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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."
If they can't tell the difference then they probably have little business talking about the subtleties of music production and recording formats.
Even better is the idea of producers (gasp) altering the mix to suit MP3s better. Maybe they should look up the original purpose of mastering compressors, especially those with a lat/vert mode. Yup - they're there to compensate for the limitations of your precious, precious vinyl.
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.
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 used to work with a mastering engineer that had specialized in vinyl and he talked about some of the things he would have to contend with when working with records. He mentioned that those problems became really evident after digital had really taken off and become established only to introduce the 'resurgence' of releasing 7inch 'remix' records and having to explain to his clients why the records sounded so much different from the existing digital masters.
Besides the obvious problem of space (signal with a lot of low-freq content can significantly reduce the amount of recording time on one side of a record, for instance, so a lot of modern music, rap, r&b, and rock) would have to be heavily sonically modified to be pressed onto vinyl) in general the low-end and high-end of the source is *very* heavily EQed on the front end (before etching) and then given the 'reverse' of the same EQ on the back-end (after detected by the needle).
Such heavy handed EQ is necessary to 'deal' with the limitations of the format and because there is no such thing as perfect EQ there is always a change in the tone of the original source.
I suspect, but admittedly have no proof, that much of what is 'appealing' to vinyl is the learned tonality of all of this processing. I am not even saying that the process is 'good' or 'bad' I merely mean to suggest that it is there and a large part of that 'vinyl sound.'
A similar process is done with cassette tape recording to address the limitations of the high-end of audible signal and noise.
As a personal anecdote, when I first started working with digital I admit that I, too, first considered digital to be 'cold' and 'sterile'. But after working with digital more I discovered that the REAL problem with digital was its veracity. Working in analog is often a lot of 'pushing' the waveform to 'extract' a certain sound out of the tape (with FANTASTIC effect -- NOTHING sounds like drums and guitars, recorded VERY hot, to virgin 24-track 2" tape. NOTHING. but you achieve that sound not because analog is better but because of what happens when you do analog 'wrong'.). With digital you get EXACTLY what you put down so in order to achieve a 'sound' you have to generate that sound before you press record on the digital deck. When we first learned this, we would sometimes track drums on 2" analog first (citing my previous comment about 2"), and then dump it to digital to do the rest of the record (that is done a lot less now -- almost never -- we were being lazy).
Most of getting 'good sound' out of digital was more a matter of relearning how to record to the newer medium
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.