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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.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
Looks like I'll have to bootleg my music collection all over again.
Godaddy is a scam and a ripoff.
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.
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.
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.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
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.
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.
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.
From an audiphile forum:
20% of the money will buy you 90% of the sound...another 30% of the money will buy you another 5% of the sound...you can't buy the remaining 5% of the sound because nobody can agree about what it is.
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.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
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.
128kbit/s at 24-bit! Now excuse me while I crank it to 11.
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
CD have more then enough dynamic range, it's just that it is hardly ever used.
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
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.
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.
5% of the money will buy you 100% of the sound, plus the whole concert experience and maybe a few beers as well.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
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.
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.
Deleted
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.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
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?
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.
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?)
While you're right about almost all that, that people should fix that autistic first, and then correct, moderately priced speakers and amps...24 bit isn't any better than 16 bit.
Humans can only hear a 120db range safely in the first place, although that's misleading. 85 dB long term causes hearing loss...that's rock concert levels. A nearby jackhammer is 100 dB.
No one should be listening to music at over 85 dB in their house. The EPA doesn't want you constantly exposed to sound over 70, at which point they make your workplace give you earplugs. Most people watch TV at 60 dB.
At the defined difference that bit are 'apart', aka, the difference in sound volume when you add or remove a bit, 16 bit is a 96 dB range of volume.
24 bits reduces that difference between 'one bit apart' sounds, but no one's ever demonstrated people can actually tell the difference. People's ears are simply not sensitive enough to tell. In fact, 'dividing 96 db by 18-19 bits' is the hypothetical best hearing people can have, and very few have ever shown that, so at best we need 19 bit music.
But even that's silly. People shouldn't be listening to music at the 96 dB range anyway...they should have turned the volume down, which already reduces the difference between 'one bit apart' sounds.
Strangely, it's easy to do the math. Each extra bit is lets you divide the range twice as much, and each 10 dB is twice the volume. So a 16 bit range at 96 dB, reduced by 30 dB to 66 dB, cuts the range needed to be covered by an eighth, so gets three more bits in 'exactness', so is the equivalent of a 19 bit signal, which near is the theoretical max anyone can distinguish sounds.
Unless you're destroying your hearing because your music is turned up too loud, 24 bit won't do anything. (And if you are doing that, you will rapidly destroy your hearing enough that 24 bit still won't do anything.)
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
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