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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."
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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
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.