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Master Engineer: Apple's "Mastered For iTunes" No Better Than AAC-Encoded Music

Posted by timothy on from the ask-the-master dept.

New submitter Stowie101 writes "British master engineer Ian Shepherd is ripping Apple's Mastered for iTunes service, saying it is pure marketing hype and isn't different than a standard AAC file in iTunes. Shepherd compared three digital music files, including a Red Hot Chili Peppers song downloaded in the Mastered for iTunes format with a CD version of the same song, and said there were no differences. Apple or someone else needs to step it up here and offer some true 'CD quality downloads.'"

4 of 312 comments (clear)

  1. Hey, the pirates can help by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    You want CD quality downloads? Yeah, magic keyword "FLAC".

    Piracy: giving you for free what the market won't since the first bestiality video was filmed.

    1. Re:Hey, the pirates can help by ackthpt · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Um, all "Mastered for iTunes" does is allow producers to preview how the final file will sound when placed on iTunes, so that they can make changes to the master file. Not sure what the point of the story is, and it definitely has nothing to do with CDs or FLAC.

      If you are selling it as "Mastered" for a purpose and the quality is identical than it is only "Mastered" for hype and profit.

      I've got some LP singles, which were intended for radio play, back in the day, which are of an improvement over the usually horrible 45 RPM mass productions, possibly better than mass produced LP versions as well. But consider Apple's source is unlikely in most cases to be original mastering materials (who in their right mind would turn over digital originals to Apple?) for them to manipulate for their product (iTunes). Odds are, 95% of their market can't tell anyway because they're hardly audiophiles and are listening through headphones with absurdly limited range and reproduction quality.

      --

      A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
    2. Re:Hey, the pirates can help by rinoid · · Score: 5, Insightful

      CD quality is not at all high audio quality ... if you ask audiophiles.

    3. Re:Hey, the pirates can help by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      The claim in the article is that there is "no difference". This claim can be validated quite easily by simply taking the two sources, with normalized amplitude, inverting the phase of one signal and then summing. What remains of the signal is the difference, or the lack thereof, between the two sources. With digital sources, anything other than a null result is considered "coloration" and we are into subjective territory. The questions then begin with "is the color within the potential threshold of human perception?" And if the answer is "yes", then you cannot rely on a single person's opinion to make a determination about the character of the coloration.