Slashdot Mirror
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."
Agree 100%.
You don't compress differently when exporting to MP3 than you do when exporting to CD. Let's not look upon an MP3 as a majestical format where audio mysteriously takes on a life of its own and sounds strikingly different. It doesn't. An MP3 is simply the same signal that you find on a CD transformed into the frequency domain, frequencies with lesser engery quantized greater, or dropped if below the absolute threshold of hearing, some spatial information discarded (depending on the encoding mode), and written out as a bitstream. An MP3 is certainly a degraded version of the original signal, but the degradation can't really be compensated for via compression. If anything, EQ would be a better solution.
I really think this article is completely off-base. Compression is completely unrelated to MP3, it's a technique used independently of the format.
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.
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.
All rites reversed 2010
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.