However, convert that back to.wav, that.wav back to.mp3, rinse, repeat, and there eventually is going to be some audible difference, and more and more the further down the line you go. It's similar to when people traded tapes...an ANA1 (1st generation off the master) sounded a lot better than an ANA5 (5th generation).
But why would you convert back and forth over and over? The downloads from the Phish site are commercial recordings and not for redistribution. From the FAQ:
As with other official Phish releases, you may not copy (except for personal use) or trade files offered through Live Phish Downloads.
--- and ---
Copies are strictly for your own use and you may not make additional copies for other people. Making copies of Live Phish Downloads for others violates our taping policy as well as federal and state copyright law.
Why don't you try reading the replies to your posts?
I've read your replies, and they don't make a lot of sense. You apparently can't understand that you have no legal right to redistribute what you download from the LivePhish.com website. I've tried to explain that to you. The website tries to make that clear. But you just don't get it.
It might help the discussion, and displace you off your soapbox. Oh wait...
Your argument still boils down to: "320kps mp3's are all anyone will ever need. Why?, cause i say so thats why! And look, heres another "guy on the internet" who agress with me, as do his likeminded friends! Science in effect y'all!"
No, my argument was, and is, that you need to do double-blind testing yourself to see if 320kbps MP3 meets your needs and not simply state that "lossless always sounds better" with no scientific evidence to back up your claim.
As to the "guy on the Interent", you are the one who asked if anyone had done such tests. I spent my time to find one example and now you're giving me shit for that. I can't win. What do I have to do? Find every published study on the subject because you're too lazy to do your own research?
You should get on the phone to Sony right now and tell them to stop archiving decades of Columbia analouge mastertapes in their ultra-high banwith SDDS format.
I had no idea that you were archiving recordings for Phish. I thought you were just a consumer who was downloading recordings from a Phish web site. That changes everything.
And i think that phonecall would sound a little...like this:
It would not be nearly as funny as your phone call to Sony where you demand that they make SDDS recordings available to you because, damn it, you are entitled to archival quality recordings of everything that you want to listen to.
I'm not sure what you consider "scientifically valid" but I have done blind testing with my own equipment and I can hear a difference between 320kbps MP3s (yes encoded with lame, not that it matters) and WAVs.
How did you switch from one source to the other? What was your percent accuracy at identifying the MP3 over how many samples? How did you guarantee that the two sources were identically level-matched? It's a mystery to me if your alleged test was scientifically valid. As to claiming that it does not matter which encoder one uses, that simply demonstrates your lack of knowledge about audio compression. There are huge differences between encoders.
Another rationalization on your part because you don't want to believe that anyone else is better than you are in a perceptual sense. That anyone can distinguish differences that you cannot.
Yeah, that must be it. I'm sitting here in my glasses because I'm so perceptually gifted.
Now think about what you just said. If one of us wants to have a sense of superiority, which of us fits the bill better? I never claimed to have superior auditory perceptual ability, hearing, or equipment to yours. But you wasted no time in declaring your supposedly superior hearing and/or listening skills and in making aspersions about the (imagined) quality of my audio equipment. Thank you Captain Ego.
I'm not sure what you consider "high end", but most audiophiles are quite willing to admit that for a given product there are price points above which the law of diminishing returns starts to apply.
Why not admit that some products are simply fraudulently misrepresented and have no bearing on the quality of the music? Good examples would be AC line cords, speaker cables and interconnects that cost hundreds of dollars. Don't believe me? Then read what respected audio designer Frank Van Alstine has to say.
I suspect that you simply have poor audio equipment and don't want to spend any money on anything better and feel the need to rationalize this. The reason that you cannot hear a difference is because your cheap equipment masks the differences that would otherwise be quite obvious.
My speakers are VMPS Super Tower/Rs. Since you brought up the issue of cost, last time I checked (a few years back), they retailed for about $3600 per pair. My amp is a Hafler PRO2400 MOSFET amp. That was an amp sold to recording studios rather than home users. It replaced an Adcom GFA-555 and, despite having less power, has better sound.. My preamp is one that I designed and built using a BUF-03 class-A video buffer, huge toroidal power transformer, and low-dropout regulators. It's stunningly revealing and compares well with many high-end pre-amps.
I don't know (or care) if that's your definition of poor audio equipment. I do know that my speakers, which are still in production in a "Special Edition", received glowing reviews from respected reviewers like Anthony Cordesman (reviewer for Audio, The Absolute Sound, and The Audiophile Voice). My Hafler amp is proudly listed by top-tier recording studios as part of the equipment that they use. It suits my purposes fine.
a few years from now, it doesn't matter that the format is obsolete, because I'll be able to buy a new format?
Right. Saving you money is really not a big concern of mine. I can still play LP records from 50 years ago and you're worried that you won't be able to play an MP3 in a few years? If you are unable to play MP3s in a few years, then you lack the technical savvy to be downloading music. Stick to buying CDs in the mall.
this is a ridiculous flame and i can't believe the moderation on this.
Yes, it is, but you haven't been moderated yet.
the issue is multi-generation copying and preserving the original recording even if that original recording is flawed.
No, it is not. The issue is whether recordings need to be distributed to listeners in a lossless format. You are not supposed to be redistributing what you download.
oh yeah, and if you did any research, you'd know that these are soundboard recordings.
I was referring to the general Phish trading of amateur recordings being traded as SHN, FLAC, or other lossless compressions when the quality does not warrant it.
So what i'm asking you, BUSTER, is: has an "scientifically valid" "are differences audiable" experiment been done or not?
Yes. Individuals have performed such tests and established bit rates at which they became unable to distinguish the difference. Here is one such test. I have never seen any test results in which the listener could, with any statistical significance, identify a 320k MP3 vs. a CD of the same music.
But the important thing is whether you can hear the difference. If you are downloading music for your own enjoyment, it makes no difference whether I, some other random Internet user, or a panel of listeners could hear the difference or not. What matters is whether you can hear the difference. And the only way to be sure when the differences are subtle is with a double-blind test.
Your "power of suggestion" theory needs this experiment and yet you claim it has never been done.
It's not my "theory." It's accepted as scientific fact. Ever heard of "the placebo effect"? That's an example of the power of suggestion. Why do you think that clinical drug trials have a control group who receive placebos? It's so that the the power of suggestion does not cause a patient to imagine drug effects that are not there.
Please don't comment on something you don't know about.
I know about this subject. Most of the live recordings traded did not come from Neumann U89 microphones. Most came from consumer-supplied stuff. Phish tapers are now limited to one deck and one mic stand per taper ticket. Are you trying to tell me that the average Phish taper is putting up a pair of Neumann U89's? What a load.
By the way Neumann U89 microphones are roughly $5000 for a pair, and the other equipment is not cheap either.
Don't exaggerate. They are $4,000 per pair from B&H Photo. Used, they go for about $2,000 per pair. I prefer U87's, but that's personal taste.
I'm just making the point that just because most/all people can't hear an audible effect, doesn't mean that there isn't one there.
If it can't be heard, it is, by definition, inaudible.
It's just like saying there's no point in recording at 24-bit because you can't hear a difference on most stereos, or 96Khz just because it exceeds what Nyquist says we can hear.
That falls into the category of "harmless." If a type of media can hold, say, one hour of music at 24bit/96khz and the recording being released is 45 minutes long, there is no reason to compress it, reduce the sample size, or reduce the bit rate.
But when people are downloading and storing to hard disk, there is a cost in time and storage. It's no problem for those of us with huge hard drives and broadband connections, but I'd hate to see music made inaccessible to those with dial-up connections and more modest storage.
So you disgree that FLAC is suitable for end use. Fine. But a master copy compressed in a non-lossy way helps the sound quality five, ten, fifteen years from now. You aren't thinking about forwards compatibility.
Yes, I am. Phish retains the master copy and they release it in the format-du-jour. People bought Beatles music in the 1960's on LP. Now that CD is out, the studio took their master copies and released CDs. In trading, not everyone needs an archival quality master recording.
And what about the ones who have permission to plug a line feed into an MD recorder direct from the desk?
I think they could require lossless recording, especially if the intention is then to encode it into lossy formats.
All MD recording is lossy. MD uses a compression algorithm called ATRAC. The MD disc has a capacity of 140MB. Without compression, it's 44.1khz/16 bit sampling would allow you to store 13 minutes of audio per disc.
Perhaps they don't want the sound quality to degrade any further than it already has?
So give me evidence that the sound quality is degraded by a 320kbps MP3. Don't just get your sphincter constricted because of the word "lossy." Compression can be lossy without having any audible effect on the sound.
There may or may not be scientifically valid proof that folks can tell the difference between mp3 and cd, but the fact remains that mp3 *is* lossy, and *does* destroy the audio signal.
"Destroy the audio signal"? Talk about a biased statement! Something can be lossy and not "destroy the audio signal." It can destroy the numerical data but have no audible effect on the signal at all. If I take a 24-bit, 96khz recording and drop off the two least significant bits, that's lossy, but it won't make any audible difference at all. "Lossy" does not mean "audibly inferior." It's a computer term which means that it is impossible to reconstruct the original numeric data exactly from the compressed version.
For people who are making music, and want to archive a huge array of samples, or their latest club mix, but don't want to take up a ton of disk space, lossless compression is really useful.
I never said that it was not useful. I sometimes use Monkey's Audio (APE) lossless compression for archival purposes. But not everyone who wants to hear a Phish concert needs an archival copy of it.
Right, people cant do that sort of comparison by themselves to make up their own minds about what they want because, errm, that would require, ya know, actually using your ears and stuff.
You can make up your mind about anything you like. People have made up their minds about tarot card readings and decided that such readings are valid way to plan their lives. Others have made up their minds about magnetic bracelets and have decided that the bracelets are an effective treatment for arthritis. Still others have made up their minds about power cords and decided that $500 power cords improve the sound of their CD player.
Sure, you can make up your own mind, but, having done so, there is no guarantee that the conclusion you have reached is correct.
And as we all well know, actual listenig to stuff is best left to like, scientist type people and stuff.
It's this kind of ignorance of science that scares the hell out of me. Did they even teach science in your school? A scientifically valid test does not mean that the participants are panel of scientists. It means that the test is not flawed or biased.
If you take a group of people and tell them that they are going to hear a CD first and a "lossy" MP3 second, you can play the exact same recording twice and many people will claim, and believe, that the "MP3" was audibly inferior. That's the power of suggestion at work and why it's important to devise a test the rules it out.
You would have enjoyed the dark ages. Back then, there was no "scientific method" and everyone thought the way that you do.
Guess I can use this in class as an example of what can happen to a student when he/she gets his/her stuff published and people actually read it...
It's really just an example of what happens when you publish something in a forum where people can read it, reply to it, and get public accolades for making wisecracks about it.
ogg at 256 or mp3 at 320 is more than enough, and small pipes and short CPUs are much happier.
I have yet to see any scientifically valid, double-blind test in which users could distinguish between a CD and an MP3 at 320kbps. Many of the people that complain about MP3 are doing so for one of three reasons:
1. They heard a low bit-rate MP3 (e.g, 128kbps) or one encoded with a flawed encoder and then judged the entire compression scheme by that.
2. In a vain attempt to sound and feel superior, they complain about a format that satisfies so many others.
3. They understand that the compression is "lossy" and, therefore, convince themselves that they hear losses even though they cannot.
Or it is some combination of numbers two and three. It reminds me of the high-end audio market, which is based on the power of suggestion, people's vanity, and the insecurity that makes many people unwilling to admit that they can't hear a difference. That's how they sell AC line cords for over $500! It's how they convince people that they need to spend $1000 on a device to "break-in" their audio cables. One company even sold a digital clock that was substantially identical to a $30 clock sold by Radio Shack. But this clock sold for $270. They claimed that plugging the clock into an AC outlet caused the electrons in your house wiring to properly align themselves. (No, I am not kidding).
So, you have people trading crappy live recordings made through sub-standard microphones, placed 100 yards away from the performers, that picked up the sound from so-so PA speakers and fed a consumer-grade portable recorder insisting that they need lossless compression for the audio treasures that they that they exchange.
Regarding the use of "their": I considered changing the word "their" to "his or her", however, it is widely accepted as correct.
According to The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition:
Usage Note: The use of the third-person plural pronoun they to refer to a singular noun or pronoun is attested as early as 1300, and many admired writers have used they, them, themselves, and their to refer to singular nouns such as one, a person, an individual, and each. W.M. Thackeray, for example, wrote in Vanity Fair in 1848, âoeA person can't help their birth,â and more recent writers such as George Bernard Shaw and Anne Morrow Lindbergh have also used this construction, in sentences such as âoeTo do a person in means to kill them,â and âoeWhen you love someone you do not love them all the time.â The practice is widespread and can be found in such mainstream publications as the Christian Science Monitor, Discover, and the Washington Post...
So there is some disagreement as to whether it is acceptable or not. Thus, I felt that it would be overly picky, even for me, to flag its use in phrase "their own machine."
I will be teaching a Freshman English class at a medium sized public university, in a computer classroom for next semester. Every student has their own machine with an internet connection.
I will be teaching a Freshman English class at a
medium-size public university, in a computer classroom [delete "for"] next semester. Each student will have their own machine with an Internet connection.
If you had said that you would be teaching a computer science class, a biology class, or any type of class other than English, I wouldn't have been such a picky bastard.;-)
The only people that get paid to do what they love are porn stars.
Yeah, that's what I used to think until I started acting in porn movies. Most of the women I've worked with are seriously f***ed up and no small percentage of them are on drugs. I'm tired of having to cup my hands under their breasts to hide the scars from the implants. I'm sick of getting into all kinds of contorted positions so that the bimbos' tattoos don't make it look like I'm f***ing a biker chick. I dread getting tested for STDs every few months. The "scripts" read like something written by Beavis and Butthead. The pay is lousy if you are a man and even the women don't make as much as you might think. Many of them do the movies just so that they can rake in the bucks at personal appearances where they sign autographs or dance at sleazy strip joints as the "celebrity porn star" of the week. Everybody thinks I'm soo lucky to have a 9" schlong and to be in porn movies. Well, it's not so great as you might think. Okay, I just made up that whole thing, but I had fun screwing with people's minds.
Sadly, you're probably right. Remember the fantastic album covers by Hipgnosis? That was when music was treated as art with art! Even something so simple as the classy posters included with the Beatles 'White Album' is never seen any more.
But maybe it's not over yet. With sales of music waning, perhaps the RIAA members will get a clue and start investing time and money into packaging design, cover art, and maybe even added value items (maybe in larger packages, since a poster folded enough times to fit into a CD case would look like a quilt).
Actually there weren't any singles released off of Sgt Pepper.
True. It was the first Beatles albums for which no singles were released. But had they been, sales of the album would have been no less brisk.
It serves as a great example of value-added stuff. It had all of the lyrics printed on the back cover. The inner sleeve was also the first to be decorated in a design by Seemon and Marijke. The L.P. came with a set of Sgt. Pepper cardboard cut-outs, which included a moustache, a picture card, some sergeant stripes, 2 badges, and a stand-up.
Most modern artists don't seem to understand the concept of a coherent album versus a collection of unrelated songs. Sales of Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon and The Beatles Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band were not threatened by sales of 45s (for the youngsters: low-priced, 7", 45RPM records which typically had one song per side and were packaged in a cheap paper sleeve). They were actual albums rather than collections containing two hit songs and a bunch of filler material. Even when an album was not a "concept", everyone involved knew that the it was all about value: If the buyer liked a lot of the music on the album, he/she would buy the album. But if there was only one or two songs on the album that were appealing, the buyer would opt for 45s.
And the record companies don't understand that they need to add value to the albums. What happened to the days when you could buy an album and get a 12" x 12" multi-page color book inside? Where are the free enclosed 24" x 36" posters? Now one is lucky to get the lyrics printed in 5 point fonts in tiny square booklets. Sorry, but when you used CDs as an excuse to double the price while taking away all of the value-added extras, you slit your own throats.
I would like to see the ebook which has a display that beats my Zaurus C-700. Is there one that gets 640x480? Most of those ebook devices don't fit in one's pocket, either, do they?
One advantage of the ebook devices is that they present the text on a physically larger screen. Sure, that means that they don't fit in your pocket. Neither will a 42" plasma TV -- but you won't find many people claiming that the lack of pocketability makes big-screen plasma TVs inferior to pocket LCD TVs. Another advantage of the ebook devices is that they use a gray-scale or monochrome LCD and, despite the advances in laptop color LCD displays, B&W text looks sharper on a a really good monochrome/gray-scale LCD.
I'm not opposed to using your Sharp, my handheld, my laptop, or my desktop system to read an ebook, but each device, including the dedicated readers, has its advantages.
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erm, you do know what the SACD is, right.
Yes. It's a Sony format that uses DSD (Direct Stream Digital) audio recording. It has much greater performance than audio CDs.
But why would you convert back and forth over and over? The downloads from the Phish site are commercial recordings and not for redistribution. From the FAQ: Why don't you try reading the replies to your posts?
I've read your replies, and they don't make a lot of sense. You apparently can't understand that you have no legal right to redistribute what you download from the LivePhish.com website. I've tried to explain that to you. The website tries to make that clear. But you just don't get it.
It might help the discussion, and displace you off your soapbox. Oh wait...
I'm on a soapbox so that you can look up to me.
Here's a clue:
Your argument still boils down to :
"320kps mp3's are all anyone will ever need. Why?, cause i say so thats why! And look, heres another "guy on the internet" who agress with me, as do his likeminded friends! Science in effect y'all!"
No, my argument was, and is, that you need to do double-blind testing yourself to see if 320kbps MP3 meets your needs and not simply state that "lossless always sounds better" with no scientific evidence to back up your claim.
As to the "guy on the Interent", you are the one who asked if anyone had done such tests. I spent my time to find one example and now you're giving me shit for that. I can't win. What do I have to do? Find every published study on the subject because you're too lazy to do your own research?
You should get on the phone to Sony right now and tell them to stop archiving decades of Columbia analouge mastertapes in their ultra-high banwith SDDS format.
I had no idea that you were archiving recordings for Phish. I thought you were just a consumer who was downloading recordings from a Phish web site. That changes everything.
And i think that phonecall would sound a little...like this:
It would not be nearly as funny as your phone call to Sony where you demand that they make SDDS recordings available to you because, damn it, you are entitled to archival quality recordings of everything that you want to listen to.
I'm not sure what you consider "scientifically valid" but I have done blind testing with my own equipment and I can hear a difference between 320kbps MP3s (yes encoded with lame, not that it matters) and WAVs.
How did you switch from one source to the other? What was your percent accuracy at identifying the MP3 over how many samples? How did you guarantee that the two sources were identically level-matched? It's a mystery to me if your alleged test was scientifically valid. As to claiming that it does not matter which encoder one uses, that simply demonstrates your lack of knowledge about audio compression. There are huge differences between encoders.
Another rationalization on your part because you don't want to believe that anyone else is better than you are in a perceptual sense. That anyone can distinguish differences that you cannot.
Yeah, that must be it. I'm sitting here in my glasses because I'm so perceptually gifted.
Now think about what you just said. If one of us wants to have a sense of superiority, which of us fits the bill better? I never claimed to have superior auditory perceptual ability, hearing, or equipment to yours. But you wasted no time in declaring your supposedly superior hearing and/or listening skills and in making aspersions about the (imagined) quality of my audio equipment. Thank you Captain Ego.
I'm not sure what you consider "high end", but most audiophiles are quite willing to admit that for a given product there are price points above which the law of diminishing returns starts to apply.
Why not admit that some products are simply fraudulently misrepresented and have no bearing on the quality of the music? Good examples would be AC line cords, speaker cables and interconnects that cost hundreds of dollars. Don't believe me? Then read what respected audio designer Frank Van Alstine has to say.
I suspect that you simply have poor audio equipment and don't want to spend any money on anything better and feel the need to rationalize this. The reason that you cannot hear a difference is because your cheap equipment masks the differences that would otherwise be quite obvious.
My speakers are VMPS Super Tower/Rs. Since you brought up the issue of cost, last time I checked (a few years back), they retailed for about $3600 per pair. My amp is a Hafler PRO2400 MOSFET amp. That was an amp sold to recording studios rather than home users. It replaced an Adcom GFA-555 and, despite having less power, has better sound.. My preamp is one that I designed and built using a BUF-03 class-A video buffer, huge toroidal power transformer, and low-dropout regulators. It's stunningly revealing and compares well with many high-end pre-amps.
I don't know (or care) if that's your definition of poor audio equipment. I do know that my speakers, which are still in production in a "Special Edition", received glowing reviews from respected reviewers like Anthony Cordesman (reviewer for Audio, The Absolute Sound, and The Audiophile Voice). My Hafler amp is proudly listed by top-tier recording studios as part of the equipment that they use. It suits my purposes fine.
a few years from now, it doesn't matter that the format is obsolete, because I'll be able to buy a new format?
Right. Saving you money is really not a big concern of mine. I can still play LP records from 50 years ago and you're worried that you won't be able to play an MP3 in a few years? If you are unable to play MP3s in a few years, then you lack the technical savvy to be downloading music. Stick to buying CDs in the mall.
this is a ridiculous flame and i can't believe the moderation on this.
Yes, it is, but you haven't been moderated yet.
the issue is multi-generation copying and preserving the original recording even if that original recording is flawed.
No, it is not. The issue is whether recordings need to be distributed to listeners in a lossless format. You are not supposed to be redistributing what you download.
oh yeah, and if you did any research, you'd know that these are soundboard recordings.
I was referring to the general Phish trading of amateur recordings being traded as SHN, FLAC, or other lossless compressions when the quality does not warrant it.
So what i'm asking you, BUSTER, is: has an "scientifically valid" "are differences audiable" experiment been done or not?
Yes. Individuals have performed such tests and established bit rates at which they became unable to distinguish the difference. Here is one such test. I have never seen any test results in which the listener could, with any statistical significance, identify a 320k MP3 vs. a CD of the same music.
But the important thing is whether you can hear the difference. If you are downloading music for your own enjoyment, it makes no difference whether I, some other random Internet user, or a panel of listeners could hear the difference or not. What matters is whether you can hear the difference. And the only way to be sure when the differences are subtle is with a double-blind test.
Your "power of suggestion" theory needs this experiment and yet you claim it has never been done.
It's not my "theory." It's accepted as scientific fact. Ever heard of "the placebo effect"? That's an example of the power of suggestion. Why do you think that clinical drug trials have a control group who receive placebos? It's so that the the power of suggestion does not cause a patient to imagine drug effects that are not there.
Please don't comment on something you don't know about.
I know about this subject. Most of the live recordings traded did not come from Neumann U89 microphones. Most came from consumer-supplied stuff. Phish tapers are now limited to one deck and one mic stand per taper ticket. Are you trying to tell me that the average Phish taper is putting up a pair of Neumann U89's? What a load.
By the way Neumann U89 microphones are roughly $5000 for a pair, and the other equipment is not cheap either.
Don't exaggerate. They are $4,000 per pair from B&H Photo. Used, they go for about $2,000 per pair. I prefer U87's, but that's personal taste.
I'm just making the point that just because most/all people can't hear an audible effect, doesn't mean that there isn't one there.
If it can't be heard, it is, by definition, inaudible.
It's just like saying there's no point in recording at 24-bit because you can't hear a difference on most stereos, or 96Khz just because it exceeds what Nyquist says we can hear.
That falls into the category of "harmless." If a type of media can hold, say, one hour of music at 24bit/96khz and the recording being released is 45 minutes long, there is no reason to compress it, reduce the sample size, or reduce the bit rate.
But when people are downloading and storing to hard disk, there is a cost in time and storage. It's no problem for those of us with huge hard drives and broadband connections, but I'd hate to see music made inaccessible to those with dial-up connections and more modest storage.
The comma isn't necessary here.
Agreed. But I'm not sure that it's use is strictly incorrect either. I tried taking it out and the sentence was slightly less easy to read.
So you disgree that FLAC is suitable for end use. Fine. But a master copy compressed in a non-lossy way helps the sound quality five, ten, fifteen years from now. You aren't thinking about forwards compatibility.
Yes, I am. Phish retains the master copy and they release it in the format-du-jour. People bought Beatles music in the 1960's on LP. Now that CD is out, the studio took their master copies and released CDs. In trading, not everyone needs an archival quality master recording.
And what about the ones who have permission to plug a line feed into an MD recorder direct from the desk?
I think they could require lossless recording, especially if the intention is then to encode it into lossy formats.
All MD recording is lossy. MD uses a compression algorithm called ATRAC. The MD disc has a capacity of 140MB. Without compression, it's 44.1khz/16 bit sampling would allow you to store 13 minutes of audio per disc.
Perhaps they don't want the sound quality to degrade any further than it already has?
So give me evidence that the sound quality is degraded by a 320kbps MP3. Don't just get your sphincter constricted because of the word "lossy." Compression can be lossy without having any audible effect on the sound.
There may or may not be scientifically valid proof that folks can tell the difference between mp3 and cd, but the fact remains that mp3 *is* lossy, and *does* destroy the audio signal.
"Destroy the audio signal"? Talk about a biased statement! Something can be lossy and not "destroy the audio signal." It can destroy the numerical data but have no audible effect on the signal at all. If I take a 24-bit, 96khz recording and drop off the two least significant bits, that's lossy, but it won't make any audible difference at all. "Lossy" does not mean "audibly inferior." It's a computer term which means that it is impossible to reconstruct the original numeric data exactly from the compressed version.
For people who are making music, and want to archive a huge array of samples, or their latest club mix, but don't want to take up a ton of disk space, lossless compression is really useful.
I never said that it was not useful. I sometimes use Monkey's Audio (APE) lossless compression for archival purposes. But not everyone who wants to hear a Phish concert needs an archival copy of it.
Right, people cant do that sort of comparison by themselves to make up their own minds about what they want because, errm, that would require, ya know, actually using your ears and stuff.
You can make up your mind about anything you like. People have made up their minds about tarot card readings and decided that such readings are valid way to plan their lives. Others have made up their minds about magnetic bracelets and have decided that the bracelets are an effective treatment for arthritis. Still others have made up their minds about power cords and decided that $500 power cords improve the sound of their CD player.
Sure, you can make up your own mind, but, having done so, there is no guarantee that the conclusion you have reached is correct.
And as we all well know, actual listenig to stuff is best left to like, scientist type people and stuff.
It's this kind of ignorance of science that scares the hell out of me. Did they even teach science in your school? A scientifically valid test does not mean that the participants are panel of scientists. It means that the test is not flawed or biased.
If you take a group of people and tell them that they are going to hear a CD first and a "lossy" MP3 second, you can play the exact same recording twice and many people will claim, and believe, that the "MP3" was audibly inferior. That's the power of suggestion at work and why it's important to devise a test the rules it out.
You would have enjoyed the dark ages. Back then, there was no "scientific method" and everyone thought the way that you do.
Guess I can use this in class as an example of what can happen to a student when he/she gets his/her stuff published and people actually read it...
It's really just an example of what happens when you publish something in a forum where people can read it, reply to it, and get public accolades for making wisecracks about it.
ogg at 256 or mp3 at 320 is more than enough, and small pipes and short CPUs are much happier.
I have yet to see any scientifically valid, double-blind test in which users could distinguish between a CD and an MP3 at 320kbps. Many of the people that complain about MP3 are doing so for one of three reasons:
1. They heard a low bit-rate MP3 (e.g, 128kbps) or one encoded with a flawed encoder and then judged the entire compression scheme by that.
2. In a vain attempt to sound and feel superior, they complain about a format that satisfies so many others.
3. They understand that the compression is "lossy" and, therefore, convince themselves that they hear losses even though they cannot.
Or it is some combination of numbers two and three. It reminds me of the high-end audio market, which is based on the power of suggestion, people's vanity, and the insecurity that makes many people unwilling to admit that they can't hear a difference. That's how they sell AC line cords for over $500! It's how they convince people that they need to spend $1000 on a device to "break-in" their audio cables. One company even sold a digital clock that was substantially identical to a $30 clock sold by Radio Shack. But this clock sold for $270. They claimed that plugging the clock into an AC outlet caused the electrons in your house wiring to properly align themselves. (No, I am not kidding).
So, you have people trading crappy live recordings made through sub-standard microphones, placed 100 yards away from the performers, that picked up the sound from so-so PA speakers and fed a consumer-grade portable recorder insisting that they need lossless compression for the audio treasures that they that they exchange.
According to The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition:
So there is some disagreement as to whether it is acceptable or not. Thus, I felt that it would be overly picky, even for me, to flag its use in phrase "their own machine."
If you had said that you would be teaching a computer science class, a biology class, or any type of class other than English, I wouldn't have been such a picky bastard.
The only people that get paid to do what they love are porn stars.
Yeah, that's what I used to think until I started acting in porn movies. Most of the women I've worked with are seriously f***ed up and no small percentage of them are on drugs. I'm tired of having to cup my hands under their breasts to hide the scars from the implants. I'm sick of getting into all kinds of contorted positions so that the bimbos' tattoos don't make it look like I'm f***ing a biker chick. I dread getting tested for STDs every few months. The "scripts" read like something written by Beavis and Butthead. The pay is lousy if you are a man and even the women don't make as much as you might think. Many of them do the movies just so that they can rake in the bucks at personal appearances where they sign autographs or dance at sleazy strip joints as the "celebrity porn star" of the week. Everybody thinks I'm soo lucky to have a 9" schlong and to be in porn movies. Well, it's not so great as you might think. Okay, I just made up that whole thing, but I had fun screwing with people's minds.
Packaging design is dead:(
Sadly, you're probably right. Remember the fantastic album covers by Hipgnosis? That was when music was treated as art with art! Even something so simple as the classy posters included with the Beatles 'White Album' is never seen any more.
But maybe it's not over yet. With sales of music waning, perhaps the RIAA members will get a clue and start investing time and money into packaging design, cover art, and maybe even added value items (maybe in larger packages, since a poster folded enough times to fit into a CD case would look like a quilt).
Actually there weren't any singles released off of Sgt Pepper.
True. It was the first Beatles albums for which no singles were released. But had they been, sales of the album would have been no less brisk.
It serves as a great example of value-added stuff. It had all of the lyrics printed on the back cover. The inner sleeve was also the first to be decorated in a design by Seemon and Marijke. The L.P. came with a set of Sgt. Pepper cardboard cut-outs, which included a moustache, a picture card, some sergeant stripes, 2 badges, and a stand-up.
Most modern artists don't seem to understand the concept of a coherent album versus a collection of unrelated songs. Sales of Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon and The Beatles Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band were not threatened by sales of 45s (for the youngsters: low-priced, 7", 45RPM records which typically had one song per side and were packaged in a cheap paper sleeve). They were actual albums rather than collections containing two hit songs and a bunch of filler material. Even when an album was not a "concept", everyone involved knew that the it was all about value: If the buyer liked a lot of the music on the album, he/she would buy the album. But if there was only one or two songs on the album that were appealing, the buyer would opt for 45s.
And the record companies don't understand that they need to add value to the albums. What happened to the days when you could buy an album and get a 12" x 12" multi-page color book inside? Where are the free enclosed 24" x 36" posters? Now one is lucky to get the lyrics printed in 5 point fonts in tiny square booklets. Sorry, but when you used CDs as an excuse to double the price while taking away all of the value-added extras, you slit your own throats.
I would like to see the ebook which has a display that beats my Zaurus C-700. Is there one that gets 640x480? Most of those ebook devices don't fit in one's pocket, either, do they?
One advantage of the ebook devices is that they present the text on a physically larger screen. Sure, that means that they don't fit in your pocket. Neither will a 42" plasma TV -- but you won't find many people claiming that the lack of pocketability makes big-screen plasma TVs inferior to pocket LCD TVs. Another advantage of the ebook devices is that they use a gray-scale or monochrome LCD and, despite the advances in laptop color LCD displays, B&W text looks sharper on a a really good monochrome/gray-scale LCD.
I'm not opposed to using your Sharp, my handheld, my laptop, or my desktop system to read an ebook, but each device, including the dedicated readers, has its advantages.