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Apple in Talks to Improve Sound Quality of Music Downloads
Barence writes "Apple and music labels are reportedly in discussions to raise the audio quality of of the songs they sell to 24-bit. The move could see digital downloads that surpass CD quality, which is recorded at 16 bits at a sample rate of 44.1kHz. It would also provide Apple and the music labels with an opportunity to 'upgrade' people's music collections, raising extra revenue in the process. The big question is whether anyone would even notice the difference between 16-bit and 24-bit files on a portable player, especially with the low-quality earbuds supplied by Apple and other manufacturers. Labels such as Linn Records already sell 'studio master' versions of albums in 24-bit FLAC format, but these are targeted at high-end audio buffs with equipment of a high enough caliber to accentuate the improvement in quality."
Labels such as Linn Records already sell 'studio master' versions of albums in 24-bit FLAC format, but these are targeted at high-end audio buffs with equipment of a high enough caliber to accentuate the improvement in quality
In other words, they're making money off the placebo effect.
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Looks like I'll have to bootleg my music collection all over again.
Godaddy is a scam and a ripoff.
NEVER underestimate the placebo effect when dealing with audiophiles.
Even if they can never hear the difference, because they THINK 24 bit lossy encoding is better than 16 bit lossy encoding, they will believe it sounds better and therefore you have a chance to charge them more for it.
After all, the audio/video realm is the home of massively overpriced digital cables with gold plated contacts and vastly inflated pricetags, because some suckers think they are better.
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Audiophiles listen to stereos. The rest of us listen to music. :)
A correctly mastered 16-bit file wouldn't have any audible difference compared to the 24-bit file anyway, unless we're talking measurable differences instead of differences you can actually hear. I'd rather see an increase in the samplerate, but preferably both.
c++;
Apple will of course rebrand FLAC as Apple-FLAC, or AFLAC for short.
This is so meaningless, it's hard not to make a crack about apple fans claiming to love various completely intangible benefits. I'll try to refrain, however.
The only reason to store audio at greater than cd-quality is if you need masters... such as you're doing multiple processing passes over it. Other than that, the benefit to the consumer is as completely illusionary as Monster audio cables.
the bit depth is interesting, but the largest improvement would come from simply not using lossy compression. one hopes that TFA glossed over this and that nobody is seriously considering 24-bit MP3's.
with an alpha channel
Perhaps is music wasn't overly compressed (talking about dynamic range, here) they wouldn't need so many more bits of resolution for the -3 dB they're mastering audio at these days.
More Twoson than Cupertino
Over the decades I've read several studies testing peoples opinions of different bitrates and compression schemes. The typical response is people can just barely tell that there is a difference between bitrates, but they are unable to accurately pick the HIGHER bitrate one. In other words, even when they can tell there is a difference, they're still not sure what one is the original...just that they sound "different".
I don't even want to get started on "audiophiles". They're institutionalized hatred of the sound of live music sickens me...they claim to want the best quality possible, but won't suffer through anything that hasn't been run through an unintentional distortion or dynamic range limiting filter.
Years ago I worked at a very large music mail-order company and had a field day going through and testing all the stuff. Among the biggest lessons I learned was that CD is not the end-all be-all of music formats that I thought it was. My friend and I would run blind tests using an album we were both very familiar with (Yes 90125) and we could actually tell the difference and preferred reel-to-reel over CD. However, the only way to really tell was to wear headphones. Granted, we were wearing the industry standard Sony MDR-7506 headphones, but still, we could hear a difference. When we tested using studio monitors we slightly leaned towards the reel-to-reel, but it was not as clear cut.
Depending on what you're getting, many headphones and mobile players actually offer very good fidelity. I was amazed at how good the headphones that came with my BlackBerry Bold 9000 are, as well as the quality of the output of the phone. I don't own a dedicated portable music player, but it's hard for me to imagine that companies like Apple would use poor quality amps.
On a side note, I was really disappointed that the higher fidelity optical discs didn't take off. Sometimes I wonder if the music industry had gone out and brainwashed everyone that the higher fidelity was way better, then maybe people would have been less enthused about pirated 128 kbps mp3s. I know I never much cared for VHS recordings of DVDs.
I once took an excursion to Reddit, and later HN. Unlimited up/down voting sucks when dealing with a hive-mind.
A quick note about dynamic range, which is what the bit depth affects.
Maximum dynamic range that human hearing can discern: 140dB average
Maximum practical dynamic range of CD: 90dB
Maximum practical dynamic range of 24-bit audio: around 140dB
Dynamic range required for full range live music playback, according to Ampex: 118dB average
Maximum practical dynamic range of high quality studio analog tape: 80dB
Maximum practical dynamic range of studio analog tape in the '60s: ~70dB
So, if you have a piece of music recorded, mixed, mastered and released in pure 24-bit depth, you *may* hear a difference under ideal conditions (excellent production, good equipment, *quiet* listening room, etc...) Note that there have been double-blind listening tests of SACD, and listeners were unable to hear a difference between the CD version.
All those old Beatles and Rolling Stones albums? Keep the best CD version you have, more bits aren't going to make a difference.
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I would love to see, er, hear, this happen. 24 bit depth would allow for more dynamic range, and the lower amount of distortion would also be great. I know most people don't have the equipment or ear training to hear the difference, but why not encode music at a higher quality level?
I think this is a great idea. Granted, the majority of us won't be able to HEAR the difference, playing the music on our ipods or even our computers' built-in speakers, (laptops in particular, such as mine) but it's good to hear they're trying to offer better quality.
Imagine they offer the option to pay a buck for the song, or a buck thirty for a higher quality version. I bet they could get the extra 30c a lot of the time. It's a good business move. And we KNOW how the **aa love to sell you the same thing more than once.
I wonder though what exact format it will be in? Maybe they will just be offering higher bitrate MP3s? (m3a) It's not necessary to go to FLAC format if you are increasing the source's resolution. Besides, these will be better than traditional FLACs that are limited to the quality of the CD media.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Sure they'll be 24-bit, but they'll also have the dynamic range compressed to shit.
Unless that's the actual selling point, getting copies of the songs before they've passed through the hands of the mastering engineer whose job it is to destroy the difference between the quietest and loudest parts of songs, or worse yet causing horrible clipping.
Huh? I haven't any problems with the quality. Has anyone in actually asked for "better than CD quality"? Can users typically hear a difference? Are users ready to spend more time and bandwidth on downloading "better than CD quality" music?
Let's spend the effort on streaming music support instead. A Spotify alternative with the iTunes catalog would be nice. And actually useful.
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Well, if you have people who pay for gold plated cables, you'll have people who pay for 'higher quality' music which makes no difference.
Would be funny if they say its 24 bit, change nothing and see how many people gab on about how they can hear much better.
Dynamic range (represented by the "24 bit" parameter) makes a lot of sense for classical music and certain other genres. No matter how much dynamic headroom is provided, most pop music will be compressed into the top four bits anyway. It won't be louder, since in the digital domain, dynamics are a matter of "attenuation from zero", and there is no envelope to push, like there was in the old days.
In a production mode, it's quite nice to have higher dynamic range, not so much for the range between extremes, but more because of the higher resolution.
Similar arguments exist for frequency, even in the face of compression of consumer audio. Want to convince yourself of how well you can hear the difference between a lossy compression codec and the original wav? There's a simple test. Take the original wav, copy it and turn it 180 degrees in phase. Mix this track agains the compressed file. Notice that when you play this result you can hear a *lot*. What you hear is the aberration of compression. If your music doesn't have a lot of stuff like clean cymbals or a solo oboe or whatever, maybe you'll find this result perfectly acceptable.
An even better, much more revealing test is to convert the track to Mid/Side stereo. (Much easier to do if you're in a studio environment, but simple and routine in any case), take the sides and compare them in a listening test and a nulling test. It will be painfully obvious what MP3 compression does to the side and to the stereo image in general.
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What I'd like to see (or rather hear), is that we can have access to the individual tracks of each song, so that we can remix stuff. Kind of like the open-source of audio.
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
You chose an album that's infamous for the poor quality of its CD remaster. Try it again with the new remasters of Let It Be and get back to us.
Yeah, I agree that the increased fidelity of the recording isn't going to make any difference in sound quality. However, as we have seen with DVD-A, the existence of an "Audiophile Format" means that studios that release them usually create a mix that doesn't compress and clip the audio to all hell, because they are catering to that market, not the FM radio market.
I'd pay a little more for a correctly mixed recording. I don't care whether it is 24-bit or 16-bit; I'll be re-encoding it to a 192kbps MP3, and it will still sound better than the CD release.
A slightly misleading article. Apple may well be talking about 24-bit audio, but 24-bits is hardly necessary for a large improvement in the perceived quality of audio. This real issue is with lossy codecs (like mp3) versus lossless codecs (like flac). Flac is far superior, and even the average person should be able to tell the difference with some practice - to the average musician its chalk and cheese let alone to an audiophile. I would be surprised if many people could differentiate 16-bit from 24-bit except via the increased dynamic range (number of discrete volume levels). And frankly this dynamic range is inappropriate for listening to most music, with the possible exception of classical and jazz that could use the extra headroom. The reason why you have to constantly adjust the volume of your DVD when watching at home? Too much dynamic range. Do you want that for you music as well? (not aware of any musical genres requiring explosions, gunshots etc at this time)
So, no, no-one will be able to tell the difference between 16-bit and 24-bit, but almost everyone should be able to appreciate the diifference between a lossy and a lossless codec. Flac, 24-bit or not will be a good thing.
For the record, most audio that is digitally recorded in 24-bit/96KHz or higher anyway. It is only 'dithered' down to 16-bit/44.1KHzas a last step in preparation for CD. For various technical reasons this results in a higher quality 16-bit recording than if it was tracked in 16-bit.
I don't own a dedicated portable music player, but it's hard for me to imagine that companies like Apple would use poor quality amps.
Depends what you mean by quality. The amp in an iPod may or may not have good linearity, frequency response and so on, but I know for sure that it's barely capable of driving a pair of headphones. Even with earbuds, you get a major improvement by using a headphone amp.
Apple also uses pretty wretched amps in their computers; you can get a major improvement from using an external USB audio interface.
Basically, anything beyond current iTMS quality is a waste of time if you're using raw iPod amplification or the built-in sound on a Mac.
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Not just audiophiles. I can't hear worth crap. Never could. I could hardly care less for the difference between a scratchy record and a CD, much less what color my cable is, gold or green or fuscia. What I do care about though, is being able to format shift my music. My archive is in FLAC, which I transcode to a lossy format for general use. When something more palatable comes along, I'll be able to transcode to that instead of having to repurchase everything -- that assuming I could even find half of it, which is very unlikely. And unlike if my collection were solely in a lossy format, I won't have to endure the progressive distortions of transcoding from one lossy format to another, the cumulative effect of which would eventually drive even me nuts.
First of all, it has not been shown that 24 bits depth (~144dB dynamic range) will give any audible benefit over 16 bit depth (~96dB) sampling depth. I don't know of any successful ABX test regarding that.
Second, lossy formats don't have something like bit depth, they are sourced from lossless data having a bitdepth, but the resulting files don't have any, and to my knowledge at least common MP3 has a noise floor much worse than 96dB.
Third, current mastering tendencies especially on pop and rock music make any plans of improving dynamic range for consumers pointless. You can try yourself, for example using the excellent SoX, to regain your files to the different bitdepths and test whether you can positively ABX the resulting files. For example I was unable to ABX Metallica's latest "masterpiece" after dithering it down to 10bits of depth, which is just 60dB of dyanmic range. So as long as the mastering itself is in such a sad state for popular music (which is the main market of iTunes?) there is absolutely no need to have 144dB dynamic range. I for one would be happy if current engineers managed to make use of the 96dB they had for some decades.
128kbit/s at 24-bit! Now excuse me while I crank it to 11.
The last CD I considered purchasing was Coldplay's Viva La Vida. It was $29.98 at my local Target. I did not purchase that album. You may well be correct, as I could definitely hear a difference in the remastered Pink Floyd CDs, and I'm quite certain it wasn't the gold reflective material.
I once took an excursion to Reddit, and later HN. Unlimited up/down voting sucks when dealing with a hive-mind.
The main reason for going higher than 16 bit, 44.1 khz is when you want to manipulate the audio, for example mixing, pitching and applying various effects.
Imagine that you have a 1600x1200 pixel screen. You have one 1600x1200 pixel image and one 4000x3000 pixel original. On your screen both images look identical. Now apply a spherize filter effect. The 1600x1200 pixel image will become pixelated on the parts where it's stretched out but the 4000x3000 pixel image will still look good.
The same theory applies to audio also.
There's no real reason to go higher than CD quality for the final mix that you're only going to listen to. Not even the best hearing audiophiles with a $10000000 stereo will be able to tell the difference in a double blind test.
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99.9% of music sold is compressed into the top half of the spectrum, where it doesn't make a damn bit of difference which fidelity you're using, or what sort of crappy amp you have.
128kbps MP3s actually vary a great deal based on the compression codec used. Some of the old "cheap" codecs from the 1990s absolutely destroyed music at 128kbps, but using a higher quality one made a much better recording, which was challenging to tell apart from the higher quality settings.
When I encoded music, I always used the "LAME" encoder with VBR settings, which resulted in about 135kbps, but was virtually indistinguishable from lossless audio and far better than 160kbps and even some 256kbps using "worse" encoders.
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My stereo(yes, two channel!) is worth several thousands of carefully-planned dollars. I think it could be put alongside systems worth $20k, and hold its own. (The speakers at present are the weakest link, and they still sound much better than yours. :-)
That said, it's a practical system. I've got enough background in electronics and acoustics (and psychology!) to know better than to buy a huge amount of the insane junk that's out there. Amplifiers that go into oscillation with the wrong cables? No thanks! Vacuum tubes? The guitar amp is downstairs, thanks very much. Cable elevators? Um...no. Just no.
So here's my defense of 24-bit 48kHz recordings: Breathing space.
Nothing to do (specifically) with dynamic headroom or the like, but when producing, mixing, and mastering data recorded as 16-bit 44kHz, there is very little you can do without inadvertently affecting the audio signal. In other words, it's harder to get it right when you're operating right at the threshold of hearing.
If studios did everything in 24-bit/96kHz and actually avoided clipping through the whole chain, then a final mixdown to 16b/44Khz (i.e. a CD) would sound gorgeous - perfect sound to the extent of human hearing. However, mixing is often done poorly, and as hot as possible for better sales, and the result is that the poor CD suffers the abuse caused by the engineers.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
This is the way that the world works. There is going to be a day when we will all be listening to 256 bit recordings, eating pizzas incorporating 15 different cheeses, watching 600inch screens with a resolution 16000x9000 from a distance of 8 feet, watering plants with brawndo (it's got what plants crave) and playing guitars with 5 necks hooked to amps that go to 11. Remember, that's the beauty of the number system, there's always a bigger number.
Perhaps apple should first make a ipod that has decent sound quality. Any vintage discman from the early 90's will blow away an ipod.
The big question is whether anyone would even notice the difference between 16-bit and 24-bit files on a portable player
The bigger question is why the geek thinks Apple wouldn't like to cut itself a slice of the high end audio market?
Denon sells a dock for the iPhone.
Why not an iTunes app on the Denon home theater receiver? The Panasonic or Samsung HDTV or theater sound bar? Pandora is there. Rhapsody is there. Why not iTunes?
Its not that 24 bits of data makes the sound better. It actually does not. What is does is give your audio more room to breathe in the numeric realm of digital audio. Remember, we are talking about numbers, calculations, not analog waveforms. With 24 bits of data demarcing your recording medium, its is possible to record extremely dynamic music, with very quiet soft passages and extraordinary loud passages. Quiet passages will be less likely struggling to stay above the noise floor on your system. One can record with no compression. You can record at lower levels, with more headroom. This ensures that the occasional peak is not truncated at the top and it will give converters some room the breathe. Because you are not pushing the limits of your bandwidth, your instruments will sound clearer, and the vocals may sound "cleaner", the song will mix better and there will be less noise. So its not that 24 bit recordings sound better. In fact they may sound just as bad or worse than 16 bit. But 24 bits gives the recordist a noise floor and headroom to create an excellent recording. Its a tool, and in the right hand, it can blow you away, audio wise.
16 Bit vs. 24 Bit Audio
If you don't think there is real high end equipment it just means you've never looked/listened. I'm not taking $1000 speaker cables or other such snake oil, I'm talking high end speakers and so on.
Speakers in particular have a wide range because they are almost always the worst component of a system. An amp that has THD in the fractions of a percent may be hooked in to a speaker that has THD in the 5-10% range when played at a high volume.
There can be a pretty big difference between normal and good equipment. There's also a pretty big monetary difference so it isn't worth it for everyone, but if you like good sound, maybe it is. It also isn't something magical that you have to have faith exists, it is stuff you can measure. Flatter frequency response, lower THD, lower noise, better dispersion, etc, etc.
Now, does that mean 24-bit is useful? Eh, I dunno. In theory possibly. You get 96dB of dynamic range out of 16-bit audio. You can extend that through dithering, but at the cost of raising the noise floor. Human hearing is more in the 120dB range. 0dB SPL (20 micropascals) is chosen as 0 becuse it is roughly the threshold of human hearing. Some people can hear a little below that, many cannot hear that low because of hearing damage/loss. 120dB SPL is about the level where you start to feel immediate pain and thus going past it is not recommended.
So to fully cover the human range of hearing you'd need 20-bits, but then more can be useful because of course if you are trying to represent low level sounds with just 1 or 2 bits, they are going to have rather bad quantization artifacts. Again dither can deal with this, in trade for higher noise levels, but just going 24-bit solves it.
As a practical matter though, it is of questionable usefulness. For recording it is quite useful because it allows for headroom. You want to be able to have plenty of digital headroom (to prevent clipping), but still capture all the detail. However when you mix everything and normalize it down, that's not so important. It also takes some fairly high quality equipment to start getting 100dB or more of actual effective SNR and dynamic range out of a system, not to mention a rather quiet room. You can hear sounds below the room's noise level, but only maybe 10-15dB below.
I've played with it quite a bit since audio production is a hobby and I really can't form an opinion. I can set up tests where I can hear the difference, but I can set up tests where I can't.
Over all I think it would be nice to move to 24-bit since space is rapidly becoming a total non-issue and it just avoids it ever being a problem. Kinda like moving past 8-bits per channel for video. However I don't think it is a big issue and it isn't something I'll tell people they gotta have. "CD quality" has endured precisely because it is "good enough" for most things. Maybe not perfect, but you don't really notice any problems in normal use and that's what matters.
people complain about sound quality of podcasts downloaded with my plugin, so I guess could see the use of it. I can't hear the difference, but I guess if you start with sources meant for 24-bit...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Going 24-bit will make no practical difference on 99% of popular music. It lowers the theoretical noise floor, but that's only relevant if the master tapes are good enough (rare), and more importantly, the music actually has that much dynamic range... Which the vast majority of music does not. How much music in the iTunes store has passages so soft you can barely hear them? It happens occasionally in classical, but virtually never in rock.
I think the point of this is to get over the stigma of compressed audio. Now instead of people saying that CDs are better because they're uncompressed, Apple has an answer: "Yeah, but ours are 24 bit!". It's meaningless, but now it's "debatable" which format is better, instead of the previous situation where CDs were objectively better and the only contention was if the difference was audible.
You know when you turn on a stereo and you hear a slight hiss and hum? Linn stuff doesn't.
Linn kit does a pretty good job of sounding like it isn't there...
At a ridiculous price of course.
A while back, I saw a comparison between various brands of stereo equipment, including some very high end stuff, and a live performance, and price does matter, you can tell even with the most outrageously expensive, but it's more difficult the more you spend. Seems to be logarithmic, you spend 10x more for a linear improvement.
For the average person like yourself, I'm sure Apple and Sony would do.
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About time.
I never understood why on earth "CD Quality" became the gold standard for compressed music, especially in the light of the fact that broadband connections are fast enough and music devices have enough storage for better quality audio.
I am not going to get into the whole "audiophile" arguments, but its almost laughable that there are people here thinking the current compressed music is good enough. For the most part, your system is doing more to add back the dynamic range missing from compressed music, most audio systems are designed to process digital music and add back the life that has been missing from overly compressed music.
I was listening to a 70's Santana record that was recorded with "quadraphonic" sound. Basically 4 discrete channels. Sure, the record was a little scratchy, and the old tube receiver took a long while before it hit its sweet spot, but man the sound was really good. I plugged in my iPod to the exact same system and it immediately sounded like it was coming from a tin can, what a difference.
Look, I don't want to go back to records, playing around with an old record player was nostalgic, but it brought back all the inconvenience of large 12" platters, static, dust, having to change sides or records every 20 minutes, no random play, etc, but I have been wanting "compressed" audio to grow up and mature and start sounding better, its about time Apple thought so too.
Bottom line is, I think consumers should have a choice. If you feel CD quality is good enough, then fine, but I would prefer downloading studio masters myself.
Sony's SACD sounded great and it was a 1 bit format... at 2.8 MHz.
Blind surveys have shown that people could only tell the difference between SACD and DVD Audio at uncomfortably loud volumes. And the difference between those formats and CDs are larger than what Apple is going to offer.
I still prefer CDs for listening enjoyment at home. But I can certainly appreciate the convenience of AAC. CDs give me a permanent backup and the freedom to rip music for any other device I choose.
I can absolutely hear a difference between Apple's 256kbps and CDs. But then, I don't normally listen to the poorly mixed, over-produced junk that is most pop music. Even on CD a lot of that stuff isn't particularly good, so it's not like you're losing much by going with compressed audio.
Most people can't hear a difference because they're not paying attention. Kind of like people who claim you can't see a difference between 720p or 1080p. I will acknowledge, however, that quality doesn't get in the way of enjoying music. But for me it does. Not that I consider myself an audiophile, nor have I invested an obscene amount of money in audio equipment. I have a 15+ year old amp and a pair of decent speakers.
Certainly a lot of it is subjective. But within a reasonable price range you can get speakers that comfortable offer 90% - 95% of the quality of the really high end speakers. But if you really get crazy, it gets to a point where people start looking at treating their rooms to maximize audio quality. And I've seen first hand how that can have a dramatic impact on quality. Of course, a good set of headphones can also accomplish this, but then you lose the physical impact.
Serious audiophiles are well aware that $5000, even $100 cables can be a scam. The ones throwing away that kind of money do so simply so they can brag they've spent that kind of money. It's like the so-called wine connoisseur who can only enjoy high-priced wines. If you've got someone telling you that the only good wines cost over $80 a bottle then you can be certain he doesn't know a damn thing about wine.
1) It isn't limited for -3dB, it is limited for 0dB. They limit it to the maximum the digital signal can be. Often the resulting wave form almost looks clipped it is pushed so hard.
2) You kinda have it backwards. When you limit things you don't need the extra resolution. If you don't limit them you may. You can only hear detail and noise so far below the signal. So if the signal is 0dBFS the whole time then you don't need so much resolution. I'd bet that 12 bits, dithered, would be plenty. That would give you a SNR in the realm of 66-69dB depending on the dithering and kill the quantization artifacts (which humans notice better than you might think). The noise ought to be enough below the signal that it is not noticeable.
However if you don't have a highly limited signal, then it makes more difference. If you had the same resolution but have a quiet passage that is -20dBFS, now you only have 40-50dB of SNR, and you are probably going to notice that. The higher the dynamic range of the audio, the more it'll matter to have dynamic range in the recording format.
That 16-vs.-24 page that you quote is about music recording and production. In that application, yes, 24 bit audio is very valuable. Similar issues apply in digital photography: 16 bits per color channel are valuable for capture and subsequent editing, but for showing the end product, 8-bit JPEGs are fine.
Are you adequate?
I've always considered Apple products overpriced. I'm assuming your use of the term 'headphones' means you're using actual over-the-ear types, not just earbuds, as I had incorrectly referred to what came with my phone. My Bold drives my MDR-7506's well enough that I find max volume uncomfortably loud on an airplane. Maybe part of Apple's success is not putting money into things most people don't notice.
I once took an excursion to Reddit, and later HN. Unlimited up/down voting sucks when dealing with a hive-mind.
"Coming soon in 2012, Apple Retina Sound on your iPod. Just like our Retina Display(tm) with ppi beyond human vision, we give you sound bitrate beyond what the human ear can detect."
Apple marketing dept will go nuts over this. Brilliant.
I don't know about anyone else, but I often like to change the pitch/time of music so that I can hear it slower/lower/higher/faster. You then hear many intricacies in detailed music which you otherwise may not catch on to. It also gives a slightly different atmosphere to the tune too.
So for those reasons, I would prefer a 88Khz upgrade, and not 24-32 bit, though both would be nice.
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I would take the higher quality sound especially if it didn't cost more...
There's no real downside, disk space and bandwidth is plentiful, if you play it on lowend hardware it wont be any worse than the low bitrate mp3s but will sound better on decent enough hardware.
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As well as pop/rock/rap.
Prokofiev; The Montagues and the Capulets springs to mind. He pretty much uses all of the range available. Try this one. Stick it on whatever sound system you have and turn the volume up.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljOMXgfflRI
About half way through it gets very quiet, sounds shit on many audio systems, you may not even be able to hear it. It gets crucified on MP3.
I listen to all sorts of music, I love Queen, ACDC, Rainbow, Gorillaz, Mozart, Prokofiev, Scott Joplin, ABBA, Paul Brady, Snoop Dogg etc etc etc etc etc. The music world isn't all Katy Perry.
Just because there's no benefit for ACDC, doesn't mean there's no benefit for Mozart.
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Why are they doing this?
What better way to get everyone to buy all the music that they've already bought (and love), again, than to re-release it with "higher quality."
Additionally, if the files you download are "locked" or encumbered with DRM, then not only is it less likely that they will be shared by you, but it also means you are unlikely to download 24bit audio. If you want DRM-free music, you have lower (CD) quality music there....
That's not really comparing apples to apples, given that there is an important difference in the output circuits of the tape and the CD. Early CD players were pretty notorious for poorly-designed D/A, filter, and buffer amp design.
Moreover, you are picking the one you liked, not necessarily the one that is most accurate. Reel-to-reel maximum performance and CD maximum performance is pretty well understood and CD has a hypothetically *much* better accuracy, particularly at high frequencies.
I have a few songs in DTS (5.1 surround sound) format, the experience is pretty good with decent speakers... How come more music isn't released in this format?
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Apple will make this work as a tried and tested sales methodology.
"Our FLACs go to 24" is the same "Our amps go to 11" marketing principle that has fanbois creaming their knickers to get hold of iGadgets today.
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Sure there are empirical ways to prove that one format has more dynamic range than another, just like you can prove 1080 via HDMI is better than 1080 via component, HOWEVER in practice, unless you are an elitist erudite prick who "can't stand to not watch or listen to the BEST" the reality is that most of us won't care.
And for the record its got nothing to do with not knowing any better or being ignorant of the quality difference.
It has to do with biology.
Take that wrist watch, if you were aware of it ALL THE TIME it would drive you crazy, but our nervous system has automatic processes which filter out continuous stimuli, like the watch or the hiss of a low quality recording.
Now I get annoyed when I can hear compression artifacts, but since I switched to high quality VBR, I rarely hear them and that's the point.
For 90% of the music out there, this is adequate for most listening environments.
There will always be a market for people like those audi commercials...."this cuestick is clad in the leather from a pigmy albino hossenpheffer's nutsack and is so rare that there are only three made each year"....whatever.
I am all about the minimum effective dose because once you get above a certain point you are just lining pockets that don't belong to you. Some might consider this aspirations of mediocrity, but I disagree and prefer instead to think in terms of efficiencies.
Why spend more when what I have is perfectly adequate for any and all of my requirements?
Clearly, this is why we have credit. Because our bodies and our budgets conspire to always level the playing field.
The CD player used was a Tascam CD-301, probably the best CD player at the time for under $2000, but I don't know how that compares to more modern players. I recall that we carefully adjusted the gain on the mixer and used a studio quality mixer with ample headroom (probably a Mackie or Studiomaster). The sound that we preferred was a smoothness, and that's about the best we could describe it. We freely admitted that it could have been an EQ effect, similar to tube amp purists, but it didn't seem that way - the CD just had a harshness which, after hearing it well, we began noticing on samplers. Keep in mind we went into the test thinking we would prefer the CD - we were 19 year-olds who thought tape was an obsolete/budget product (excluding ultra-high end studio stuff).
I once took an excursion to Reddit, and later HN. Unlimited up/down voting sucks when dealing with a hive-mind.
I don't know which model iPods you have but mine (two Nano 3G "Fat Boy" and the current 160GB classic) have *no* problem driving my 32-ohm Grados. A headphone amp stuck in the analog side makes no discernible difference in the quality or max volume. None.
Of course it make a difference if you use the Wadia dock, an external DAC, and *then* a headphone amp. But that bypasses the iPod analog completely and in my case it's back to bitwise-identical to the original CD when it enters the DAC.
Brett
No, really I don't. I listen to music I like because I LIKE THE MUSIC, not because I like the fidelity with which the music is reproduced. I'd rather listen to a third-generation analog magnetic tape recording of an AM radio broadcast of The Beatles than a pristine 24-bit digital reproduction of the latest American Idol winner's latest single.
Even if you can't tell the difference, other people who have experienced 24-bit sound can. And not everyone listens on just portable devices with crappy earbuds. This isn't so much about existing catalogs, it's about the FUTURE, and fortunately Apple doesn't see that we should be limited to the CD format. Any reputable studio is going to mix in a 24-bit or 32-bit environment, and then they have to crunch it down to 16-bit 44.1khz. Why squeeze it down and lose fidelity if you don't have to?
This is the stupidest thing I've heard in a long time.
16 bits per channel gives you a whopping 96dB or so of dynamic range.
All popular and contemporary music has crap compressed out of the dynamic range so you'd be lucky if you could get a discernable 20dB of range. Classical music needs a lot more, but not 96dB. Maybe 60 or 70dB.
You would need as quiet a listening environment as an empty concert hall, and a very high powered amp turned up loud, to even hear as much dynamic range as is represented by 16 bits.
And they think adding more even dynamic range than that is a good idea?!
If they wanted to make a difference to sound quality, they should increase the sample rate to 48kHz, or hey go why not crazy and go to 96kHz. It will still not sound any different to the average person, but at least the difference can actually be detected and measured with the right equipment.
This is just a prelude to the new Apple iEars implantable neural audio interface (with full DRM and iAd support) that they're going to sell you so you can fully appreciate this exciting new bandwidth. Then there will be the iEars TruSeven 7.1 channel version, which involves drilling another six holes in your head so you can actually experience BluRay Movies the way that God intended.
The Genius Bar guys can get you set up with an appointment at your nearest AOSC (Apple Outpatient Surgery Center).
G.
Have signed up only to comment. Bollox! Show me dubstep or Hip-hop or D&B that has a dynamic range of more than 60 dB and I'll pleasure you till you get fed up. Mahler 8 needs 120 dB as does, er, not much else, except a jet going from ignition turned off to ignition turned on. What do I know? Not much, except I'm Director of Undergraduate Studies in Music and Sound Recording at a major UK University, which means I know jack shit.
2 Mac Pros, MBP Retina, 2x Mac Minis, ATV, IPad 3. Nexus 4 phone (WTF?)
After reading the article and seeing the typical discussion of audio quality I decided to go back to my trusty vinyl. I put Orion by Metallica which has some nice subtle effects at the beginning. Specifically there is a washboard like electronic effect on the 3 chord intro E5 & Bm/D & Ebm that can be heard on the vinyl record. Going to youtube or from an mp3 demo the intro is much more subdued and all you can hear are the muted chords. When the drums enter on the record you hear a distinct crash of the cymbals where on the mp3 and youtube you hear what sounds like a tambourine or a tin salt shaker. Also I play my records at around -8 db that same -8db for a youtube video or mp3 would blow my ears out. Those I play at around -28 to -30db. There is a difference and what people need to look for isn't that a different exists but rather which one includes more natural artifacts like hearing fingers slide along guitar strings or when a singer takes a breath. Nirvana's Unplugged album is a great example as well. The CD includes a lot of background noise and the talk in between the tracks but it still seems like the sound engineers played around with the sound and some things are difficult to hear. I don't have this on vinyl but I would be curious to know if some of the recordings subtleties are easier to pick up on in a non over-engineered vinyl master.
There is or can be built a machine that can simulate any physical object. -Church-Turing principle
99.9% of music sold is compressed into the top half of the spectrum
Are you aware that the "top half of the spectrum" as you call it would be a loss of only a single bit of resolution? 15-bit instead of 16-bit?
Just saying...
"His name was James Damore."
I was amazed at how good the headphones that came with my BlackBerry Bold 9000 are, as well as the quality of the output of the phone.
I doubt that they use more than 12bit dacs anyway.
SoAnIs from hydrogenaudio also gives an interesting perspective on the 24-bit thingy.
24-bit precision gives you about 16.77 million values. Assuming a total groove width of 50 x 10^-6m, the maximum movement of the cutter is physically bounded at about half that. Much more and the cutter will be in the space for an adjacent groove. Thus, 50 microns width divided by 16.77 million gives us about 3 x 10^-12m, i.e. ~0.03 angstroms.
The diameter of a hydrogen atom is 1.0 angstroms (1 x 10^-10m). That would make the resolution of a 24-bit digital signal equivalent to an analog cutter whose resolution is just about 1/30 the width of a hydrogen atom. Sadly, this seems to be physically impossible, as none of the particles smaller than atoms are stable enough to be used in records.
Of course, records aren't made of hydrogen, they're made of the polymer pvc. One molecule of pvc is about 100,000 angstroms. This means that, if the cutters were actually removing single pvc molecules the vinyl records would have about 11 bits of resolution. Sadly, they don't get even that precise, though I'm not sure the actual precision. To get down to a record made of hydrogen atoms (possible under very low temp/very high pressure I suppose) one would need 19 bits. Anything beyond that is useless as long as the laws of physics hold.
Therefore, all other things being equal, digital is superior to vinyl. That said, mastering on CDs is often terrible while the mastering on records is often made somewhat better. This varies from CD to CD and record to record, and CDs are technologically far superior to records.
We don't really need 24-bit recordings. We need the producers to use 24-bit in the studio, and then a nice 16-bit final output with dithering, and we have all the dynamic range we really need.
16-bit gives you about 90 dB. That's enough to go from "barely audible in a quiet room" to "starting to make your ears hurt". It's enough dynamic range, really.
But look up the "loudness wars" and find that much music being sold these days doesn't even use all that dynamic range. They compress the daylights out of the music to make it "louder".
So, I'm sort of interested in the 24-bit standard, if and only if it implies that the music will be produced with some actual dynamic range. If Rush makes a new album, they can release the CD with the dynamic range compressed away to nothing; and they can release the 24-bit mastered with some actual dynamic range.
Will this actually happen? Who knows. But I'm cautiously optimistic. This will give the studios the chance to release two completely different mixes, the mass-market one that "has to be loud" and the one marketed at audiophiles which "has to be clean". I don't spend $2000 on a power cord for my stereo, but I do appreciate a clean mix, so I hope this does work out.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
You never cease to amaze me with how you can squeeze extra pennies out of your already-overpaying customers.
A normal tech company would have moral qualms, like the human ear's inability to distinguish between a 16- and 24-bit audio file, but not you! You proudly flaunt it and just dive right in misleading your customers that it is somehow 'better quality' because now your volume increment is 1/16777216 instead of 1/65536 of max volume.
Never mind that many of your source files and master copies are nowhere near that quality, speakers that normal people use(specifically the ones in your computers and earbuds) are not capable of reproducing that fine of a detailed sound, and loss from wires and digital transmission far exceeds any quality improvement of your extra bits.
You just go on with your bad self!
If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits
A correctly mastered 16-bit file wouldn't have any audible difference compared to the 24-bit file anyway, unless we're talking measurable differences instead of differences you can actually hear. I'd rather see an increase in the samplerate, but preferably both.
I'd refer that the loudness war (dynamic compression) end:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_range_compression
I listen to mostly classical (though some jazz and rock), and there are such things are pianissimo and forte. That idea seems to have been lost at some point along the way.
Yes, the encoder is very important. Use LAME, not some crappy one.
I tend to encode at 320 kbps, though, simply because I really don't care about the disk space that frickin audio files are taking. My entire music collection is 32 gigs and sits happily on a mostly empty NAS. ;)
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
Pirated 128kbps MP3s? Dude you can easily pirate 24bit FLAC recordings of vinyl, reel to reel, etc
16bit audio is fantastic. Or it was until the recording studios started compressing the audio range because of the "loudness war". Going to 24bit audio won't improve that until the recording studios to stop the range compression.
Life is not for the lazy.
If this development came from an Android music store, this would be praised is "why Android is better than Apple - they sell better-quality music!". But because it's Apple doing it, it's "evil".
If someone is convinced that evil is defined by the source rather than by the effect, that person should quit tech and become a preacher. What the heck, there's more money in it and you have a better chance of getting laid.
Everybody gets what the majority deserves.
Not on Napster through AOL you couldn't!
I once took an excursion to Reddit, and later HN. Unlimited up/down voting sucks when dealing with a hive-mind.
Wait, Let It Be - did you mean Leave It? Let It Be was The Beatles, and I've just never really been a Beatles fan.
I once took an excursion to Reddit, and later HN. Unlimited up/down voting sucks when dealing with a hive-mind.
CDs such because they aren't mastered to accurately represent the sound, they're mastered to make the sound louder at the expense of dynamic range. DVD-Audio/SACD didn't take off because 24-bit encoding is better, it's because the discs were mastered for audiophiles, not the mass-market.
Apple shouldn't be arguing for 24-bit masters, they should be arguing for masters with decent audio.
The gold reflective material doesn't make it sound better today, it's supposed to make it sound better than other CDs 20 years from now.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
24bit is irrelevant if you use a lossy format like MP3 or AAC. If you use raw PCM (WAV, AIF...) or lossless FLAC you may feel the difference in a very good sound system.
I have an entry level audiophile system and I can assure that a lot of the records hold a shitty sound the will not benefit with 24bits/192KHz.
Moreover, in my town there are almost no hi-fi sellers because everybody listens music in portable devices with dubious quality.
The way records are being made has changed since the beginning of the dominance of MP3. One of the consequences is that producers focus in strong bass and light high because in a compressed MP3 those are the most hitted freqs...
In a low end system if you reduce the sample rate to 32KHz (from 44KHz) you will not feel the difference and they talk of 24bits... This is pure BS.
In the 80's even with analog systems sound quality was almost the same as today.
Math is beautiful... e^(pi*i)+1=0
I don't want to locked down by any file format that is going into obsolesce. Give me tags with FLAC and album art ( like hdtracks.com ) or give me straight studio master .WAV. If you are going to DRM the hell out if it and call it an upgrade no thanks Apple. I know I spent $40,000+ on my stereo equipment. Currently use a Logitech Squeezebox Touch fed into a DAC and play 24/96 FLAC archives from tons of web labels. Apple has waited too long IMHO. The only Apple product I have is the iPad I am typing on. Portable for me is listening to Rhapsody on my HTC android phone over the t-mobile HSPA network. Anyone seriously into high end audio uses a Linux solution like the squeezebox touch embedded Linux platform, or a optimized net book, most guys and gals I know that are audiophiles like me love FLAC, and are not going back (no pun intended). Long live ALSA!
Steve
Okay, I'll buy that. Good thing I made FLAC backups of all my CDs, which I actually only finally did in the last year or so. Can't speak highly enough of EAC - it encoded songs that wouldn't play on even a computer CD-ROM anymore with very few audible artifacts.
I once took an excursion to Reddit, and later HN. Unlimited up/down voting sucks when dealing with a hive-mind.
and my notebook speakers will sound so much better, with my new Monster USB cable: http://www.google.com/products/catalog?rlz=1C1CHFX_enUS396&q=monster+digital+cables&um=1&ie=UTF-8&cid=13577606728003664351&sa=X&ei=ibNlTf-tFIK8sAOt-onuBA&ved=0CEYQ8gIwBA#
My favorite quote doesn't fit into 120 characters. Now no one will like me.
The bit depth (read: word length) of an audio file defines its dynamic range. CDs are 16 bit, which is 96dB of dynamic range, minus a little dithering at the bottom end. 24 bit would get you 144dB, which is unusable in any audio system. Even 96dB of dynamic range is barely achievable with extremely low noise electronics in very well sound proofed rooms. This is almost certainly a moot point given that most modern recordings have about an 8dB crest (peak to average) factor.
Increasing the sample rate a little is probably a good step, but again modern AD/DA converters deal with this quite well. Properly reconstructed (read: oversampled) there should be no difference to our ears (which can barely hear past 18kHz) from an increased sample rate, and there is a much greater burden on the processing hardware. File size will also go up.
The real issue is that neither of these specifications defines audio quality. iTunes Plus did increase audio quality by doubling the bitrate of the AAC codec. I cannot hear the difference between CD and 256AAC. If I can't hear it it's unlikely than almost anyone can.
--Bennett Prescott
Former Lord Of Packets
For classical music there is going to be a big difference with the right equipment.
Hey dont complain its a good move, even if you cant hear the difference.
I'll tell you this for nothing, I've an SACD player, and I use iTunes in my main area, and I would _greatly_ enjoy 24-bit music. I lament often how little is available on SACD and DVD audio. I can most certainly tell the difference. I've recordings of some music on both SACD and regular CD, and without knowing which was going in, I could tell you which was which. I have a dedicated DAC hooked up to my Mac, and even with current high bit-rate AACs it makes a big difference from just hooking up my amplifier to the audio out port. 24-bit files would be sweeeeet.
Everyone is living in a personal delusion, just some are more delusional than others.
Back when the CD standard was promulgated I recall Steve Eberback (the designer of the excellent DCM loudspeakers) lamenting the quality.
Played through the flat-transient-response speakers his company produced, the 16-bit LINEAR encoding caused annoyingly audible artifacts on any program material with significant dynamic range (such as classical music), both in terms of distortion and bringing up the noise floor (which is acoustic-illusion killing). Meanwhile the too-close-in Nyquist frequency of 22.01 kHz required antialiasing filters which were normally far from phase-flat, time-smearing broadband percussive sounds and mushing-up the splendid crispness that the speakers were capable of reproducing.
They still did better than virtually all of the competition. But CD program material ate most of their advantage over even moderately-good competitive products.
I hope they not only raise the number of bits per sample but also raise the sampling rate. It would be nice to again experience some of the amazing effects these speakers could produce, but with new program material.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
So arguably this would not be targeting me. That's not to say I don't appreciate music - on the contrary, I almost went into music as a profession - but I don't mind that my music isn't at CD quality when I listen to it on my iPod. I can't tell the difference between $5 Big Lots ear buds and $30 ones from Apple (although I can tell the difference between the $3 and the $5 ear buds at Big Logs, and that extra $2 is most definitely worth it.) I can tell the difference between the sound on those $5 ear buds and a pair of $100 headphones, but I don't *mind* the loss of sound quality, and I'll take the convenience of my seashells over the bulk of very good headphones any day.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
Having working on PCM audio recording there is a few things I want to point out. 1. Studios don't record in 24Bit. They use a 32Bit float to avoid clipping. Once the file of normalized it can be converted to a 24Bit int. It's a small point because it doesn't really change the quality but it's good to know. 1. The only reason to ship audio above 40KHz in to allow room for a lowpass filter to cut anything above 20KHz. 44100Hz doen't leave a lot of room for the cutoff and that's why 96000KHz is nice. Anything above that is useless to the listener and can only be useful in production. I could go on about 16bit Vs. 24bit and sampling rates in PCM audio but I don't think people would care.
There are many reasonably priced audio components that produce great audio..As an example, the Grado SR60 headphones make great sound-and list for 80 dollars. Ebay has many hybrid tube/mosFET headphone amplifiers that sell in the 50-70 dollar range (including shipping). An example is here: http://cgi.ebay.com/Valve-Class-Tube-Headphone-Amplifier-pre-Bravo-V2-h-/250778333891?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item3a638db2c3. Or, for piortable use, this one is great-and also inexpensive: http://cgi.ebay.com/Micro-Cmoy-headphone-amp-Opamp-2227-Amplifier-/250777688383?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item3a6383d93f If you know how to, you can also roll your own pretty cheaply-start with the National Semiconductor LM4562 dual opamp.True audiophile performance for $1.10!
Man, those cables will be heavy on the ears.
Just for the shock value that they exist and that someone is paying these prices.
Audioquest: 8 feet of speaker cable for $8,450
Pear Cable: 12 feet for $7,250
Here's 3 meters for $12,700
A voltage stabilizer for $11,500 (what is that?)
A turntable cartridge for $20,000
And here's the winner: 8 ft of speaker cable for $39,999
You can't make this stuff up
Under the assumption that they're sticking with AAC, it has no bitrate. Nothing, nada, zip. Instead it is compressed in the frequency domain and quantized however is best.
If you have a high end stereo system with a tube DAC that takes optical in. You could then transmit that 24-bit via airport express to audio out to your fancy DAC. And yes you would hear the difference. You would also hear all the bad recording too though.
This whole audiophile thing is also present in the car industry. Yes, there are plenty of scams like putting a magnet around your fuel line to improve performance BUT there is another side to the story.
There are those who claim the cost difference between a Mercedes Benz and a Rolls Royce isn't worth the supposed quality difference and that nobody's ass is senstive enough to feel the difference in the seats.
This is a statement only made by those who never have sat in a Rolls Royce. I have. It is worth the extra money. No, I don't have that kind of money but if I had, it would be worth it.
Same with some parts of audiophile equipment. There is a lot of crap, like monster cables. But at the real high end you are simply talking about equipment that is better produced for marginal gains that some find worth it. Take the RR again and say that it is 50% more comfortable but 1000% more expensive. Is that worth it? Yes, to some. Just as you pay through the nose for a performance car that goes only marginally faster then my clunker (if you push it off a hill, and mind you, you got to PUSH downhill) and some find it worth the money.
I had my own demonstration of relative sound quality in a large theather where the sound engineer claimed that MP3 players made horrible noise. He was right, hook up an early iPod to a theather system and you can hear the damage MP3 and subpar hardware do. Hooked my Cowon S9 and it was passable BUT not as good as the sound from the life orchastra with zero compression and other crap.
A good sound system sounds a lot better then a crap one. A high quality sound system sounds marginally better then a good sound system. If you then listen to crap music that is compressed to hell to create the wall of sound effect, then you might say it is not worth the money.
But there are people who can hear the difference. But it is also an area where there are a lot of scams. But because throwing a magnet in your tank is a scam doesn't mean a Koenigsegg Trevita is a scam.
Just try this excersise, listen with a half decent sound system to the difference between the voice of a reasonably talented pop starlet with big tits and a REALLY good singer selected for nothing but his/her voice. Even singing the same piece. You will hear a difference. Same with better audio equipment. But that isn't to be found in gold cables or other gadgets but speakers that fit correctly so they don't vibrate and are varied enough and fast enough to produce the sound.
But this doesn't have to cost a fortune. But we are talking to people here who think the speakers in their cheap TV produce a decent sound... there are the monster cable suckers and there are the completly deaf. Both should be whipped.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Despite all the hoopla the human ear is not capable of distinguishing between 24 bit and 16 bit audio that has been properly recorded. There have been all sorts of double blind tests verifying this, including some very convincing demonstrations. The simple fact is that the physiology of the ear is incapable of sensing the difference unless there are some other differences.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Audio_CD#Audible_differences_compared_to_PCM/CD
On top of this, add in the lousy recording practices in the popular music industry, various types of lossy compression, and the crappy transducers most of Apple's customers use and the high probability of hearing damage from using ear buds at high volumes all day long and what you have here is simply fraudulent marketing.
I'll have to buy the White Album again!
Early CDs were made before the benefits of dithering to increase resolution were fully realized.
Modern CDs sound much better because of improvements in the understanding of how to optimize the recording and playback process.
Just based on what I hear, I'd say they could improve the sound quality by switching from aac to mp3. I don't care what the tests say. The files I encode using the "iTunes Plus" setting seem to have distortion and the ones I do with CDex and the LAME encoder come out right. And I guess I was free from the placebo effect because after everybody said AAC was better, I was expecting it to be better.
...now if only Apple manufactured current generation audio hardware with sensible response ranges. I'm glad that the quality may go up, but there's little they offer to actually enjoy it on. My current iPod sounds worse than my refurbished Sansa e240.
My home stereo system has migrated to streaming files from my macs to very high quality components and speakers utilizing wifi AirPort Express Base Stations.
I would love to have higher quality 24 bit music streaming through this system. What I don't know is what are the limitations of the wifi components. It may not make much sense but I have gone this way out of connivence.
Guess what I am trying to say is the whole system need to be upgraded for their to be a real market.
Sure a $10,000 super-hifi system is better than a 128kbps mp3 on stock iPod earbuds, but neither one is going to approximate actually listening to live music. Imagine an ABX test of a live orchestra versus the best hifi setup money can buy. I would rather get decent but inexpensive audio equipment and save my money for live performances.
Of course, this is probably more significant for me than to most people because I listen to jazz and classical music, which are designed to be played live. Most recorded music, as many commenters have pointed out, is mixed for listening on a typical consumer setup in a typical living room, or on mobile devices. The only time you're really going to benefit from very high-end audio equipment is when you have a recording designed for that type of setup. If you listen to a lot of "contemporary classical" electronic music designed for stereo speakers, then more power to you. But even in this genre, many of these pieces are really designed for specific setups using dozens of speakers in very specific arrangements, which cannot realistically be replicated in the home.
I spent several days with a high end MP3 player and some very high end sound isolation earbuds- not the rubbish Ipods and "comes with the product" speakers. I tested three versions of encoding: MP3@192kbps, MP3@320kbps and FLAC. I tested this across all styles of music using multiple EQ settings on the player. The conclusion I came to is that I could definitely hear the difference between 192 and 320kbps MP3. However, I could not hear the difference between 320 and FLAC. My personal conclusion was that the best thing Joe average can do if you want to improve listening quality is buy some decent headphones. The ones I bought cost $500 and are worth every cent. Sound isolation is not for everyone but by god does it make a difference to audio quality. The extra storage space required for FLAC is a waste compared to what (if any) incremental improvement in sound quality people with better ears than mine may detect. This proposal by Apple is just a means to milk more money from fools. And it will most likely work.
The same sort of folk who shell out big bucks for Monster Cables will certainly convince themselves that it is worth it. Besides, Apple will be able to sell newer, higher storage capacity devices that will be able to store the newer larger high quality music files.
So, if I switched to CDs, will I hear children being molested in any other of Michaels works? Sorry to not mod you up, but I spent my points on cheap whores and crack.
so no one else have an issue with paying more for recordings you already have a license for?
already own the album? whatever!
wanna play that track in Rock Band? ka-ching!
again in RB2? ka-ching!
want it in ipod format? ka-ching!
again in 24bit format? ka-ching!
Because most /.ers have heard better.
Rather then listening to a recording through multi thousand dollar stereo with fancy EQ, gold plated doodads and other paraphernalia, I'd rather listen to some guitar, drums and actual vocals produced in real time to the maximum possible range of the instruments for 1/10000th of the cost.
Yes dear audiophiles, I can cheaply replicate what you spend so much effort and money by going down to the local rock pub while at the same time having a good time and even possibly getting a shag. You've got jazz and blues nights, opera's and orchestra's with a greater dynamic range then the most expensive audio equipment could ever produce, although I think you'd be a bit harder pressed to find a temporary partner at the Philharmonic orchestra but stranger things have happened..
Anywho, this is why we mock you.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
On that note, let's give a round of applause to the compact disc. It is still the standard in consumer audio and about to turn 30 years old. Not many technologies can boast as much.
There is no difference between the two files, definitely not on 99.9999% of commercially available gear.
The last time Apple made changes to file formats on Itunes it changed the pricing structure to make them more expensive. That is what these "talks" are really about, how Apple and the content producers can make a price increase more transparent and less noticed. Audiophiles arguing about bitrates and cables ignore the fact that 99.999% of people don't care and will listen to it on their cheap Ipod audio controller through cheaper Apple earbuds so there will be no difference to audio quality what so ever. It's about hiding a price increase.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
It has problems digital doesn't. Higher SNR, things like wow and flutter (inaccuracies in table speed) and so on. People also never do good comparisons with it. You'll see some vinyl head talk about how good their setup sounds compared to CD. Then you find out it is a $2000 table, $1000 stylus, and $10,000 camp and speakers. Ya sure that sounds better than a $20 CD player hooked to $50 speakers. However let's take an apples-to-apple comparison. Try a nice DVD-A player, to a nice processor with room correction, a nice amp and nice speakers. Spend the same price on digital as you do on vinyl and it'll be far superior.
Also digital never degrades. Even with the best setups (short of using a laser which does exist) a record will degrade each time it is played. Digital is as good the 500th time as it is the first time.
You physically can't distinguish between a properly dithered 16 bit CD and 24 bit original recording. Extra dynamic range does not matter for several reasons:
1. No _analog_ path can realize this dynamic range. Not even studio and crazy-ass high end gear. It's not physically possible due to non-linearities and non-zero noise floor.
2. Today's music is mastered to be "loud", which basically means dynamic range compression gets applied to CDs. There's no reason to believe it will not be applied to this new format.
3. Even if you could theoretically reproduce 24 bit audio properly, you wouldn't hear the difference in double blind testing.
24 bit makes sense for _recording_ and _mixing_, because you need the extra bits to avoid overflow and numerical issues. Heck, if you're hell bent on having more bits, 18 bit, or non-linear quantization in 16 bit could give you more dynamic range than we currently know what to do with.
96KHz, on the other hand, makes much more sense to me. At 96KHz you can get away with much less steep (and therefore much less "ripply" in the passband) low pass filters when both recording and playing back the signal (and downsampling, if needed). These filters are necessary to prevent aliasing artifacts, same as low pass optical filter in your digital camera, except at 96KHz even if there are artifacts, you wouldn't hear them anyway.
Yes's 90125 is just not a good sounding CD. I have about half a dozen different versions of it in that format--US remasters, Japanese remasters, Gold CD--and not a one of them sounds good. Love the music, hate the engineering. If you want a Yes CD that sounds good, try the recent Mobile Fidelity remaster of The Yes Album. It's fairly expensive, but it's shockingly good. Never expected that old album to ever sound that nice.
Unfortunately even when higher fidelity formats came out, the same crappy mastering issues were still around. Sticking with Yes, they released Fragile as a DVD-Audio title. It sounds terrible; exaggerated treble, sibilance, just an awful sounding release. Sony did the same thing with SACD, plenty of those remasters don't sound better than good quality transfers onto CD did. Proper mastering is more important than bit rate. But if you get the combination of good engineering, mastering, and a higher than CD quality release, some of those can sound really amazing.
The Tom Petty back catalog is being made available in 24-bit FLAC as well as several other formats.
I'm speaking as someone who uses a 64gb Ipod Touch as my mp3 player I put up with the poor sound quality because I like the Apps I can have to hand but seriously if anyone asked me to recommend a music player on sound quality alone I'd have to point them to Cowon.
Get some decent headphones - download the linn samples - it's clear
Oh crap, I came late to comment in this story, and after reading all the +3 comments I got so sad. It looks like slashdot has been invaded by a bunch of old techno-farts. Every comment is mainly a rant. It deffinitely shows how the Slashdot community has grown up and now it is only old people (who use email).
No wonder why a lot of people has moved on to other greener sites :(
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
But that's not the whole story. If the sound level is 140dB, you won't hear anything below 90dB, or perhaps 80dB. So there's only 50 to 60dB of audible bandwidth, which is roughly 8 to 10 bits. So if we used floating point audio (which exists, by the way), 10 bits for the mantissa and 8 for the exponent would be enough.
It seems all the artists on the radio these days are autotuned. This introduces an effect in their voices which makes them irresistably noticeable. I think it is the sound of a baby crying and it is worked into every waveform on the recording. This is a form of subliminal advertising, which is illegal.
Loudness isn't the maximum, it's the average. The loudness war kills the MAJOR point of CDs (extremely high dynamic range, ~100+dB cf Vinyl's ~40dB when new) and moves the low volume levels up and removing that dynamic range.
Clipping has nothing to do with the loudness war.
And 24 bit sound will have even higher dynamic range ( well over 120db, more likely 140dB) but the loudness war still wants the dynamic range to be low to sound loud.
Simple maths, kid.
if your unit is 1, then 16 bits lets you get to 65000 ish. Therefore you can represent 1 unit of difference between any of those 65000 ish numbers. Your resolution isn't any better than that. That dynamic range is log10(65000)*20 dB. Or 96dB in dynamic range at the same resolution.
if you have your unit as 1, then 24 bits gets you 17,000,000 ish. 145dB.
Unless you are sitting there with your hand on the volume knob, twiddling it up and down, you can't get a higher dynamic range than that.
Apple is giving consumers the snake oil the consumers are demanding. That consumers haven't the slightest clue why they want it doesn't matter and never has. There's a profit to be made selling Radium Elixir! Apple once again has found a place where fools can be parted from their money (with a shout out to established audio troll Dr. Dre). At least 24 bit audio isn't going to kill people... I guess that's progress.
I can't see how Apple wouldn't consider it a big shiny win-win and want to milk it. But people, you're all getting played, and the various back-of-the-envelope calculations in this thread have been substantially wrong and/or misapplied (eg: CD dynamic depth only 90dB? first off, 16 bits is a range of ~96dB, but audio perception doesn't work that way--- narrowband dynamic ranges of 120dB are easily encodable on CD because you're confusing naive dynamic depth with narrowband energy and noise density. Shaped dither improves things even further.)
There are precious few ways in which 44.1kHz/16bit audio delivery can be gamed under even ideal circumstances to be called 'insufficient'. Most of them involve purposely poor mastering or exploiting placebo effect. It's no different from all the myths about Edison and Tesla never needing sleep-- people assert what they wish was true ("it's cool!") and believe what they want to believe. Once it's repeated enough times, it becomes fact.
No consumer needs or can hear 24 bit depth. There are situations, idealized situations, where trained listeners can hear the limitations of a 16 bit recording, but only when the recording is fading to of from silence, and only in acoustically isolated surroundings. The quietest home den is not quiet enough. A single incandescent lightbulb in the room is noisy enough to drown out the effect (the filament hums with the AC. CF is worse).
No one (period) can hear > 20kHz without risking permanent hearing damage (20kHz is somewhat past where the 'threshold of perception' and 'threshold of pain' auditory curves cross.) The null hypothesis has been supported by experiment after experiment after experiment. No individual exceptions have been found as yet. The ear canal simply doesn't pass > 20kHz and the basal membrane has no hardware to sense it anyway.
Pros use 24 bit as an intermediate format to avoid quantization noise from building up through chains of hundreds of signal processing effects. As for higher sampling rates... yeah, no one bothers anymore now that reproduction stages have antialiasing filters that work very nicely at 44.1/48kHz. Even pros, at least the ones who base what they do on fact rather than supersition, master at lower rates now. You only need higher sampling rates when the A/D/A design has bad aliasing problems but comparatively good jitter performance. That was occasionally true 20 years ago but not today.
In my youth, my audio purchasing habits were audiophileish.
Then one day, I realized, "Why am I spending so much money so that the crap comes in clearer?"
If it wasn't for the RIAA and their manufactured crap, I'd be an audiophile today. Thanks RIAA!
Apple can finally throw their weight around and get better quality music. Apple can get auto tuners banned, have singers write their own lyrics and bands will no longer be "created" by studio execs.... oh you mean sound quality... who cares then...
"Ones and zeros were everywhere. I even think I saw a two!" - Bender
Headphones or earbuds, the iPod doesn't drive them well, and a headphone amp improves things greatly.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Hmm. We've got an old iPod classic with dock connector and touchwheel, a previous-generation Nano, and a shuffle. The Nano is OK, but the shuffle and the classic iPod both suck as far as audio output. Maybe I should consider getting a newer classic.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
The Monster cable thing has become a meme, but it doesn't hurt to mention that the lamp cables that many manufacturers persist in supplying with their audio equipment are crap. Just spending a few extra dollars for proper cables does actually show noticeable benefits in sound reproduction.
Monster do actually sell cables in a sensible price bracket (as do many other manufacturers), and these products are excellent. However, that doesn't mean that spending twice as much (or 100x for that matter) will reward you with any noticeable improvement. Oh, and while I think of it: gold plated interconnects are made because gold resists corrosion, not because it is particularly good as an electrical conductor. Silver is a better conductor, but it oxidises readily.
If you use anything other than these you're missing out.
Just read the raving reviews.
An improvement in audio quality is nice, but could they put an end to randomly corrupting songs?
Changing the world... one research project at a time.
Easily 90% of my music listening happens in a car. Right there, most of what you could get from better quality recordings/masters is gone anyway due to road noise. Yeah, CDs ripped at 196k, played via iPod, through a tape adapter to my car stereo, and refugees from the loudness wars anyway... not such great quality. But it's cheap, easy, and good enough for what I need.
That's not to say better quality stuff shouldn't be offered - sure, choice is a good thing. But I have to think that there are a bunch of people who are going to get ripped off buying super-high quality tracks that they don't have a prayer of accurately playing on their equipment. Super high bit-rate and dynamic range tracks are the premium gasoline of music.
Wow, lots more commenters than moderators on this thread. I'll add my voice to the din. Sound quality articles catch my interest, from coat hangers to codecs, but I haven't paid much attention to this particular topic. Here's a short list of 24-bit FAQs for end users.
Existing sites like HDtracks.com, linnrecords.com, naimlabel.com, and Society of Sound offer 24-bit files with sample rates ranging from 44.1 KHz to 192 KHz, with 96 KHz being the most popular. Popular formats (in decreasing order of popularity) include FLAC, Apple lossless (ALAC), and WMA lossless.
FLAC seems to have more diverse support, but ALAC has arguably broader support, including iTunes and iPods. WMA appears to compress better than FLAC, which appears to compress better than ALAC. (FLAC's compression levels don't seem to change the ratio much, except at the lowest/fastest levels.) FLAC seems to have the fastest decoder, but ALAC has the handy property that you can simply discard the eight low-order bits (as iPods apparently do). [Sources: Hydrogenaudio Knowledgebase, hvdh at inter.nl.net, and FLAC comparison.]
I also came across some discussion of high-definition compatible digital (HDCD), a patented mastering fad from the late 90s that encodes about twenty bits on a CD, subsequently bought and buried by Microsoft. Apparently there are only two models of machines in the world that can encode HDCD, and they're both discontinued, with replacement parts in jeopardy as well.
Scrounging through CDs in the attic, I found some HDCD CDs from Capitol, High Street (Windham Hill), Red House, Sony, and Warner Bros. Goodwin's High End has an extensive list. As a quick test, I ripped Deana Carter's "Strawberry Wine" to a 16-bit WAV (51.4 MB) with XLD, converted to a 24-bit WAV (77.1 MB) with hdcd.exe (Windows only, but seems to work in WINE), then converted to 24-bit ALAC (56.4 MB) with XLD. I don't have the time or gear for an ABX test right now. The HDCD conversion is noticably quieter, for what it's worth.
Another quick way to try this at home is to torrent the 24/96 FLACs of the The Slip from nin.com (email registration required).
How else do cable companies take a cable made in China for 50 cents, then resell it to an Audiophile for 500$ dollars by saying it is platinum tipped, with gold contacts, shielded using ground unicorn horn, and baptized by the lord our savior baby Jesus.
A close second for actual cool, yet blow your freaking mind backwardness was the selling of computer motherboards to audiophiles that actually had VACUUM TUBES installed on the integrated audio portion of the board for "richer" and more "compelling" sound. So yeah, your actually using vacuum tube and integrated silicon circuits, transistors, etc... on the same board. Nice!
hd music videos, hd concert, hd live shows, tv series
foobar2000 & torrents/soulseek. no use for itunes.
and who cares about studies claiming the average listener cant discern between x bit-rate or y format. these average people arent listening to your music on your system, you are. appreciate what you yourself can hear.
I was amazed at how good the headphones that came with my BlackBerry Bold 9000 are, as well as the quality of the output of the phone.
I doubt that they use more than 12bit dacs anyway.
SoAnIs from hydrogenaudio also gives an interesting perspective on the 24-bit thingy.
I did some digging and it looks like the Bold 9000 uses the Texas Instruments TLV320AIC3106 stereo audio DAC rated at 102 dBa S/N, 16,20,24,32-bit data, and 8 kHz - 96 kHz sample rates. I don't pretend to know if the Bold actually outputs at the full capability of the chip, but why bother using such a chip if you're not going to make the features available?
There is no doubt in my mind that 24-bit and higher is better than anything analog, but I guess I'm old enough that someone will have to prove to me that CD's can be better than reel-to-reel. I'll also add that there is simply no comparison between reel-to-reel and vinyl. Have you ever listened to a good quality reel-to-reel? One roughly the size of a 24" CRT (ca. 1995)? They really do sound quite good,not that I'd ever buy one.
I once took an excursion to Reddit, and later HN. Unlimited up/down voting sucks when dealing with a hive-mind.