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."

Comments

Quasi-audiophile here

[swordgeek]

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.

Re:In other words

[boristhespider]

A year or two back I decided to actually test where I hit transparency on MP3s encoded with LAME as it then was. I thought I'd get transparency at somewhere between 192kbs and 256kbs. I didn't, I got it at roughly 160-170kbs depending on the song. (Too many cymbals does fuck that up but up the bitrate enough and at maybe 210-225kbs cymbals and cornets go transparent for me, too. Maybe I've got cloth ears but since I'm encoding my music for me I don't give the slightest hint of a fuck - also I doubt it, I think the desire to prove how great you are is driving a lot of audiophiles to convince themselves they can hear more than they can.)

A good friend of mine -- a better musician than me by a long way and I'm not actually that bad -- hits transparency at about 150-160kbs on modern encoders, though to be fair he uses OGG by default and I tend to hit transparency down around there on OGG too.

I'd love to see more people who claim they *need* lossless to listen properly do an actual, full double-blind on a range of tpyes of music. I've no issue believing other people hit transparency higher than I do, but frankly I don't believe anyone who says that 320kbs MP3 isn't good enough.

Disclaimer 1: I have FLAC rips of all my CDs except a few which I ripped with iTunes and haven't swapped from ALAC yet. This is partly to have full quality archives of my CD collection, and partly because I'm well aware of the haemorrhaging of quality you get by reencoding compressed files.
Disclaimer 2: Both I and my friend did these double blinds through headphones. Nice quality headphones (Sennheiser over-the-ears, can't remember which model) but headphones nonetheless. The results through a big speaker stack would probably be different and I'd expect to hit transparency a bit higher, at maybe 256kbs again. But I might be wrong and it might be lower (or, of course, it might be higher).
Disclaimer 3: Not really a disclaimer, just that when I record at home I tend to record in 48kHz and 24 bit. That's mainly because my computer is aging. Give me more RAM and I'll happily sit there and record at 96kHz and 32 bit. I'll then downsample it to 16 bit and 44.1kHz because I really don't see the point of doing anything else given I'm compressing everything so that maybe -50dB is the lowest volume my music hits and normally it's between -30dB and -0.1dB...
Disclaimer 4: I'm very loathe to buy anything from online music stores because they're only offering compressed formats, so I've automatically taken a quality hit. But when there's no physical release I buy them anyway because in all reality I can't pretend to tell the difference between a 320kbs MP3 and a CD and nor can I tell the difference between a 192kbs AAC and a CD. But if I ever have to re-encode -- like if I end up back somewhere running Linux and I can't put on MP3 support unlikely as that now seems -- then I know I'll lose some quality. Which may or may not be audible, of course....