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Master Engineer: Apple's "Mastered For iTunes" No Better Than AAC-Encoded Music
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.'"
Total bullshit.
"Digital douchery" (otherwise known as "analysis") is accurate, where as your ears are imperfect perceptions interpreted by your imperfect brain. If you want to deliver useful information to people, you do it digitally and present the results.
So take your hipster nonsense and piss off. Any real audiophile would care about what's accurate and useful.
On of my favourite experiments one of the high-end HiFi magazines did a very long time ago, when CD was new, was to let a group of 'golden ears' audiophiles double blind test CD vs LP. And most of them could reliably distinguish between and prefer LP sound over CD in double blind test (which is good, a lot of people who are hellbent sure they know a difference will fail double blind testing). So far so good. Then they tested with CD-Rs recorded with LP as source.. Now they could no longer tell the difference, and thought the CD-Rs sounded just as good as LP. All that "warm, rich, musical, analogue" sound carried over to the CD-Rs, as they are distortion characteristics of LP playback. It is ok to prefer the sound, but it has nothing to do with CD vs LP or analogue vs digital (and digital is fully capable of reproducing it too if you want).