp - the bottom end (say a CMOY) won't cost you much, and drasticlly improves the sound of most sound cards and MP3 players - the amp built into your computer really can't drive much of a load. It's not what the designers of your laptop were really worrying about
-- 73 de KG2V For the Children - RKBA! "You are what you do when it counts" - the Masso
Amen. I did a back-to-back test years ago (on a 266MHz P2 to give you an idea of how long ago). I listened to same section of the same track as the CD-quality WAV rip and as a high quality MP3. Even on crap speakers you could immediately tell the difference between the two. The most obvious difference was that the MP3's missed some of the background ambiance.
Its a tradeoff.
However, its too bad to hear that they are now modifying the actual source too. At least before you had a choice between quality and convenience. ( LP or CD or MP3 )
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Translation of parent:
In tests, MP3s made with LAME at the default settings are usually very hard to distinguish from the original. The test is to play the original (A), then the MP3 (B) and then a random choice of the original or the MP3 (X). The listener then has to guess if X was the original or the MP3. This is repeated several times until the results are statistically valid. In most cased people, even audiophiles with high end equipment, cannot accurately determine which one X is.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
During the Japanese electronics invasion in the 80's I first noticed a radical decline in warm-sounding tones in music everywhere...I figured out what was happening, it seemed most amps/speakers made in Japan had a very unnatural sound response profile to western ears. In comparison, they are very sharp, sort of high and tinny, with hardly any warm tonal response at all.
Apprently it is a fact that Japanese use the other side of their brain to hear music than western cultures. Perhaps that accounts for why they like harsh-sounding speakers.
Unfortunately it also seems western standards of what is good-sounding has changed to fit the proliferation of Japanese electronics, rather than the electronics being tailored for western ears. Just go find and listen to an old American or European-made stereo (say from the 1960's or 70's.. mostly pre Jap influence) It will blow your mind.
This is a surprise? You compress something, you lose something. period. End of discussion. I've seen this trend coming for years, and have used it as a basis for arguing against downloadable music. I don't give a hoot about the RIAA's whining about lost $, they've deserved a good shafting for a few decades now, what I object to is that the real damage being done by downloadable music forms such as mp3's is that they are going to make it damn near impossible to actually go out & buy a CD and get the better quality sound. Sad to see that the actual mixing of the source material is catering to garbage as well. Even the CD's that you do buy are going to sound like crap. I guess the only saving grace to all this is 99.8564% of what's being sold as music these days isn't, not by a long shot, and that most of the good stuff that I listen to was mastered way before all this nonsense started. And yes, I am an old fart. I have a working turntable that gets used on a regular basis, and listen to mostly older stuff. I do listen at home on a decent system, and yes, I can easily hear the difference between a CD or a record of a classic from the 70's and an MP3 of the same song.
I just laugh at the LP's were better crowd when reading how guys like Phil Ramone were compressing the hell out music to FIT IT IN THE LP's LIMITS back then. When CD's came out he (producer of Sinatra, Streisand. Simon, Billy Joel, Ray Charles, etc etc) couldn't believe how much better the digital format was. Didn't have to compensate for needle momentum on inside tracks any more, true dynamic range and so on. Read about it in his "Making Records" book. The sound was different for LP's and we could if we want reproduce that digitally, but we don't.
I tried strumming a power chord once but every time I pulled it tight enough, it just pulled out of the wall socket.
But I don't think that accounts for half of /. trashing MP3s.
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
RIAA sues producers for making music nicer for pirates.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
Two Words: Joint Stereo
As a default, it's the worst possible choice.
Technology -- No Place For Wimps! Grateful Dead and Jerry Garcia Chatroom -- http://www.wemissjerry.org
Why bother with 24-bit? Unless you're listening to classical your recording probably uses less than the top eight bits anyway.
Listen:
On a pair of consumer-grade headphones or consumer stereo, I dare any pair of human ears to tell the difference between playing a CD through iTunes and listening to a 192kbps VBR MP3 or 128kbps VBR AAC through iTunes. On a pair of studio monitors, some folks probably can.
The fact of the matter is that the problem is not the medium. Does lossy encoding affect the sonics of digital music? Yes, by definition it does, but if encoded with a decent encoder at a decent bit rate, the changes are practically imperceptable, and frankly not particularly unpleasant. It may bring up the level of the lower bit or two of the 16-bit dynamic range of CD audio, but on most consumer gear you won't even notice, and if you set your bit-rate to something better than the default and turn on VBR, it's a non-issue.
Now, compare the *extremely* slight sonic effects of even the default lossy compression in most ripping software to what the record labels have been *forcing* engineers to do to their works over the last 10-15 years. The waveform images in the article are not BS. This is not rocket science nor is it 'audiophile juju magic'; when a song looks like a flat blob of audio, it sounds like a flat blob of audio, and there is very little that can be done by the consumer to recover it once it's been sonically destroyed by order of a record-label higher-up.
Where the article (or the sources used in the article) falls flat on it's face is in stating that all this post-production compression has been applied to 'compensate' for a 'perceived lack of volume or dynamic range' in iPods or music encoded using lossy compression.
I'm sorry, but that's bullshit. Apple is potentially litigious enough to draft a legal love note based on such statements. It sounds to me like the folks in the recording industry have a chip on their shoulder as a result of Apple's tactics in securing music for the iTunes store, and are suddenly willing to write off the sonic butchering of recorded works over the last decade as Apple's fault for making portable compressed digital music the de-facto medium of choice for consumers. I'm not one to stand up and defend Apple at every turn, but in this particular case it's absolutely clear-cut.
Pro Tools makes artists sound 'unnaturally perfect'? Equally as libelous and without merit. To name just a few whose albums I own, Geddy Lee and Art Neville have both recorded, produced, and released albums that were done start-to-finish in Pro Tools, and they sound great because no corporate rock production was involved.
Regardless of the reason, the 'loudness war' is real. There's nothing wrong with a certain degree of 'loudness', but the finished product must be 99% free of clipped transients and be loud where the music is loud and quiet where the music is quiet. The crash cymbal must be louder than the 'background' drum track, the bass' finger-popping must stand out, etc. A compromise can certainly be reached where music is 'loud' enough to satisfy both the label and people that actually care what the disc sounds like.
It's time to call a spade a spade. If music sounds like shit in the studio after post-prod compression, it will sound like shit on any playback device, regardless of the medium (including analog vinyl!). If computer-based digital audio workstations, lossy compression, and iPods sound so bad, then what exactly the hell should we be using to record, mix, master, and distribute music in 2008, Mr. Record Man? Ah, I seem to have forgotten: in order to sound good music must only come from from major labels' studios, sold on CD, and listened to on CD players...
I have encoded much of my classical music collection that way. I listen to it at work at low volume on a portable player, so that is probably overkill.
yeah, but encoding a 44.1/16bit into 192/24 is a bit like squeezing blood from a stone.
"If for any reason you're not satisfied with our service, I hate you."
They have been screwing up mixes since the early nineties way before mp3s were prevalent. Fidelity was a thing of the past way back in the past. Mixing engineers first compensated for everyone's crappy speakers and little tinny headphones. Then they started doing it for mobiles and mp3s. This is all at the hands of some moronic producer who doesn't understand quality. Compare anything mixed after 1990 with "Dark Side of the Moon". Nothing stacks up. Case in point. Norah Jones. Her first album was mixed very well. Her second album was mixed by someone with no concept of fidelity. And, yes, I have the system to fully enjoy it. My headphones alone can handle more of the spectrum than the human ears can.
Producers don't care about the music or quality or fidelity anymore. It's all about the dollar. "What can I sell to people?" This is part of the reason why I don't buy music anymore. The last two CDs I bought were both Paul McCartney albums. (Though "memory almost full" is pretty crappy.) I occasionally buy singles from itunes but that's it.
I like to think that my music is mixed well.
They're using their grammar skills there.
Cyclo, have a look at the Squeezebox. High end D/A converter & wireless connection to your PC. Interface is not the greatest but otherwise a great piece of equipment.
Guess what? Something "truly" analog can't be expressed with analog either.
I see the day when certain bands release the same song in multiple quality levels.
You get the "everyday" version that sounds good on computer speakers, earbuds, or cheap car stereo.
You get the "home theater" version that sounds as good as possible on high-end earphones, home theater equipment, or high-end car audio.
You get the "studio" version that gives you the "you were there in the studio" feel assuming you have the right playback equipment.
They would be priced accordingly.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I mean how much fidelity do you need to listen to Lil Wayne? Niggaz bitches hos mo money mo problem guns and niggaz an rock and bitches fuck mah bitches nigga nigga what?
It doesn't really matter if FLAC does a nice job when the record companies themselves lower the standard of the original audio recording to suit the listening environment of the lowest common denominator.
Encode "Dani California" from Red Hot Chilli peppers with FLAC, and FLAC will maintain the original fidelity of the track guaranteed no argument from me. With MP3's I use the additional LAME command line "-V0 --vbr-new -m s -c -b 224 --lowpass 22" for my CD encoding, but really, it probably would not matter if I encode "Dani California" at 128kbps. The original recording is so compressed that virtually no one would notice or care. The problem is the original source track doesn't have audio fidelity in the first place - the point of the article. And more recording are lately being produced this way.
This Rolling Stone article is not exposing anything new about studio compressed recordings. Audiophile and stereo magazines were raising the concern regarding compression, and downgrading alterations made many years before MP3 encoding became a mainstream phenomenon.
Most live performances I've been to recently crank the sound up way too much. At these levels your ears just don't work as well. Proof: put your hands over your ears to reduce the sound volume. Suddenly the music and singer's words are clearer and better sounding. I don't know if the folks running the mixer have damaged hearing or what. I hesitate to think what it must sound like to the folks seating near the speakers. Once and awhile you go to a small club where the sound is done right and realize it doesn't have to be this way. This summer went to a Dave Matthews's concert at the Columbia River Gorge. A wonderful outdoor venue. Even a long way from the stage it sounded better with my hands gentlely placed over my ears.
I don't know how many people do the same thing as me, but I keep my entire music collection FLAC encoded. Not, however, because of sound quality, since lossless codecs sounds virtually the same as a good lossy one encoded at a high enough bitrate.
I do it to future proof my collection. At some point down the line everyone will move away from lossy codec X to lossy codec X2 which will provide higher compression (as in file size). Some time later lossy codec Y will be introduced which will offer further benefits over codec X2, and so on... Most DAP's will also adopt these codecs and possibly drop support for some of the earlier ones.
If someone had their music on X they would then have to re-encode their entire collection over the years like so: X -> X2 -> Y
By this point, after 3 re-encodes with lossy codecs from the original source (say, a CD) you *will* notice the difference. And at some point you'll have to re-rip your entire collection again. And when you have 10.000 tracks this can become a daunting task.
Or, you can avoid all this and just keep the collection on a lossless format, which can then be converted to any other lossy or lossless codec with a simple script or with programs such as transkode. I've been through the experience of ripping hundreds of CDs, I'm not in a hurry to do it again if I want to take advantage of newer codecs.
So for me, FLAC and other lossless codecs aren't about sound quality, they're about flexibility.
Come on guys, this is the 21st century, embrace the digital age. Quit choosing to only serve part of the customers. Figure out a way to make all the customer's happy all the time.
With the current CD format, one should be able to scrounge enough bits so that a musician doesn't have to choose between sounding good in a car and on the web versus sounding good in an audiophile's listening room.
Playback equipment should be able to play it back either eay.
To make the choice unnecessary, record it uncompressed, but steal a few annotation bits to indicate how to play it back compressed. Playback on a normal CD player would be uncomressed with a bit of extra noise from the annotations, but software players could quickly make use of the compression hints. Eventually CD players could have a button to make 15 year olds happy. If the annotations also provided for expansion, even the audiophiles might be happy. (They would get back the dynamic range lost in the transition from LP to CD.)
Having to hear these same arguments about overcompression, mp3s, and vinyl too many times.
? syntax error
I was mainly talking about people who encode their MP3s at 256, 384kbps and other stupid bitrates.
Yes if you know precicely what your listening for, and have two samples at 128 and 196 bitrates, of certain types of music then you'll hear a minor difference.
The differences decrease exponentially with bitrates and for all intents and purposes, 128 is perfect for casual listening by your average joe.
"typical iPod ear phones" are better than 99% of loudspeaker systems ever made.
Personally, I use a 80GB iPod with a pair of old Sony MDR-D77 'phones. I use Apple Lossless to compress my CDs and, overall, it's the most satisfying Walkman I've ever had. I do have the odd MP3 in my collection, and I can nearly always spot 'em immediately.
Honestly, you can 160GB DAPs now, it won't be long before you can realistically store your entire collection as Apple Lossless or FLAC.
Do it for your ears.
That was classic intercourse!
On my next CD, I'm going to put a big disclaimer on the back or something. Maybe like "Caution - This CD was mastered to sound good as opposed to sound loud like all the other crap on the market. If you want it louder, turn up your stereo/iPod."
Music - www.richardmac.com
The best answer so far is probably The Transporter. The squeezebox also has quite a nice sound to it, while being a tad cheaper.
You could also go the route of using an external D/A-converter.
mats
One man's ceiling is another man's floor.
FLAC won't help in the least. The source material from CD is *massively* compressed to the point where anything you play is just a flat jangling noise.
Until record companies ease up on the dynamic compression a bit, you might as well use GSM to encode stuff. It's going to sound shite no matter what you do.
n/t
That's not how bit depth is used in audio recording/playback.
Bits in audio are all about dynamic range.. you still need all the bits for loud music as well as quiet music.
16 bits gives you 96 dB, and 24 bits gives you 144 dB. This is why 16bit is "good enough" for most music, but recording is almost always done at 24 bits to allow for more accuracy of level adjustments and mixing. Then down-mixed to 16 bits.
The Squeezebox outputs analog using Burr-Brown DACs. It's not, of course, an ipod-type MP3 player, but rather an audio system component, so you might like it.
Are you sure? I'm not talking about RECORDING or MASTERING, I'm talking about playback. Try this thought experiment. You've got a CD. On that CD is a bunch of 16-bit numbers representing the music. So, I put the CD in my CD player, or computer, and hit play. So by your assertion loud music uses all 16-bits, as does soft music. So, if I don't touch the volume knob, how does my CD player know to play track 1 (Teeth Gnashing Rage) loud, and track 2 (Music to Spoon By) at different volumes? Better yet, how does it know that Teeth Gnashing Rage has a quiet section in the middle?
Alternatively, if the volume of the music is boosted in mastering so that it's loud, how come extra loud bits (like a drum hit) clip (that is, exceed the ability of the CD to represent)?
No, that was not my assertion. My assertion is that you still need the lower bits for ALL music. Having more bits doesn't increase the maximum volume, it increases the fidelity of the recording. If CDs were 24bit, the dynamic range compression tricks that mastering people use to make really really loud CDs wouldn't have to hurt the quality of the music so much.
The mastering process uses dynamic range compression and software to do soft clipping of extra loud bits.
Take the vinyl and coat it with a transparent coating, like a shellac or urethane varnish. Take several readings at different angles to get rid of the surface noise.
:o
For bonus points, record a parallel track that contains error correction information. Hmm, I don't think I've ever heard of an analog error correction method other than averaging.
Here's an idea, record 3 analog tracks side by side offset 130 degrees from each other. Each of the three is then compared against the other two, if there is a significant difference in one of them then it throws away that one and averages the other two. If the difference is slight, then it just averages all three.
Does anyone know of an analog FEC algorithm?
If you thought laser turntables were expensive, wait till they come out with NMR turntables
They ARE out to get you simply because They are in it for themselves and they don't care about you.
Ah. So if you go back to my original post, my question was why you want more bits when most modern music doesn't use most of the ones already there. I might like 24 bits for classical, but it's pretty much useless for any pop or rock made in the last decade.
Who cares if an MP3 encoder drops a tiny amount of imperceptible data when the CD itself has been compressed and clipped to the point that you don't want to listen to it?
The confusion comes from the word compression. It can mean
a) loudness wars: an editing technique where a track's quiet parts are amplified to bring the whole thing closer to maximum level. It's called "compression" because the envelope of the signal is being squished against the limits of the medium to give it a louder sound.
or
b) lossy codec, mp3 etc: using a psychoacoustic model to reduce the data rate of a signal by representing only the most audible material. In contrast to (a), the whole point of a lossy codec is to NOT change the way a track sounds, while expressing it as accurately as possible using fewer bits. It's called compression because you are squeezing it down to a lower bit rate.
The problem is that people are always confusing the two and it is never clear which is being referred to without a lot of context. We should stop using the word to describe the loudness wars, and just call it loudness wars.
Stadium Arcadium was produced by Rick Rubin. What you describe is actually his ' style' I guess :).
He's been doing it for a while too :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rick_Rubin#List_of_albums_produced
But yeah, it's disturbing to hear how good some old Motown sh*t sounded with the limited equipment they had, and now, with all our superduper digital systems, things just sound thin, dull, compressed and tiring. Most of the time they just put in too much stuff , I mean how many gated reverbs and exciters can you handle ?
The Bigger The Headache The Bigger the Pill
I've seen the graphs, I'd like to hear the difference. Any demo pages setup out there?
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Highly compressed music is making "the most" of the bits that are there. They pack a LOT more into the bit space provided by the format.
The big thing that I'm hoping kills off some of the loudness wars is the "replay gain" feature that most good flac/mp3 players can use. This will mute the extra-loud albums slightly, and bump the quiet ones slightly reducing the ability for the industry to game the format.
http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=Replaygain
..it's disturbing to hear how good some old Motown sh*t sounded with the limited equipment they had I recently read engineer Geoff Emerick's account of the time he spent working at EMI Abbey Road with The Beatles, "Here, There, and Everywhere". There's an interesting anecdote about The Beatles wanting their albums as loud as those Motown albums. The loudness war is nothing new, I guess....PLENTY of low end.
Enough to move your pants legs when you stand close.
It all depends on the guitar amp and playing technique.
>>check out its spectrum; there's not much low end at all
Where did you get the guitar spectrum from? A poorly-recorded song? That's the point.
If you really want to be 100% fair, rip the original CD to WAV (or FLAC), then reburn it. Then encode those WAVs (or FLACs) as MP3s, then decode them again, and burn that.
You can now play both on the same relatively high-end CD player. (Or you could try playing both from a laptop, if you like, but I'll bet the CD player is better.)
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Except that isn't true. The bitrate at which a song sounds identical to a listener to an uncompressed file is based upon the complexity of the music as well as the type. A 192kbps file might sound amazing when compared against a loud CD, but sound like crap when compared with an intricate symphony recorded and reproduced in 24bit sound.
For most modern music 192kbps is good enough, especially if one is going to go outside and listen to it on the bus, or while waiting for a flight in a noisy airport. Chances are it is even more than you can realistically pick out in that situation.
The other thing is that depending upon a person's own hearing characteristics, you might very well be able to throw far more of the information out before he notices that there's anything missing.
Yes, "iPod earphones" was just the parrot speaking. Earphones give a lot of bang for the buck (the car is a valid argument though).
:-)
The article however was not about MP3 compression but rather dynamic range compression used when mastering CDs
After reading the article in Rolling Stone (several weeks ago) I came to realize that the quoted music producers didn't know the difference between the two audio definitions of word 'compression'. They were using the two different meanings interchangeably to make arguments that reflected their financial positions in the music industry rather than make sense to the music consuming public.
...And they are supposed to be professionals!
Audio compression means to reduce the amount of difference between the loudest and softest sounds of an audio recording or signal. This is what a guitar stompbox pedal like the MXR Dyna-comp does or what the NE571 Compandor IC does.
File compression is to transform the time-domain voltage samples of a digital audio recording, convert them in frequency domain, and discard data below a certain threshold.
Compression means to make smaller. Audio compression reduces volume range and file compression reduces file data size. But they are completely different concepts.
Both types of compression are done on audio recordings by the music industry. Both affect the resultant product.
But they are completely different processes that affect the music in completely different ways. And many of the music professionals quoted in the article couldn't tell or honestly didn't know the difference.
Well, it's using the most of the few selected bits it's decided to use. When your audience is willing to forgive such huge distortions as clipping I suspect they're not really going to benefit much from decreasing the size of the quantization steps. If they were, then a better solution, as opposed to adding bits, would be to add a preamble to flip the interpretation of your existing bits over into "loud" mode. File sizes don't grow, you don't need faster DACs and the rock heads get to hear their clipping with greater fidelity.
I don't know if that will do it (do most people encode their own mp3s?). It would be nice if the music industry would just recognize that the volume knob is under MY control, not theirs. Once we get THAT sorted, then maybe we can start talking about giving them more bits to play with.
That is one of the funniest slashdot meta-jokes I've heard in a while. Bonus points for burying it in a thread about how MP3s suck.
A few years ago I set up an incredible sound system with a diy subwoofer I built, and was very disappointed with the quality of music played through it as mp3 when compared with CD. Even the insane 320kbps lame preset, the low end just didn't sound quite right. It was garbage, actually.
I assumed that I could clearly tell the difference between mp3 (on cd) and the original cds, it wasn't even a question. The effect was so noticeable that everyone who listened could tell a difference.
I was disappointed, but eventually I had the idea to take the same mp3s, and decode them back to pcm and burn CDs from them on my pc, and play these CDs through the system. They sounded wonderful.
So the perceived difference between mp3 and pcm wasn't due to mp3 itself, but the low quality mp3 decoding hardware built into my cd player. I think this is worth mentioning as something to rule out of any testing. mp3 may be excellent, but not all decoders are as good as the latest software player on our pcs. Some are cheap 30 cent chips that do not represent the same amount of audiophile grade sound effort that some software devs put in. Now, I just stream music from a pc as a jukebox via spdif. Older albums are 320 mp3, newer ones flac (Because disk space is too cheap to care now.)
16 bits is enough dynamic range for playback, though. The CD format wasn't chosen at random: it exceeds the fidelity of the human ear. The scientists and engineers who delevoped the CD format weren't settling for "good enough". Those who say different are selling something (usually extremely overpriced audiophile gear).
For mastering and mixing of course you need more bits, so that you preserve 16 data-ful bits at the end of the process.
24 bit CDs would do *nothing* to preserve sound quality *after* dynamic range compression. The data has already been lost, adding more 0s doesn't get you anything.
More bits on the master recording might help, but that has nothing to do with the CD format, and everything to do with the mastering process.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
It's no secret any more that radio stations alter the sound of the records that they play. I listen to 'classic' rock a lot from the 1970's and pop from the 1960's. Before the songs came out on CD (and before I could find the CD's of classic rock in the public library as I don't buy RIAA product anymore), I would record long sessions of FM-radio broadcasts on 6-hour VCR tapes. When I found a song that I liked and wasn't in my collection, I would copy it onto a mix cassette audio tape. This was before MP3 and CD ripping appeared in the late 1990s.
When I started ripping the same songs from CDs, I noticed that they all sounded flat or simply different. I encoded several of the FM recordings to WAV files using GOLDWAVE and other audio programs and looked at the resulting waveforms of the CD and the FM broadcast. The FM always had less difference between the loudest and softest passages of the same song. Then when Slashdot appeared and this topic became occasionally discussed, several people described how FM stations routinely compressed the signal to make the music sound more 'alive' on the air and to overcome some FM frequency range limitations.
Personally, I like the FM compression. It adds a different mood to the song. I keep the old FM compressed recordings and will play them instead of the CD MP3 256KBPS recordings when I'm in the mood for a 'hotter' and more low-fidelity recording.
I don't listen to new music very much. My only source of new music is the FM radio and very little new music seems worth the hassle of listening to. Add all the commercials and promos and FM has become a dead medium for me. Hip-hop tracks are interesting until the singer-rapper-DJ-loudmouth-poet-nigga-whatever starts, then it becomes unbearable. Since the whole point of hip-hop is the singer-rapper-DJ-loudmouth-poet-nigga-whatever, I don't listen to it much. But the hip-hop basic groove audio tracks are exciting.
This is unfortunately a problem that is far, far bigger than the limited space we have to discuss it here.
It starts at the dawn of the MTV age, when record labels mounted a very successful propaganda campaign to make everyone feel bad if they didn't own a compact disc
of their favorite music, claiming that it was infinitely superior to anything ever made, up to that point. The only ones who didn't buy into this plan were those who were
rather underwhelmed with these outlandish claims from the marketing departments, due to their own empirical yet very practical experience, and who kept vinyl
pressing plants in business well into the 2000's when they were slated to die years before: the DJ's that played daily in large clubs for thousands of people.
It is a well-know fact among that crowd that true analog media 'sounds' and FEELS far better, for reasons that (again) oscilloscopes and spectrum analyzers can't
quite quantify, but that boil down to the fact that digital media chops everything down into time-delimited segments, which introduces a series of stairsteps in
the waveforms (the slices) of audio it reproduces, and in very large acoustic spaces the human ear is incredibly sensitive to this, especially and most noticeably
in the high frequencies, (the screechy nails on the chalkboard effect), again in a way that is difficult to necessarily measure due to our very poor understanding
of psychoacoustics, and the perceptual and three-dimensional audio reproduction which our ear is capable of accomplishing.
The 'finalizing effect' of over-compressing only helps to contribute further to a poor reproduction of the dynamic range that was supposed to be on the original
master, in favor of the immediacy of the loudness that becomes apparent if you refuse to do it, as everyone else's CD appears to sound far louder than yours.
The compounded effect of these factors end up making something that doesn't quite seem to have the same excitement and immediacy it had in a format such as
analog, perhaps less pristine, with more distortion and other inherent artifacts, but which are not as subjectively 'bad' and tiresome to listen to over long periods
of time, again the larger the space, the more you will hear it.
What I am saying is that (forgetting MP3 for a second) we have all become victims of a great swindle, that successfully managed to make everyone believe that these
new formats were better. They are certainly better for certain things like separation, measured frequency response, linearity, lack of wow and flutter, and other well-known
characterisctics of digital audio, but what the CD was should have been a mere starting point, and just as digital cameras yearly keep pushing the megapixel count to a point
where it is slowly getting close to the resolution of film, audio should have abandoned formats like the CD (which was all we could manage technically around 1980, when
the Red Book Audio format was ratified) with progressively higher-resolution ones as technology improved and processing and storage afforded us the ability to increase
its quality.
So again, never mind MP3, the problem (in my eyes, at least) is that we are still using 25-year old obsolete technology as a 'Gold Standard', which robs the listeners
of a great deal more than most people realize until the actually - for once in their life - get to listen to an actual open-reel master tape, and compare. Obviously, SACD
and DV-Audio were at leat positive steps in the right direction, but in SACD's case, Sony's iron-clap grip over the über-proprietary DSD format has
made it all but impractical to use in everyday music production situations, and it now appears 'Betamaxed', doomed for lack of support.
Forgetting the convenience and portability factor compressed lossy formats have made possible, for the audio professionals they are the equivalent of Mike J
You brought up threads from 4 years and 6 years ago (2003 and 2001)? One guy offered to use mod points, and one guy asked for some mod points. I'd say the cabal is exposed, thanks for your tireless work!
Slay a dragon... over lunch!
Thanks for your message and taking the time to write and post it. One of the great things about Slashdot is that it provides a forum for professionals who know what they are talking about on a subject. It may be only one of a thousand messages posted to Slashdot, but it is reason that thousands of professionals in other specialized fields continue to read this site.
Your time, effort, expertise, experience, and input is appreciated here.
What's this "drums" thing you talk about? You mean those muffled thuds that one can barely hear behind the wall of shrieking guitars and distorted voices?
Goddamned loudness war is killing rock...
Circumcision is child abuse.
http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/lofiversion/index.php/t56797.html
It seems that Slashdot serves them right when they spam, but for some reason they hold a grudge against it. BTW, does that forum have any rules against flaming? My own parent post has been modded as a flamebait by many moderators and I can feel their reasoning. It does border with flamebait.
But has anyone warned all those H.A. jerks against flaming another forum? It seems that as long you guys keep your bullying aimed at the designated targets nobody is going to moderate you, in Hydrogen Audio.
So burn the original wav to CD as track 1, an uncompress the MP3 to wav, and add it to the CD as track 2. This is how I decided Ogg -q6 was CD quality to my ears - by putting the original song, and the Ogg alongside it, and listening to it.
And, after deciding it was good to my ears on my system(which is far from low-end), I then went and did the same on my fathers. The outcome of my testing still stood - despite being played back through a well regarded and very nice Naim CD5, BBC studio monitors, etc, etc.
I have an iPod, one of the most popular portable players, and it plays FLAC just fine. I only have 24 GB taken up on it, with 74 CD albums/singles/collections (890 FLAC) in addition to randomly downloaded songs (293 OGG, 946 MP3).
And for the truck I rarely drive (9 years old), it has a line in on its deck, as does my father's car.
YEah, I guess so :)
I once read that the reason that you can hear all instruments seperately so clearly on those old Motown records is that they creatively used parametric EQ.
Making a 'dip' in the bass and a corresponding 'bump' in the bassdrum allowing you to clearly distinguish between the two.
Not sure if that's true, just what I read. Still sounds good to me though, and a ' permissable' way of beefing things up....
The Bigger The Headache The Bigger the Pill
Imagine if this were 10 years ago and you had the choice of a "regular" CD with 70 minutes of music or a "studio" CD with 10 minutes of very hi-fi music, which would you choose?
For some applications of course you would go studio. For the car and the walkman I'd go with the 70-minutes/disc version so I wouldn't have to keep changing CDs.
If my hearing wasn't all that good and the low- or mid-quality versions sounded just as good as the best version, then I have no need for the best version at all.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I had a similar experience a few years back. I decided to finally sit down and rip my wife and I's entire music collection. I encoded a clip of music in LAME MP3, Blade Encoder(MP3), Muse Pack, and Ogg formats. I used a bitrate of around 200kpbs in all of the samples, and made sure not to use Joint Stereo.
I then compared how each of the compressed samples sounded compared to the original wav clip. Both the LAME Mp3 clip and the MPC clip sounded different from the original; not distorted, as with lower bitrates but as if someone had run an EQ filter on them. The Blade MP3 sounded pretty damn close to the original and the Ogg sample sounded identical the original.
It's possible that some setting I used, or the decoders involved were the cuplrits, but ogg due to it's ability to accurate reproduce sound and it's freeness won out.
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
MP3 encoding algorithms have come a long way in the past 10 or so years since your P2 was a current machine. Try the tests again, using LAME to make a -V0 rip, and compare that to the original WAV. I've got a moderately expensive sound system (Rotel and VAF), and LAME V0 rips sound as good as the original CDDA source material to me. MP3 can't reproduce the HDCD information on some albums, as this relies on twiddling the lowest bit to add extra decoding information, but other than that V0 mp3 to me sounds the same as redbook CDDA.
Specialist Mac support for creative pros, Melbourne
The best way is to compare lame encoded mp3 with lossless format on the same machine.
for example mp3 CD and audio CD on the same CD Player on the same amp and speaker.
-- Hasbullah bin Pit (sebol)
Sony stuff tends to focus on the top and bottom ranges and forgets about the middle. That's probably why your old CD player sounds better than your mp3 on your computer. In order to really claim that you can tell a difference you need to use the same device from the player all the way to the head phones.
In my own tests I have found that every thing can alter the sound from the decoder algorithm to the sound card to the head phones. For example I have 2 mp3 players, one is an old creative muvo and another is a sansa e250. If I take the same mp3 file encoded poorly (128 or lower) the sansa shows noticeable audio crappiness while the creative player tends to cover up for a lot of the mp3's artifacts. But if I take a high good 320 bitrate mp3, the difference between the two becomes very small.
Also I've gone through a ton of head phones until I finally gave up. It seems like most manufacturers just load their head phones with all the bass they can even if it means sacrificing the mid range. For pop music that might make sense since there's rarely actual music or even intruments in pop stuff. The same is true for speakers. I like logitech mice but I hate their speakers. Everyone seems to disagree with me but I always feel that logitech speakers have no mid range at all.
I've found that with lamemp3, 192 ABR or VBR with -q 2 or -h is probably the best compression you can get without sacraficing quality even for high-end audio equipment. If you push the quality on lamemp3 all the way (-q 0) it starts producing artifacts in the highs that are easy to detect when the bitrate gets too low. But if you drop the quality to the default level (-h) then it does not do that. So I honestly think it is your sony cd player that has some built-in eq or something to make the bass sound better because I've never had issues with 192 bitrate mp3s encoded by myself.
Everyone blast mp3 and how it ruined high fidelity. Yet, everyone think dolby digital(ac3) is hifi and i can't contradict them since most concert dvd sound wayyy better than their cd counterpart. Well in fact, ac3 is a psychoacoustic codec similar to mp3 (and less efficient) so we can clearly see the fault is not the format but the audio engineer. The problem is mostly the loudnessrace started in mid 90. The article author doesn't know anything about mp3 technology and digital audio in general. To say that mp3 codec remove extreme low frequency is completely stupid. These frequency are the easier one to retains. The author should study the basis of psychoacoustic before writing something like that.
No, it isn't. It's the smartest possible choice. There is no loss of stereo separation in LAME "joint stereo" (actually, mid/side or matrix stereo), unlike in intensity stereo encoding, which isn't even implemented in LAME. How LAME works by default is that it analyses each frame separately to see whether it is more efficient to encode the frame in LR or MS. Most of the time, not every frame is encoded in "joint stereo". If there was an audible effect to stereo imaging from using MS encoding, the stereo image would continuously pump back and forth as the encoding method changes. Never heard of anyone complaining about that happening...
The drawback to MS encoding is that LAME is only optimised for stereo listening - if the compressed track is played back through a Dolby Pro Logic decoder, the quality of the rear channel sound can suffer audibly in some cases. In Dolby Stereo, the rear channel is L-R, just like the S channel in MS encoded stereo. LAME only optimises the decoded LR stereo signals for audible artifacts, not the S signal when listened to as is. As far as I know, that is the only scenario where using LAME in LR mode exclusively has been shown to improve sound quality. In all other situations, it performs much better in automatic LR/MS mode, or "joint stereo", so the encoder can decide where to use the bits available.
See this old page for an explanation of MS encoding. There's lots to be found on the topic in Hydrogenaudio's archives, but I can't be arsed to do a search right now.
In my view, most people don't care so much about the fidelity of a recording as they do about the convenience of listening to it.
MP3 gives worse sound but I can fit a few thousand on my phone and carry them around with me. Same with movies, blu-ray etc are all very well but video over youtube is quick and easy enough that I don't care so much that it's fuzzy.
Once the quality of ubiquitous portable formats gets to the stage where we can hear all the detail in a sound, then studios will start putting the detail in again. For now they may as well master to the most likely playback situation.
People have correctly pointed out that this is about the dynamic range and not to do with data compression. And I agree.
:). Wow, that was a long time ago. Without the quieter passages and the more dramatic louder parts, it wouldn't be nearly as impressive.
I think one of the problems is that more and more, people tend to listen to music as a less focused pass time than it used to be. No more putting on the headphones to listen to a Pink Floyd concept album start to finish, appreciating the highs and lows (both tone and volume-wise) in detail, as a work of art. (Or as Homer would say, "I stayed up listening to Queen... When I was seventeen..."
Now with the one-hit mass-produced crap, everything is aimed at blasting on the dance floor, or background noise in public or via headphones to drone out the world. Not for listening, but for distraction, out in public, in noisy, over stimulated environments. So yes, for those enviornments, cranking everything to a flat maximum loundess serves the purpose, sadly. In a noisy bar, quiet passages would just be perceived as silence, without range compression.
There are times when the dynamic range limiting is good; when I'm in the car, driving, there is background noise. And my Montana's stereo thankfully does some dynamic adjustment based upon speed; when I go fast and there's more road noise, it cranks it; when I slow down, it reduces volume. That's constructive dynamic range fiddling, unlike the production techniques talked about here.
I used to listen to whole albums that were amazing, getting chills down my spine at the beauty of the crafted work (in my case it's typically 60's and 70's stuff, but for others the same is true for classic, and other genres). I can't remember the last time an album came out like that (probably Fish's Vigil in Wildernes of Mirrors in '89 (highly recommended
Sigh.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
"I wish someone would manufacture an mp3 player with better analog output circuitry designed not for headphone / earphone listening but for hooking up to hifi components."
The Rio Karma was as close to a audiophile digital audio player as you could get when it was around. It has RCA line level outputs via its dock which is nice for hifi hookups (not to mention it also had a 5 band parametric customizable EQ): http://www.digitalnetworksna.com/shop/_templates/item_main_Rio.asp?model=261
Digital Downloads May Signal the End of High Fidelity was written in Jan 2006, amost two years ago.
It has been discussed on other forums and on Wired and High-Fidelty sites too.
It's always good to see something new on the subject and a fresh perspective.
Banjo - The more I know about Windoze, the more I love *nix
It makes the track "With Teeth" on the NIN album of the same name unlistenable, because it means that I have to change volume quickly in order to make the quiet part audible and the loud parts the quiet part goes between not so loud it takes a day off the life of my ears.
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
I have done some CBR MP3 testing a while ago to find out the best balance between bitrate and sound quality to maximize the playback time on my old 1GB MP3 player. 128kbps is definitely out of the picture since it completely mangles hit-hats like nobody's business. 160kbps is better but still unbearable on many hit-hats passages. 192kbps is far better but still occasionally failed at cleanly reproducing some heavy hit-hats passages on some of my test tracks. At 224kbps, no flaws were obvious enough to distract me and I could not clearly identify any further improvements with 256kbps.
Since my MP3 player is considerably lower-fi than my PC's Audigy2, I figured minor flaws on PC playback should be mostly unnoticeable on the MP3 player so I picked 192kbps for my portable collection - plenty good enough 99% of the time for me.
16 bits is enough dynamic range for playback, <--....for the shit music most people listen to.
....<---Why would you apply compression to a 24-bit CD? You must be a consummate audio-professional?
....mmmmm wrong again, 32-bit float is standard for mastering, "the CD format"? There are 3: CD, SACD, DVD-Audio. If you are so fucking deaf why do you even talk about "music", are you a Sony exec?
The CD format wasn't chosen at random: it exceeds the fidelity of the human ear. <--...are you for real? Spouting this kind of shit, why don't you listen to some 24/96 recording before shooting off your "mouth"?
The scientists and engineers who delevope[sic] [and what about the bean counters?] the CD format weren't settling for "good enough". Those who say different are selling something (usually extremely overpriced audiophile gear). <--...clean out the waxplugs in your ears and start listening to 24/96 material. SACD and DVD-Audio came about because why?
24-bits converters cost how much when the format was designed in the 1970's?
http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=24-bit%20AND%20mediatype%3Aaudio <-- free samples
24 bit CDs would do *nothing* to preserve sound quality *after* dynamic range compression. The data has already been lost, adding more 0s doesn't get you anything.
More bits on the master recording might help, but that has nothing to do with the CD format, and everything to do with the mastering process.
Rolling Stone - ugh... But apart from that, producers have been doing that for a lot longer, years before the prevalence of mp3s. But for the same inane reasoning: louder is better. The illusion is that it is better, but the fatiguing/loss-of-interest effect certainly holds true. Even if the music was any good... ;^)
I downloaded the Assassin's Creed sound track sample files from the developer's website (in .wav) and listened to them once through, finding them of interest. Then I compressed them with LAME on default and after listening to 1/4 of the first track I had to take my headphones off because it was giving me a horrible headache.
The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win, you're still a rat." Lily Tomlin
adding more 0s doesn't get you anything.
But adding more 1s gets your amp to play to 11.
Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known. -- Carl Sagan
Your hifi component needs for playing MP3's have already been met by Slim Devices. Even though this company was purchased by Logitech not too long ago, they seem to have been left to their own devices, as it were. Sure it requires a home network, but we all know you already have one of those. And before someone asks ye old /. question: "does it run under Linux", yes, yes it does. The server software component of these little beauties runs under anything that can run a modern version of Perl. It also supports the lossless FLAC, WAV and AIFF formats. Yes, it supports Ogg Vorbis.
You're welcome.
Sig goes here.
Hi,
Your bit about sound artifacts being increasingly noticable in larger spaces made me think of our local symphony orchestra (Tampa). I have season tickets and am accustomed to hearing a professional orchestra perform in a reasonably proper auditorium. However, Tampa does not have any reasonable outdoor performance area, and the "concerts in the park" are done with no acoustic shell - the orchestra is sitting in the open, with a large PA system, and it sounds atrocious. If I close my eyes, it does not seem like a live orchestral concert at all - more like listening over a very cheap boom-box. The sad part is that the outdoor concerts are attended by folks who don't know the difference, and they think they are hearing a "classical concert".
(not to mention the radically different pops-oriented programming at the outdoor concerts compared to a "real" concert at the Performing Arts Center).
Instead of screwing with the mastering/recording process, what they should have done is worked with the PC hardware and codec software writers to fix the actual problem.
However they didn't do that, why? because this articles premise is FUD, the loudness problem started before MP3's and its more likely that the in-car CD and growing use of mass music for adverts started it.
This article is half implies that the record companies were boosting the loudness to improve the sound of MP3's...what the same format that they've tried to ban and exterminate from existence.
----- I refuse to have an argument with an unarmed person
After reading through the article, I checked out the Hear it for Yourself section. The Lilly Allen song picked sounds like crap on an iPod and that defeats his primary argument. There are two versions on the album and he picked the rotten one. For $100 you can get kick ass audio speakers on a PC that are better than most stereos 10 years ago. Audiophiles are alive and well; you don't need to spend 2k to get great sound anymore.
The problem is probably not the encoding, but just the crappy devices people have now.
There are 2 way loudspeaker systems beeing sold as HIFI-Equipment which give out certain frequencies way more directional than other frequencies. A good set of speakers will not change the colour of the sound depending of your position so much.
MP3 should have a completely flat frequency response unless you do something completely wrong.
And although 128 kBit is definitely audible, higher bitrates are a very good approximation of 1411 kBit PCM, but you always need to keep in mind that PCM and "lossless" derivatives of it also have a certain loss of quality. Just try listening to a 64 kBit PCM file (i.E. 8 kHz 8 Bit mono) and just compare it to 64 kBit MP3.
In a way PCM was just the MP3 of the 70s. It was the most efficient way of digitally encoding audio in high quality. (actually there were more effient ways like G.711 which are able to give higher fidelity than PCM at 64 kBit, but those were hard to do for higher bitrates)
Anyhow unless you have decent headphones and go higher than 128 kBit you should not notice any degradiation from PCM to MP3. In fact the buildt-in speakers of many mobile phones are so bad, you cannot distinguish 32 kBit from 64 kBit.
I think you're right. For me, I've always called it the "kick". It's the burst from all the instruments after the solo in Yes's "Roundabout"; the concussive blast after the intro in "Name of the Game" by The Crystal Method.
Compression (both types) shove everything up into the higher range, so that when you want that POW! there is simply nothing left. It's like watching a Michael Bay movie and seeing a massive budget-breaking explosion and yet hearing a duck fart.
I noticed the lack of punch in "Name of the Game" at a DJ gig a few years ago. Most of what we play is uncompressed, but the only version we happened to have at the time was .mp3 (192/48K). The kick in that song is awesome at concert volume: ass-spankin', baby-slappin', window-shakin' kinda cool. Blade II had just come out and I couldn't wait for that kick to hit the crowd... But it sounded like static. No edge, no power, it just wasn't that great.
The disappointment in that one tiny little duck fart led me to re-evaluate the codec I was using to store all my music. What I discovered, was that .mp3 could not reproduce that Crystal Method kick, regardless of the bitrate or codec. Even at 320 with 48KHz over-sampling. It always sounded like static. .ogg, on the other hand, reproduced it perfectly at 192. With a decent pair of headphones, I couldn't tell the difference between .ogg and .wav. So now, most of my library has been re-ripped and converted to .ogg.
For me, it is not that compression handles music well in most cases, but that when you need to push it to eleven, it's not there.
Ultimately, music is about emotion and contrast. When you flatten the recording, you flatten the emotion.
Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself; but talent instantly recognizes genius. -- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Dude, not to rain on your parade or anything, but all the points the people made in the posts you linked to seemed pretty legitimate to me, and indeed even come up regularly in Slashdot's own discussions. So they're saying a misleading, horribly written piece of barely journalistic garbage showed up on the front page of Slashdot? What is it... Monday? It happens all the time, get over it, that's why Slashdot is such a great place; even if an article linked to on the main page is trash, it still sparks discussions involving all kinds of people from all over the internet. That's what makes it a discussion, opinions other than your own.
Paid a lot for that "better than CD" player, didn't you? Did you know that when SACDs are mastered (which have CD format tracks for backwards compatibility), they deliberately introduce noise into the CD Format tracks, so that if you compare the formats you can hear a difference? Ahh, business.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
I did bring that up by myself, though 128 is the 'standard' rate that songs seem to be provided at online (though the new radiohead album was something like 160kbps so I haven't actually ripped the physical copy yet). Yes, I said that 192kbps is fine.
which is totally what she said