Does Going Digital Mean Missing Music? 751
arlanTLDR writes "The Seattle PI is running a story about how the MP3 format is the sign of a musical apocalypse. Apparently, many top music producers are 'howling' over the fact that files in a compressed format contain 'less than 10 percent of the original music on the CDs.' Is this just sensationalist FUD, or is there something to the assertion that listening to an MP3 is like hearing music 'through a screen door?'" The article mentions that the iPod and its cheap earbuds bear some of the responsibility for rendering this degradation in sound quality less objectionable.
The music industry can blame itself (Score:5, Informative)
Of course, some people are now going for the "super bitrate" MP3s ripped directly from CDs, but they are the rare ones.
Also, if the mass market really wanted higher audio quality, don't you think any of the CD successors would have taken off already?
Re:Sounds we can and cannot hear. (Score:3, Informative)
ipods have a few million users as a base, i bet at least 25% (probably way more) use the $0.50 earbuds that came with them. they suck, yet the users are fine with it. apple keeps selling ipods with shitty earphones, users accept the way music sounds. hell even dell's $20 speakerset with subs get rave reviews from my friends who live in college dorms......until they hear my $1300 5.1 setup
Cheap earbuds? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Sounds we can and cannot hear. (Score:5, Informative)
As I recall, nobody could really tell the more often than chance would predict. The audiophile did slightly better, but nothing to shake a stick at.
Re:The music industry can blame itself (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Sounds we can and cannot hear. (Score:5, Informative)
I don't know about guitars (I've never heard one compressed that wasn't too buried in the mix to identify), but I can't stand the way AAC screws up cymbals. Anything that naturally has no tonality tends to be massacred by lossy compression. If you can't hear the difference, you probably can't hear high frequencies.... It is annoying to me even with cheap earbuds in a quiet room. In noisy environments, I can't hear the difference, of course, thanks to the masking effect of everything else. Whether you can hear the effect or not depends largely on whether you are actively or passively listening to the music.
Honestly, I don't mind the earbuds. The proximity to the ear makes up for most of the low frequency loss associated with a small diaphragm, so they sound acceptable. They aren't God's gift to man or anything, but they aren't nearly as awful as you make them out to be. Now computer speakers... those tend to be universally abhorrent. No bass response whatsoever, so they sound like tin can telephones.
As for the $20 speakers with subwoofers, they get rave reviews mainly because most people have never heard good speakers. Compared to a set of 6 inch drivers, yeah, they probably sound great. You actually have deep bass response. Compared to a pair of properly tuned 3-ways with 12 inch drivers, they sound like ass because you have probably a couple of octaves of upper bass to lower mids that are mostly missing because it's too high for the sub to generate it and too low for the tiny 4 inch (or smaller) main speakers to generate it. Compared with my studio monitors, they're laughable. The problem is that most people have never heard speakers with drivers over about six inches... maybe eight. Oh, yeah, and most people don't have any hearing above 14 kHz anyway, so those tinny little speakers sound good to them. :-D
Wining (Score:3, Informative)
Many people credit a certain 1976 blind test of wines [wikipedia.org] for launching the California wine industry, and proving that Americans could make "serious" wine as well as (in fact, better than) the French. There was a repeat [wikipedia.org] in 1986 and 2006, with similar results.
And a few years ago, Trader Joe's "Two Buck Chuck" won a 'double-gold' medal at a California wine fair [syvnews.com] during a double-blind test. (In other tests, it was usually last
Re:Damn (Score:1, Informative)
By the way, I'm in the music biz and make a living making records. I deal with major and indie labels and artists. They want the loud records. If you're going to bitch about them tell the artists or refuse to buy their records. Don't blame us engineers because we don't want out of a job.
Re:Sounds we can and cannot hear. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:No. RIAA will make sure that MP3 suck. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Sounds we can and cannot hear. (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.maximumpc.com/article/do_higher_mp3_bi
This test showed it was hard to pick the differences, but they conclude using vbr with a higher bit rate would improve the sound quality.
Here is a comparison of earbuds using apple's aac formats at 128 vs 256
http://www.maximumpc.com/article/itunes_256_vs_12
Cheap ear buds expose the differences in compression levels, while expensive earbuds make it hard to tell the difference.
Re:Sounds we can and cannot hear. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Hearing tests aren't the whole story (Score:3, Informative)
You know just enough about this topic to be dangerous, but not enough to be right. I don't of any serious, informed audio professionals who would even bother to mention DSD in this context - its not discredited, just forgotten. Your comments on double blind testing is the usual apologist side-tracking that the "audiophile" community offers in response to such tests demonstrating no discernible differences. I was suprised that you missed out the part about how "golden ears" still count even if 99% of the rest of the population don't fit such a profile. Your comments on 192/24 completely ignore two very salient facts: (a) the improvement comes mostly from using 24 bit samples instead of 16 bits (b) almost all of the tiny benefit of a 192kHz sample rate comes from the brickwall filter design that is enabled by this higher rate BUT almost all of that benefit exists at 96kHz and there are still no double blind tests that show people able to differentiate 96/24 from 48/24.
Re:Sounds we can and cannot hear. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Sounds we can and cannot hear. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Hearing tests aren't the whole story (Score:5, Informative)
With a good enough algorithm most people, including those with well-trained ears, will not be able to consciously distinguish the two sounds. But that does not mean that these people don't subconsciously react differently to them. One way to measure that might be to measure brain activity in various regions of the brain, which is exactly what this article mentions. The problem is that that type of test is always going to show a different reaction which is something the makers and users of audio codecs often don't want to hear.
The major problem here is what does the brain activity data mean? Even if you can see a difference in brain activity for a 16 bit/44 kHz PCM file verses a 128 kbit/sec VBR AAC file how do you determine if one format is preferred over the other?
You end up still falling back on subjective measures, it's much simpler to have a large number of participants and then ask them questions like, "Which recording did you prefer?" The data from a properly run survey is much more likely to yield meaningful conclusions than scans of brain activity. We are, after all, dealing with music - a highly subjective art form.
One notable feature of DSD is that dynamic compression occurs at higher frequencies yet the frequencies are able to be reproduced accurately. Contrast this with PCM where the dynamic range is fixed (i.e. 16-bit, 20-bit, 24-bit) but at higher frequencies the tonality is not as pure because it's impossible to represent anything other than a square wave at the nyquist frequency which is exactly 1/2 the sampling rate. Of course, a filter is applied to make that into a more pleasant sine wave. Now consider a frequency that is not exactly 22.05 kHz but perhaps a little shy of that. It's almost impossible to represent this accurately with PCM. The result is that you actually get a slightly oscillating frequency somewhere around the original frequency.
What you are describing is a phenomenon known as aliasing [wikipedia.org].
I'm not sure you completely understand how the Nyquist-Shannon Sampling Theorem [wikipedia.org] works. It boils down to the fact that as long as you sample at a rate greater than double the maximum frequency you want to capture, you will get no aliasing [wikipedia.org]. This means that if you sample at 44.1 kHz then all frequencies below 22.05 kHz will be represented accurately. If you sample a frequency just shy of 22.05 kHz you will NOT "get a slightly oscillating frequency somewhere around the original frequency".
It is true that DSD has a variable dynamic response that depends on frequency but that works both for and against DSD since higher frequencies tend to less accurately represented than lower frequencies. In fact there is a lot of discussions (PDF file, see page 8, section 3[c]) [sjeng.org] that conclude that the current implementations of DSD produce worse quality per bit than an equivalent bit-rate PCM sampling. There are solutions to these problems but they are very complex and involve a mix of DSD and PCM sampling methods, so much so that the line between DSD and PCM blurs considerably.
This has a serious effect on how an album is mastered. When the target format is CD the producer can cause the CD player to output extremely loud high frequency sounds though not particularly accurate frequencies. This is reflected in the current crop of music which is often extremely loud and to many ears just sounds like a bunch of noise. Metallica's self-titled black album was one of the first to use severe dynamic compression to make the album sound super loud. Comparing it with modern CDs we can see that that album was relatively tame.
Again you are mixing up sound levels with frequencies. Severe dynamic compression basically limits the number of sound levels which are utilized,
Comment removed (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Sounds we can and cannot hear. (Score:5, Informative)
So you don't even need the $500 stereo to tell the difference.
Along with noiselike sound sources such as cymbals, lossy compression also does a number on sharp transients. My own pet peeve is what happens to pick noise on acoustic instruments, as well as the "swoosh" effect on higher-frequency percussion events. Even at 256kbps you can hear mushiness. And my high-end hearing is not what it used to be-- I don't think I can hear much above 18khz anymore.
What I wonder is how many engineers are now recording and mixing so that the song will sound OK even when it's mashed into a 128kbps MP3. Similar to how they used to listen to trial mixes on shitty speakers from AM radios since that's how the kids would hear it back in the day. You think there was an esthetic reason for all that compression? It was making the best of the limitations of the medium.
Re:Cheap earbuds? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Hi Fidelity or MP3? (Score:1, Informative)
That's absolutely false. Have you ever used a ZIP file? Do you think ANYONE would use ANY type of file compression if there was a chance it would lose a SINGLE BIT? Sounds like someone needs to go back to school...
Re:Darned whippersnappers (Score:4, Informative)
Compression meh, for some things you can tell the difference, IF you know what your listening to and know your equipment
Yes, an MP3 is probably about 10% the size of an uncompressed file, but MORE than 10% of the INFORMATION is there, not all of it is there, MP3 is a lossy compression scheme, yeh you lose data, BUT there are lossless compression schemes, and they still give you a file size smaller than uncompressed data.
Does any of this MATTER? um nope not to me, whoop de do the industry complains, does i care? NO. Should the rest of the world care? Well if you are an audiophile you probably already knew about it and already listen in a way that works for you. If your not an audiophile, probably doesn't matter much, your music sounded fine yesterday, should sound fine today.
NOTE:
i am a bit of an audiophile, good etymotic earphones, high quality cartridge in the record player, good cartridge amp and low noise preamp (with hand picked parts)
ALL of the music on my ipod is compressed, jethro tull sounds great, so does blue man group, Manhattan Transfer, and panic at the disco
Re:192KBPS seems OK (Score:5, Informative)
Re: MP3 Compression (Score:3, Informative)
And that's just as dogmatic as the GP, just going the other way. Sound quality is a continuum: you can keep improving a sound system by throwing money at it. Diminishing returns do apply, and at the high end there's lots of bullshit to wade through. Not all components show the same amount of improvement for X amount of dollars: the quality curve flattens for CD players and amplifiers sooner than for loudspeakers.
$100 does not get you a 'very good' pair of full-range speakers. I recently tried buying a set of inexpensive speakers for use with my computer; I listened to about 15 sets in the $100-1000/pair price range. All $100 sets sounded horrible. Sound quality generally improved with price, but rather nonlinearly. Personal preference also plays an important role here.
The least expensive loudspeakers I could live with were a $200/pair set of bookshelf speakers. Full-range loudspeakers at that price offered more frequency range, but had a very uneven frequency response. Decent full-range speakers started at about $400/pair, iirc.
For $100 you can get an amplifier with 0.02% THD, which is about as good as you can get
Amplifier quality is about more than just THD. THD and noise are easy to get good specs on. Things like phase response and crossover distortion are much more difficult (=expensive) to get right.
Re:192KBPS seems OK (Score:1, Informative)
CDs don't have a cutoff at 16-18 Khz, it's more at 20KHz and it's a brickwall filter, the high frequency oscillation found on CD is due to this.
Vinyl are thought to sound better because the sound is continuous, has no high frequency oscillation and have noise. When you listened to your music all your life with lots of background noise and you end up with a clean recording on CD, it feels empty. Vinyl, DO NOT sound better, they have a much reduce dynamic range and their frequency response is extremelly uneven and actually quite narrow for a music playback medium.
you hear 16KHz, even when old, just faintly.
The band don't pay the producer, that's why they have a record company, the band receive an advance which is treated as a salary and all the cost related to the album are taken from their cut of the CD until it's paid back, the band NEVER owes that money to the record company. Little known bands make no money and big stars make lots of money, it all comes to this, sell enough album and you'll pay back it's cost to the record company, every next time one sells you get a small percentage of it. No money will be taken on your advance to cover anything.
Mp3 are compressed, info is removed at compression and added on playback, Mp3 DO sound like shit, get a decent sound system, even my dad could hear it, even at 320Kbps, they don't call it compressed cause it's untouched.
Re:Darned whippersnappers (Score:3, Informative)
I did notice changes in sound quality in MP3 at 128 bit. My OGG files done at 128Bit sound fine to me, though. I just wish more players handled OGG.
FLAC is about the only lossless format I know. Not that I know them all, of course.
Re:today's records use bad tonemapping (Score:3, Informative)
Chances are that your old classical music LPs have been compressed for dynamic range too. But that was simply due to the fact that an LP simply doesn't have the dynamic range required to fully record classical music. So the compression was a technical matter. Compare it to the need of tonemapping to display a perfect HDR image of a physical scene on a monitor or print.
Today however, pop music is compressed for dynamic by design, simply to make it sound louder than other songs when played at the radio or from a jukebox where the volume knob is left untouched. Compare it multiplying your image by a factor ten simply to show it "brighter" than on the monitor next it. It will "appear" brighter if you don't look too closely, but it will have lost much detail simply because it clips to your monitor brightness.
Modern pop music may not have the same dynamical range as classical music, but it still has more potential than you find on most of today's CDs:
(a) live performances _do_ have the punchy bass drums and highlighted snares lacking on the album, because the PA can deliver what's requested without clipping. Unless your band is called Cradle of Filth (they suffer the EVERYTHING LOUDER THAN EVERYTHING ELSE syndrome even on stage).
(b) pop albums of 20 years ago don't suffer this problem. They still have lots of headroom. Even trash metal records (Metallica - Kill 'Em All) behave very well with lots of dynamic range and lots of headroom. Yet, the moment they are remastered, that's totally gone. There's suddenly clipping all over the place. It's still the same music!
So it's not the music. It's the mastering.
Re:Damn (Score:3, Informative)
Re:192KBPS seems OK (Score:1, Informative)
Rubbish. Trying to put any significant level much above 25Khz will cook any cutting head.
If you see anything up there, it's surface noise.
"Well, these days that might be true with "modern vinyl" which is nothing more than a digital master cut to a metal mother and pressed to vinyl."
I'll tell you a little secret. Virtually every LP has had it's audio go through a digital converter since about 1984. Need a delay to do the one revolution delay to calculate the auto variable groove spacing, so when the first lexicon delays appeared, all the cutting rooms bought one. Had to use a tape delay before that, which sucked a lot more than the lexicons.
You either had a digital delay, or your cuts were quieter and shorter than the competition.
"How ever current ADC/DAC circuits just aren't high enough quality yet to out pace the sound quality of vinyl, even if vinyl has plenty of sound quality issues of it's own it is still a higher resolution recording medium right now."
Tish and pish. Look at the noise floor, distortion and frequency response. Vinyl is neither higher resolution, nor higher fidelity. Best way to tell:
One day listen to the direct signal from speech on a good mic though great monitors.
Then route it though a good ad/da.
It's virtually impossible to tell the difference.
Then put on any speech ever recorded from any record.
The noise and distortion is immediately apparent.
"You are correct about the RIAA curve, though I doubt a GOOD engineer would loop it through TWICE, maybe some engineers do this but I sure as hell would not have."
It's an encode/decode process. You either go through that phase skewing capacitor resistor filter twice or you don't do it at all. The second one is in your phono preamp.
Just being argumentative. I bet your hifi rules.
Re:Darned whippersnappers (Score:3, Informative)
Internet radio. I like the Shoutcast feature built into winamp, because a huge number of stations are all accessible through one interface. It gives you just the right amount of choice for discovering new stuff - you get to choose the station, and they get to choose the music. Listen to a station - and not some generic crap like "Hits of the 80s" - something with some unique character or genre. Give it a chance, for like 15 minutes or a half hour. If it's intolerable find something else. If you like it, check the track list - write down some of the artist names and investigate further. You can go on and on, finding new stations pretty much forever.