Neil Young Pushes Pono, Says Piracy Is the New Radio

Hugh Pickens writes "Kia Makarechi reports that Neil Young isn't particularly concerned with the effects of piracy on artists but is more concerned that the files that are being shared are of such low quality. 'It doesn't affect me because I look at the internet as the new radio,' says Young. 'I look at the radio as gone. Piracy is the new radio. That's how music gets around. That's the radio. If you really want to hear it, let's make it available, let them hear it, let them hear the 95 percent of it.' Young is primarily concerned about whether the MP3 files we're all listening to actually are pretty poor from an audio-quality standpoint. Young's main concern is that your average MP3 file only contains about five percent of the audio from an original recording and is pushing a new format called Pono that would be 'high-resolution' digital tracks of the same quality as that produced during the studio recording. Young wants to see better music recording and high resolution recording, but we're not anywhere near that and hopes that 'some rich guy' will solve the problem of creating and distributing '100 percent' of the sound in music. 'Steve Jobs was a pioneer of digital music, his legacy was tremendous. But when he went home, he listened to vinyl.'"

Comments

FLAC

[Trintech]

Isn't FLAC already lossless? What makes Pono better?

Re:FLAC

[robmv]

Looks like the name is trademarked, so this looks like a way to request money for "Pono compliance"

Re:FLAC

[characterZer0]

FLAC can handle up to 8 channels, up to 32 bits per channel, and a sampling rate up to 655350 Hz.

Redbook CDs use 2 channels, 16 bits per channel, and 44.1kHz sampling rate.

FLAC is lossless from perspectives of much higher quality that CDs.

Re:FLAC

[TheGratefulNet]

flac is fine and it works great. not sure what else you want to improve on it.

it does not have 'trailing garbage' like mp3 does (mp3, without hacks, does not know the *exact* duration of the song; the last block could have unknown padding). this is what causes all the issues in gapless playback.

flac *does* count to the last sample, and so you can append flacs and get gapless playback as the source cd intended.

flac supports 24/192, which is pretty much the highest you'll find for anything commercially buyable. I build and test dacs and i2s systems and all my 24/192, 24/176, 24/96, 24/88.2 stuff is in flac format. and I have to keep testing with all the samplerates and word depths (16, 20, 24, even 32) on my hardware.

flac is even seekable (old shorten (shn) was not as easily).

flac has tags and they are rich enough to be useful.

just not sure what's wrong. probably nothing. what's going on neil? why isn't flac doing it for ya?

"music man, better keep your head,
don't forget what the redbook said."

Re:FLAC

[Tapewolf]

What do the studios record at?

I believe it's 24/96 or 24/192 mostly.

Re:FLAC

[TheGratefulNet]

more and more, they are doing recording to 24bit and 192k (as opposed to 44.1k which we get on cd). most studios agree that there is no need to record/capture higher than 24/192. you keep that format ALL thru out and mix-down to 16/44 only at the last step.

much like you want to capture photos in .raw mode, keep them in 16bit color ALL the way thru pshop, then dither-down to 8bit jpg when you do a 'web save-as'.

studios capture at 24bit (a/d converters are mostly junk beyond 23rd bit anyway) and at 192k or even 320 if they want bragging rights.

some use 'odd' samplerates like 176.4 and 88.2 in addition to the more standard 96. I have files from 'high res' music sellers in pretty much all those formats. its a PITA for DAC and spdif chip guys, let me tell you ...

Re:FLAC

[Desler]

Audiophiles prefer vinyl because they think it gives better sound because they prefer the analog artefacts. In the real world, on average vinyl records and LP players were of pretty low quality and could be easily beaten by a properly mastered CD and even a mid-range CD player hooked to a decent AMP. The benefit is you save thousands of dollars on snake oil audiophile gear.

Re:FLAC

[Anonymous Coward]

You are full of nonsense. First of all, FLAC supports 24-bit samples and up to 655kHz sampling rate. Nobody can hear the difference between 16/44 and 24/96+ if they don't know which is which and vinyl is inferior in every measurable way. You don't have bat hearing so there is no need for high sampling rates and the dynamic range of music fits well within 16 bits. Very few people even have a room/system that can reproduce 16-bits of dynamic range even if there was that much to listen to on the recording. Which there isn't, because almost all music, which didn't have 96dB range in the first place, has had the dynamics mercilessly crushed out of it. The quality of filtering algorithms is such now that has eliminated the any benefit at all to higher sampling rates, as revealed by double blind tests.

Perhaps you meant the music sounded better in the studio right after the musicians/producer finished mixing it and before it was sent off to some jackass who calls himself a "mastering engineer" and crushed the life out of it and clipped all the peaks.

Re:FLAC

[Desler]

It's not rubbish at all. You've fallen for audiophile myth..

Re:FLAC

[roc97007]

Vinyl, um, no. For a lot of technical reasons that no doubt many others will point out, so I will try not to be redundant here.

Directly from studio to flac, then you'd have something substantially better than CD, and substantially better than what vinylphiles think vinyl buys them. Not necessarily better than the studio's original, but at some point one has to say "that's good enough". Vinyl even at it's best (I used to collect the Sheffield Labs disks) is not as good as it could be. CD as a medium *could* be pretty good, (Example: Sheffield's "I've got the music in me") but the mix-down of commercial CDs is often horrible.

I agree with your comment on photographing in raw mode, though. As you said, like audio, you stay at full depth and resolution with no compression artifacts all the way through the process, dithering/compressing at the end. But even there, people will tell you that jpg in-camera is the only way to go. One school of thought is that the camera has all these algorithms for compression and noise reduction and color correction that you aren't using if you shoot raw. To which I respond, "yes, that's true. And that's a good thing." With adequate tools and knowledge of your subject and intended goals, you can always do better than some all-purpose algorithm produced by the manufacturer. I strongly suspect that this is all true for audio production also.

Re:FLAC

[hairyfeet]

For playback yes that's dumb but I think most would agree that for recording guitarists NEED tubes. The distortion from solid state, even $2k+ modeling amps, just sounds like shit. As a bass player i prefer solid state, my Trace Elliot is insanely clean at any volume (weighs a fricking ton though, those 2 ten inches have magnets that are HUGE, its like moving a fricking safe) but I have yet to hear a guitarist, live or recorded, that didn't sound like shit with solid state. In fact the ONLY time I heard one sound really good the guitarist had a pedal using tubes for his distortion and only used the solid state for amplifying the siignal.

Everyone may make fun of tubes but frankly we just haven't figured out how to get a nice fat distortion that responds to the player with solid state, its too brittle and is all or nothing whereas with tubes you can roll off the volume and get dozens of levels of distortion without the harshness. Of course if you WANT harshness, like Black Flag or Pantera then solid states work great, most people don't want their guitar to sound like a chainsaw.

Psychoacoustics and perceptual coding

[Omega Hacker]

He clearly doesn't understand the first thing about the human ear or brain. The *bitrate* is 5% of the original CD, but the human-effective *datarate* is ~95%. That last ~5% of the signal is various harmonics, twitchy bits, and other stuff that the human ear is simply incapable of hearing, but in terms of actual spectral data it's pretty incompressible. Lossy audio compression makes the perfectly legitimate trade-off that you can completely skip that incompressible chunk of the audio signal that the human ear can't actually hear, and save bandwidth.

Modern psychoacoustic models take into account both the physical and mental limitations of the human body. A prime example is "masking", where a louder sound will completely overcome a quieter sound, and do so for a period *longer* than the loud sound. Think of the ear as having an AGC with a slow response: it has to adjust the "gain" for the louder sound and ends up missing the quiet bits before it, then has to adjust the gain back down before it can pick up the quiet bits after. Simple compression trick: toss the quiet bits cause you can't hear them anyway.

What's clear is that he's just fronting for the latest in a long line of "we're better at this than the entire rest of the world combined" snake-oil audio companies with a nifty little lock-in strategy. Just read the list of trademarks.....

This concept has been thoroughly debunked

[MetalliQaZ]

The concept of distributing 24-bit studio recording data directly to consumers in order to get some kind of increase in sound quality has been thoroughly debunked. See this Slashdot article: Why Distributing Music As 24-bit/192kHz Downloads Is Pointless

That article is well worth the read.

Not a step up.

[pavon]

No, it's not a step up. No-one has ever been able to reliably distinguish a 24/96 recording from it's downgraded 16/48 version in a properly conducted double-blind test.

It is absolutely necessary to oversample when acquiring data (since all analog filters have some roll-off), and it is good to use higher dynamic range when mixing to keep the repeated rounding errors below the noise floor. But once the final recording it is mastered, there is no benefit to distributing or listening to the result at higher than 16/48.