Mastering Engineer Explains Types of Compression, Effects On Today's Music 382
Stowie101 writes "Today is Dynamic Range Day, which is an event to educate the public about the 'Loudness Wars' that are compressing and harming the quality of today's music. Ian Shepherd, a mastering engineer and founder of Dynamic Range Day, explains why music lovers should avoid MP3 files. 'The one that springs to mind is to avoid MP3, especially if it's 128 kbps. Apple uses a more advanced technology called AAC, but if someone can get lossless files like FLAC that's a better place to start.' Shepherd says it's actually harder to make a good 'lossy' encode of something that has been heavily musically compressed. Very heavy dynamic compression and limiting makes MP3s sound worse, so the loudness wars indirectly make MP3s sound worse."
obligatory... (Score:5, Funny)
Hearing the difference now isn't the reason to encode to FLAC. FLAC uses lossless compression, while MP3 is 'lossy'. What this means is that for each year the MP3 sits on your hard drive, it will lose roughly 12kbps, assuming you have SATA - it's about 15kbps on IDE, but only 7kbps on SCSI, due to rotational velocidensity. You don't want to know how much worse it is on CD-ROM or other optical media.
I started collecting MP3s in about 2001, and if I try to play any of the tracks I downloaded back then, even the stuff I grabbed at 320kbps, they just sound like crap. The bass is terrible, the midrange...well don't get me started. Some of those albums have degraded down to 32 or even 16kbps. FLAC rips from the same period still sound great, even if they weren't stored correctly, in a cool, dry place. Seriously, stick to FLAC, you may not be able to hear the difference now, but in a year or two, you'll be glad you did.
Re:obligatory... (Score:5, Funny)
Did you even look for a job today?
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Too much technobabble. Can you give me a car analogy instead?
Re:obligatory... (Score:5, Interesting)
Of course. Cars made of plain, cheap, sheet steel might look great when you first get them, but store them in a leaky garage for a few years and they'll be rusty and broken, and a real problem to drive. Cars made of "Exotic" materials like Aluminium and Carbon Fibre are more expensive to purchase initially, but if you left them in the same leaky garage there would be no (or at least fewer) problems with rusting or breaking down.
Does this fulfill my nerd quotia for the day?
Re: (Score:3)
Of course. Given that 1GiB of data (When held in RAM) weighs approximately 391 femtograms (given an 50% distribution of 1s and 0s), an average African Elephant would weigh the same as be ~ 8,177.6 Yobibytes.
Do please check my math, if you so desire. [uni-jena.de] - Electron mass being 9.10938215 × 10^-31kg, 10^5 electrons in a bit, And an average African Elephant weighing 3.6 tonnes.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
"for each year the MP3 sits on your hard drive, it will lose roughly 12kbps"
ok so 12 kbps / 8 * 60 * 60 * 24 * 365.25 = 47.3 GB of audio stream loss per year. niceee
Re:obligatory... (Score:5, Funny)
Tip: put a magnet on top of your hard drive. If bits do fall off they'll stick to the magnet so you can recycle them. These are also known as "sticky bits."
Re:obligatory... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:obligatory... (Score:5, Funny)
And while we're at it, ya know, Navy pilots are in fact internet addicts.
They break out in cold sweat when their screen says NO CARRIER.
Re:obligatory... (Score:5, Funny)
No, it's true. Velocidensity is a very important consideration to an audiophile.
You can sometimes improve velocidensity by using very expensive, high quality wooden knobs on all the stereo equipment. The superior quality wood's acoustogravity spreads out the reverberations and diminishes the effects of compression and SNR gain.
Re:obligatory... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:obligatory... (Score:5, Funny)
What? No thermal enclosure? Just 2 degrees celcius variation can manifest noticeable stochastic interference, not to mention the loss of the warmth from the tube amplifier.
Re:obligatory... (Score:5, Funny)
Why are you all ignoring the very real problem of entropic noise dilution caused by cosmic radiation and the natural tendency of any ordered system to move towards a state of increasing entropy? That is the real problem. Think of the children! They will not be able to hear the varied subtleties of such great hits as "Love Shack" and "Mickey" in all of their original splendor if this keeps up. Think of the children.
Re:obligatory... (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm pretty much a newbie in the audiophile world so, if I may, I have a question...
Does this mean I should go ahead and buy new power outlets?
Re:obligatory... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:obligatory... (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (Score:3)
Actually those won't be the issue for you, as long as you don't accidentally allow other people closer than about 17.8 meters to your equipment. You see, the natural current condensation that is transferred through your power outlets has already harmonised with your own natural molecular frequency, so from your perspective you don't want to disturb the gentle balance you already have there. Just make sure to wrap a few pieces of tin foil around yourself to achieve electrostatic balance as well (aluminium
Re:obligatory... (Score:5, Funny)
Mod parent correct but incomplete! SSD drives can actually be improved down to less than 6kbps loss a year if you're willing to drop top dollar. It's a bit cutting edge, so I'll spare the gory details.. but you can gravimetrically contain stray electron decay by routing the phononic wavefront through an electroencabulator. It's a bit tricky to get set correctly, though -- you can't adjust it while in use or you risk collapsing the function and all quantum effects begin to fail. I learned THAT lesson the hard way!
Re:obligatory... (Score:4, Funny)
This is why it's so important to upgrade to audiophile-grade digital audio and network cables. You really can't afford any more bit degradation on top of the time-related rot.
Re: (Score:3)
Re:obligatory... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:obligatory... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Please sir, I only use knobs made from the finest of unicorn horn. It may have cost several million dollars but once you hear the warmth on the midrange of the complete catalog of Right Said Fred you'll understand why.
Re:obligatory... (Score:5, Funny)
What on earth did I just read?
Digital data does not degrade Mr. Audiophile. If it was 256k when you got the MP3 it will still be 256k. Though the CD-R might self-erase (the dye fades) and become completely unplayable. I recommend only store-bought CDs (they are pressed with permanent pits). Or just save money and stream your music off youtube for free. ;-)
Mod parent "Doesn't understand humor".
Re:obligatory... (Score:5, Funny)
Oh give CPU6502 a break. He's only an 8 bit. His algorithms run pretty slow.
Re: (Score:3)
Static white noise sounds actually better in 128k.
Re:obligatory... (Score:5, Funny)
Static white noise sounds actually better in 128k.
Yeah, I downgraded the encoding on my dad's Shania Twain MP3s first chance I got.
Musicians demand loudness (Score:5, Interesting)
I've heard one engineer complain that he mixes the music correctly, with loud and soft passages, but the musicians then demand he make it sound louder. They are not satisfied until the quiet passages are just as loud as the loud passages.
So basically a CD with 90 db range is compressed to about 10 db (plus clipping off the top of the max volume scale).
Re:Musicians demand loudness (Score:5, Interesting)
It sounded so loud and compressed, as if it were all played through a powerful and well designed portable radio with a 1.5" speaker.
Sigh, at least I can still depend on classical music recordings to have that quaint ol' thing called dynamic range.
Re:Musicians demand loudness (Score:5, Interesting)
Death Magnetic did indeed sound terrible, which is sad since it's Metallica's best album in 15 years. There's a solution though. When the album was released for the Guitar Hero games, they were given the original multi-track mixes, which means that each individual track in the game (vocal, lead, rhythm, bass, drums) was basically the master before the engineers mangled it.
A bunch of fans were then able to take those multi-tracks and mix their own version of the album, and these went out on torrent sites. I downloaded the Deceifer Remaster, and the album sounds absolutely amazing. I deleted the digital download I actually paid for, because it pales in comparison.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Musicians demand loudness (Score:4, Insightful)
Sadly, I have to agree with this. I hate having to listen to something at an unreasonably loud volume (for the time/place) just so I can hear the quietest parts, only to have the loudest parts wake everyone in the house, piss off my neighbors, or cause shit to rattle off the shelves (when its not intended).
Its also one of the reasons I prefer DVD rips to actual DVDs. I usually have a fan on in the house so I have to turn the movie up to be able to actually understand the dialog. And if the source of the media has a lot of range, the explosions, gunshots, or whatever startle the crap out of me. Hell, the first time I watched Braveheart on DVD I jumped off the couch during the scene when he set that wooden keep ablaze, just because it was so much louder than any part of the movie up until that point.
If we all had ideal sound systems and listening environments with no ambient noise, then yeah, good dynamic range is awesome, otherwise, let me be able to hear the spoken words over my box fan/car noise/noisy neighbors/nearby road/rain storm/etc without having to subject everyone in the neighborhood to whatever I happen to be listening to at the time.
Re:Musicians demand loudness (Score:4, Funny)
Just tell them it goes up to 11.
Re:Musicians demand loudness (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think the engineer is working with musicians.
Re:Musicians demand loudness (Score:5, Interesting)
10 dB??? (Score:5, Informative)
You should be so lucky. These days most mastering engineers shoot for 4 dB of dynamic range at most because, otherwise, the soft passages will be lost in the car noise.
Re:10 dB??? (Score:5, Insightful)
This. Which is why all the car manufacturers should be beaten upside the head with clue bats until every new car built comes with a proper sound system that compensates for volume changes relative to the vehicle's current noise floor. It isn't particularly hard to do....
Re: (Score:3)
What happens: You use tools* to remove the fasteners. After that you can either replace them with new fasteners of the same type, or use some other variety of fastener.
It's like performing any other mechanical work on any manner of machine: You observe the work to be performed, gather up the appropriate tools, and then use the tools until the work is complete. *shrug*
*: In order of my own personal preference: A sharp, offset cold chisel and maybe a punch will remove common aluminum pop rivets with a f
Re:10 dB??? (Score:5, Insightful)
Guessing the amount of volume compensation based on the vehicle's speed is an epic fail if I ever saw one. At highway speeds, there's at least a 6 dB difference (and probably more like 10–12 dB) between the loudest roads I drive on and the quietest roads. At 0 MPH, there is a 0 dB difference (or nearly so). That huge scaling discrepancy from one road to the next would make any speed-based scheme very nearly (if not completely) useless.
There is exactly one way to accurately determine the ambient noise level for compensation purposes: combine a microphone outside the vehicle with a carefully crafted attenuation profile that describes how well the vehicle blocks noise at various frequencies.
Well, I suppose you could have a microphone inside the car and use a reverb model of the car to cancel out the desired sound from each of the car's speakers, but that requires a fair bit more DSP and provides no real benefit over an external mic with an equalizer.... :-)
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Musicians demand loudness (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not just the musicians, it's the listeners, especially because of so many listening through earphones. If you listen to music with dynamic variations in an open area, a room, or through speakers, you pay more attention to the softer passages. If you listen through headphones, as often as not, you turn it up to have a constant volume in your ears.
Some people say that it started with the Wall of Sound, where everybody wanted that massive effect on everything, regardless of whether it was right for the album or song or not, others say that it started later, with boomboxes, but in any case, we've lost one of the most powerful ways to create musical tension and drama. Now there's pretty much only abrupt changes in tempo, which doesn't work for music where you need a constant beat, or suspensions, which only work for a while before they get too self-indulgent.
Hey! Get off my lawn!
Apple has a "lossless AAC format" (Score:3, Informative)
It's also known as ALAC. I don't believe that it's an option for the iTunes store, but if you own a CD and want to get it into your iDevice environment, it's a good option.
Re: (Score:3)
ALAC =/= AAC (which is owned by MPEG)
:-)
Trusted Source (Score:4, Interesting)
Neil Young made the same argument last month in Wired. The interviewer was a douchbag, so I'm not going to link to it, but Neil was right, and first.
Re:Trusted Source (Score:5, Funny)
Right, because this issue JUST STARTED RECENTLY.
Damn those kids and this BRAND NEW PHENOMENON.
You tell em Neil!
Re:Trusted Source (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Trusted Source (Score:4, Funny)
What's the old saying, Garbage In, Garbage Out?
Damn, I thought that was a new saying after reading it in a Wired article recently.
MP3 Bad, FLAC Good! (Score:2, Insightful)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know all this.
Problem is where is the support for the alternatives? Hardly any software really supports FLAC at all. I don't use iTunes, but does it support it? I know that Zune does not. Most standalone players don't support it.
Of course, every other technology I use takes advantage of MP3. Asterisk can't use FLAC. Which would be hilarious if it did because the standard codecs are about the worst way to transmit music anyways. A phone call is terrible for quality. Unless you ar
Re: (Score:2)
From what I've seen, many standalone players do support FLAC. Last time I checked, I think it may have had more support than AAC, but it's been a couple of years.
Re:MP3 Bad, FLAC Good! (Score:5, Informative)
every other technology I use takes advantage of MP3. Asterisk can't use FLAC. Which would be hilarious if it did because the standard codecs are about the worst way to transmit music anyways. A phone call is terrible for quality.
Phone calls don't use MP3. The wired phones are uncompressed 7-bit PCM, while the cell phones use a codec designed specifically for speech and barely stream faster than 4-5 kbit/s. (Yes that's right... 1/10th the speed of a 56k dialup connection.)
Re:MP3 Bad, FLAC Good! (Score:4, Informative)
Yes, the connections to the PSTN don't use the MP3 codec, and it would be very strange to use MP3 between phones on a PBX system. However, PBX systems like Asterisk do transcode MP3 files to play as MOH or even system sounds on a channel.
If you build a jukebox system to provide MOH, typically the end user uses MP3's to load their music, not FLAC.
Also, if you are doing anything scripted on a Linux system for dynamic content generation Sox does not fully support FLAC. FFMPEG does have support for it, but I am not sure about any others.
So while it is possible to convert FLAC to MP3, so it can be converted to g729 or whatever codec you prefer it does not make a lot of sense when the codecs actually used for transport to most PSTNs are terrible for music and audio fidelity in general.
Which is kind of my point. Unless you are talking about some in-house conference systems, even MP3 is wasted.
Re:MP3 Bad, FLAC Good! (Score:4, Informative)
More research into your platforms? You really have to make it something you look for, rather than something you expect to just appear.
Personally, I use MediaMonkey as a library app and have a Cowon S9 for music/movies on the go (battery life is fantastic with the screen off). They both support FLAC, OGG, and a bunch of other filetypes. Heck even my phone (Galaxy Nexus) supports FLAC and OGG.
Compression and compression (Score:5, Informative)
So to clear things up... dynamic range compression is a form of signal processing that is usually used to make the average level of a signal louder, hence the loudness wars.
Data compression probably doesn't need to be explained to this crowd. But you know... MP3s and stuff.
Re:Compression and compression (Score:5, Insightful)
It is unfortunate that the same term is used for two entirely different things. The article does a pretty good job of conflating the two.
Anyway, the loudness war is over. Digital players, as opposed to CD players, now routinely apply SoundCheck (Apple) or ReplayGain to normalize levels from track to track, so mastering a digital track into saturation no longer makes it "louder" than the next track on the player. Most streaming services do the same. The advantage, if there ever was any, is gone.
It's not surprising that there are still some producers who still indulge in mastering at saturated levels. It's also not surprising that RHCP are still turning out such recordings; they were among the worst offenders at the peak of the loudness war, 13 years ago, and they are probably superstitious enough to believe that it still has some benefit.
Re:Compression and compression (Score:5, Informative)
ReplayGain can't fix poor dynamic range though, that's the big shame. It removes the problem of certain tracks being mastered for maximum level, but still doesn't change the fact that most music nowadays is almost uniformly of the same volume - be that loud or not. There's little to no difference in volume between a quiet passage and a thundering chorus.
Re:Compression and compression (Score:4, Interesting)
Indeed. And it can lead to strange effects. The other day I was listening to some music on the radio (I forget what) where the singer started out with what was probably a quiet solo. After a while the orchestra swelled in the background. The singer's voice should have increased in volume to sing over top of the orchestra, but because the music was so heavily compressed, their voice actually diminished in volume while still being over top of the orchestra. The overall volume stayed the same.
I remember thinking, "Well, that's bizarre". It completely ruined the song. The soft, quiet part was annoyingly loud, with the singer's voice piercing my eardrums, and as the song built momentum and energy, the singer kept getting quieter and quieter.
When Experts Attack (Score:3, Funny)
I am greatly enjoying 'Adopt an Audiophile... And Beat Some Sense Into Him' Month here on Slashdot.
It matters to a point. (Score:5, Insightful)
I've been a musician for many years, and I have a nice studio set-up so that I can hear music as clear as possible. Yet I have amassed... umm, through various ways thousands of mp3s as well as flacs and oogs. Do I like the quality of lossless files better, yeah. But does that make me want to get on some flac-only crusade and not listen to mp3s? Not at all. Maybe it's because I'm of that age where I remember scratchy records, or pressing a transistor radio against my ear to hear the latest Jackson-5 or Stevie Wonder cut that was playing on the radio. For me it's the notes, melody, rhythm, lyrics that matter, that's the true musical information. From my music collection I have grown in my musical sensibilities immensely. I don't think it would be possible to have the library I have if everything was lossless just from the standpoint of space and perhaps download time.
So of course, lossless is better than lossy by definition, but mp3s still bring me to where I want to me in terms of getting the music the artist wanted to convey.
Don't buy mp3 (Score:2)
It's one thing to encode your music as mp3 so it fits on a portable device, and another altogether to purchase it in that form. Sooner or later you will wish that you had bought the lossless encoding.
Yes, and hearing the difference costs how much? (Score:2, Interesting)
When I can somehow distinguish between FLAC and 192 mp3 VBR on equipment costing less than 2K, I'll consider it.
Quality (Score:4, Interesting)
Personally I wouldn't blame the degrading quality of modern music on compression. Even with a high dynamic range, there's a higher ratio of crap out there than during the disco era.. Of course, you may be standing on my lawn.
C64 anyone? (Score:3)
After all, louder is better, so Monty on the Run or R-Type on the radio or TV would be heaven! (Irony being they do beat 99.9% of pop today anyway...)
Re:C64 anyone? (Score:4, Interesting)
>>>soundwaves always peak at the maximum floor and ceiling levels
Hardly. The C64 has a volume control. 0 to 255 if I recall correctly, so the music could range from soft to loud (not maxed-out like today's CDs). Ditto other "chip music" produced by Atari 800s or Commodore Amigas.
I've tried sharing 64, amiga, and Super Nintendo music on facebook but most people think it sounds like junk. They don't appreciate that electronic sound. (shrug). BTW http://www.lemon64.com/ [lemon64.com] let's you hear 64 music directly over the web.
Not avoiding MP3s (Score:5, Interesting)
MP3s are still a wonderful compression and it's quite amazing how it has withstood the test of time. Large scale ABX tests have shown people are unable to tell the difference between a 256kbps mp3 and the original lossless recording. Over the past several years I've also noticed a trend for MP3s no longer to be encoded at stupidly low bitrates.
No I won't be avoiding MP3s. I much prefer an MP3 (even at 128kbps) than one of those wonderful "remasters" of an old album. Quite frankly there's nothing masterful about how the loudness war has managed to destroy modern music. The real shame is it doesn't end with the CD master. SACD, DVD-A and I guess now we can include the new supposedly magical itunes format have all tried to tell us the wonders of 24bit music, and yet the dynamic range of music rarely drops below -7dB.
When people download some backyard mp3 digitisation of a Red Hot Chilli Pepper's vinyl release of an album to get better sound quality, or when they download rips of the GuitarHero versions of Metallica songs to get some form of dynamic range you really know the industry has gone to shit.
Finally! Someone who knows something about music! (Score:3, Funny)
The end of improvement. (Score:5, Interesting)
When audio recording was first invented, quality was awful, but people loved it, because it was new and exciting, and nothing like it had ever existed before..
Year after year, quality improved.
We expected that someday, recorded music would become indistinguishable from live performance.
Then everything changed.
Convenience became more important than quality.
Storing 5000 mediocre quality recordings on an ipod became the norm.
Combine that with the excessive compression used to fight the loudness war, and it really makes an old-school audiophile sad.
I don't buy a lot of music (Score:4, Interesting)
Loudness war (Score:5, Informative)
Wikipedia's article on the "loudness war" does a good job of explaining the problem.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war [wikipedia.org]
I used to work for JJ Johnston. He took a popular music track (I won't say which one) and ripped a .wav file from the CD, and then ran a simple Matlab script that tallied how many samples there were of each value. CDs use 16-bit samples, so there were 64K bins in this histogram. You would expect a pretty much Bell-curve shape to the histogram. With this particular song, over half of all samples were either +1 or -1 (i.e., 16-bit sample values of either +32767 or -32768).
That music is so horribly overcompressed that most of the wave forms are sawed-off into square waves [wikipedia.org]. Square waves, in turn, add unpleasant harmonics [diyguitarist.com], which make the music harder to enjoy, and make it louder (in the psychoacoustic meaning of "louder").
I'm hoping that "audiophile" versions of songs become available, not because I think I need all my music in 24-bit 192KHz but because I'm hoping the mix engineers will be allowed to do the mix properly, instead of mixing it far too hot.
I'm sort of afraid to buy remastered versions of old classic rock albums, because I'm worried they will actually sound worse [youtube.com] than the originals!
steveha
Re:Loudness war (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm sort of afraid to buy remastered versions of old classic rock albums, because I'm worried they will actually sound worse [youtube.com] than the originals!
They do. I used to use the oscillosope plugin for winamp, and you could directly see the effect of range compression. I think I did a comparison of new vs old versions of the same song, and it wasn't pleasant. For sure, the old, unmastered albums (like Dark Side of the Moon) had interesting structure even visually on the scope. I compared it to a modern album and it looked completely tortured on the scope.
The worst I ever heard was a green day greatest hits album (I know, I know, blank CD), which was so distorted that even as a non-audiophile, I couldn't even listen to it.
As a hobbyist sound guy... (Score:5, Interesting)
Y'know, there's always someone harping all day long about how MP3 takes a steaming liquid crap all over your sound, and I cannot agree with them. I have a mid-range yet respectable sound system, worth maybe $4000 new. I listen to a LOT of music with an unforgiving ear for detail, and what I often joke as "digital audio memory". Anytime I listen to something, I'm comparing it to a very precise memory in my head. If the pitch is off by a hundredth, there's subtle (dynamic) compression, or phasing issues, I know immediately.
Back when we were peddling 112 and 128kbps MP3s (y'know, 15 years ago), it was pretty obvious that our encoders sucked. You could hear the nasty phasing all over the high end. Today, with most dedicated rippers using "LAME -V0" or 256/320kbps CBR, I'll say that it is impossible to tell the difference on 99.9% of all music out there. Yes, you theoretically lose some high-frequency information above 19khz, but hardly any adults can hear those frequencies anyway, as our range of hearing degrades with age. At 32, I have supposedly great hearing, yet I can barely hear 18khz, and 19khz I can't really hear but just "feel" as pressure on my ears canal. The parts MP3 encoders discard, most people can't hear anyway, and even if we could, it's so high in the audio spectrum that it's just headache-inducing whine. In practice, many mastering engineers will filter that out anyway, because those frequencies are nothing but trouble, they can mess with playback on cheap (read: common) stereos, and are basically a waste of signal which could be better allocated to the mids.
The compression artifacts themselves, they are nothing like they were 15 years ago. If you really want to see how much sound is lost from compression, take an uncompressed WAV, convert it to MP3, then back to WAV. Pull a spectrogram for both the original and processed WAVs, and compare these in a graphics editor. If you're lazy, you can grab the screenshots from here [blowfish.be] instead. If you're using photoshop, change the blending mode to "Difference" on one of them. Any coloured pixels are the differences, while black means both images are identical.
So, that's digital compression. The other big thing audiophiles bitch about is dynamic compression, and that is an all-too real problem. This is the "brick wall" sound people often cite as the cancer that's killing music. It is the process by which quiet sounds are made disproportionately loud, resulting in the average signal level being louder across the entire album. Most common audio is stored as 16-bit data, this means there are 65536 different intensities available, from silence to maximum, across what is often quoted as 96dbfs of range. Most modern pop music crunches all the sound into the uppermost 6db, so you're kind-of getting 1/16th of the fidelity (yes my math is flawed). This makes crappy speakers and earbuds sound "better" (still shit), and good speakers sound equally shit. It's the sonic equivalent of turning the brightness and contrast on your TV all the way up, now everyone has bright red skin and look like cartoon characters. If you want a painful example of this distortion, cue up Metallica's Death Magnetic, the official CD or iTunes version. Then go find the Guitar Hero version of the same album on TPB and compare. The pressed version is brickwalled, the Guitar Hero version was mixed much more reasonably, in-line with past Metallica releases. Then if you want to hear the opposite, something with very wide dynamic range, try ZZ Top's Eliminator, or Van Halen's 1984. Björk's albums also tend to have good characteristics. You're looking for quiet sounds amid the louder ones - they might be the little squeaks of guitar strings or drum skins, or the long fade of a cymbal.
Back to our buddy boy Ian Shepherd... one of his recommendations for good dynamic range is Daft Punk's Tron Legacy soundtrack. This is pretty much an admission that the man is completely full of shit. Don't get
encoding (Score:3)
I upgraded my MP3s to AFLAC - not only do I get a better sound, but if I am off work for injury, I get paid cash to buy groceries
Huh? (Score:3)
So, according to this article, MP3's of music that's been heavily compressed don't sound good.
So maybe the problem is with MP3?
"Better" or "worse" when talking about digital music is highly subjective. There are some very interesting effects that can be achieved through manipulating dynamics.
Try to play an uncompressed recording at a dance club and see how it takes the air out of the room. What's good sometimes is not always good all the time.
Some of my favorite moments in recorded music came from things that sound "bad" to your average recording engineer or hi-fi enthusiast. The last person you want making musical decisions is a hi-fi enthusiast. And make no mistake, compression can be used very musically, from subtle effects that you don't notice except there's something about a song or recording that really gets you, to very non-subtle over-compressed aural assaults.
And I'm sorry if Bader Meinhoff Franfenfeurter or whatever the name of the guy who invented MP3 has his feelings hurt, but who cares if heavily compressed music doesn't sound good in Mp3? That's why God made flac. Plus, as the price of digital storage comes down, maybe we won't need to compress our files so drastically using lossy methods much longer.
Oh, by the way, if you're interested in remixing well-known recordings, you can often find uncompressed copies of the unmixed master tracks if you know where to look. They've been around "underground" for years. In fact, I learned the rudiments of digital mixing and musical post-production from a copy of Logic Audio and the master tracks from a bunch of Motown classic albums, starting with "Heard it Through the Grapevine" on an early PPC Mac (well, it was a new mac at the time). I can't give out any links because it would make me persona non grata in certain circles, but if you visit the right forum and you're polite, you might find someone to share the goodies with you.
Why MP3/AAC? (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
TFA's "good albums" list (Score:3, Informative)
Ian's remark about 128kbit/s MP3s (Score:3, Informative)
Ian Shepherd's mentioning that one should avoid 128kbit/s encoded MP3. This is leaving out a critical piece of information. Luckily he mentioned himself that heavily (audio) compressed music (data) compresses very badly. This will be especially evident if you force the encoder to only allocate a fixed number of bits to a section, called "Constant Bitrate" (CBR) in MP3 encoders. "Busy" sections will get the same data allotment as quiet sections. This problem can be diminished by using "Variable Bitrate" (VBR) mode when encoding, which encodes to a specific target quality rather than file size. With that, (LAME) MP3s can still sound good enough around 128kbit/s, since the encoder is free to allocate more bits to critical sections and less bits to non-critical section.
In short, there is no reason to use CBR encoding, unless your target device is unable to decode VBR encoded files, or you absolutely need to know the exact bandwidth requirement of a stream. It defeats the whole point of lossy encoding, which is to reproduce the original with highest possible fidelity, not reach a target file size.
Dynamic Range Day? (Score:3)
Dynamic Range Day?
TODAY???
Good luck promoting that on your St. Patrick's Day parties....
"Hey DJ, can you turn the volume up and down a bit? It's Dynamic Range Day today...."
Re: (Score:2)
>>>320kbps should be enough for anyone.
I actually use 32k AAC. With the tiny speakers on my player you can't hear any real difference, and it lets me squeeze more songs on the device. CD bought from a store is what I use for archiving.
Re:Quality is subjective (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem is not that bad quality records exist, but that good quality records do not.
Re:I'm sure the nice man means well (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is you're not listening to it, but that doesn't mean the difference isn't there, it means you've closed your eyes. Or ears.
Re: (Score:3)
Whats happened to music is that people with genuine talent are being overlooked in favor of people who can be made to look really really good and who have enough talent to actually make music but not enough that they could make a living from it without the backing of the record company keeping them alive.
See Justin Beber, Katy Perry and who knows how many others who's name I forget because their music is so crap. Also see everyone who has won shows like American Idol.
REAL musicians are artists like Bruce Sp
Re:huh (Score:5, Interesting)
Anon Cow has a point, if not blunt. Most people have non discriminating ears till you really get some square waving going, so mp3 is fine for cd. It will get blasted from average home stereo speakers, 6x9 car speakers and crammed into Wal-Mart earbuds after being ripped with the V.U. pegging the red zone anyway.
I've listened to scratchy 78s , old 45s, modern vinyl, reel to reel, 8-track,cassette,DAT and hard drive on everything from audiophile to crap to P.A. systems.
Audiophile music has survived popular culture thus far. Mp3 isn't going to harm anydamnthing. The sky isn't falling. Relax.
I do however expect flac to become standard for bands smart enough to give away their music to promote themselves. What balls to fly in the chin of the music industry who doesn't dare pull a stunt like that.
Re: (Score:3)
that's not the point.
It's why people have non-discriminating ears.
They don't know the difference. This will help.
I can hear the difference listening to Dave Brubeck on original vinyl vs. modern CD.
Though you have a point about what hardware they're using to listen.
Re:huh (Score:4, Insightful)
I can hear the difference listening to Dave Brubeck on original vinyl vs. modern CD.
Yes, but we're talking mp3 here, nobody's claiming a 256kbps mp3 is as lossy or distorted as vinyl.
Re:huh (Score:4, Informative)
.MP3 is capable of far, far greater dynamic range than any vinyl. Lossy compression has its issues, but dynamic range isn't one of them.
Though it does exhibit certain artifacts when the dynamic range and the bit rate are both low. Of course, vinyl has its own issues with hot signals.
Re:huh (Score:5, Informative)
Neither the article you linked to, nor the suspect Bauman paper it references measured a real 112db dynamic range from an actual record. They measured the noise floor of a pickup, did some measurements of the pre-amp, did some hand waving about how a skilled ear can add a magic 30 dB below the noise floor and claimed that as the theoretical dynamic range of actually playing a record on high quality equipment. It totally ignores the physical limitations of the vinyl and pickup. It also ignores the other issues with records such as rumble, wow and flutter, poor stereo separation, non-linear response, and other distortions. Their own measurements show the pre-amp SNR in in the 70s, which shows the 112dB claim to be BS.
I label any review as suspect when it uses fluffy wording like this:
As you might expect, the resolution of low-level detail was outstanding. Against a dead-black background, finely layered images floated in three dimensions on what was a somewhat wider soundstage than I'd become accustomed to
Re:huh (Score:5, Insightful)
From your quoted article
...are represented by stylus motions of less than an ultraviolet wavelength (1/100,000,000 of a meter)—a dimension approaching the size of a complex organic molecule.
Yep, just relying on a few assumptions:
Vinyl can be cut 3 times more precisely with record presses than Intel can than silicon (32nm, 3.2/100,000,000 of a meter) with multi billion dollar factories.
This movement, after being transferred through you multiple millimetre long stylus, then into the magnetic coil, then through a meter non-zero impedance analogue cable and into your pre-amp, this signal will be stronger than the radiation caused by a star in another galaxy.
There exists a cleaning method that can remove all dust, germs, water drops, micro-organisms from vinyl without putting a 10nm scratch into it.
Re:huh (Score:5, Insightful)
The funny thing is, I'm sure there's all sorts of gunk in a vinyl groove resulting in tiny stylus motions that are theoretically audible...but which weren't put there intentionally.
Whoops.
I grew up with vinyl and always thought it was a ridiculous audio format. Fragile, noisy, screeching high frequency harmonics, static, had to be cleaned every play, degraded, spindle holes always off center, warped, scratched, hum, rumble, wow & flutter, clipped, pure unadulterated shit. To add insult to injury a decent turntable and cartridge cost at least $300 bucks even in the early '80s (probably $600 in 2012 dollars), just to try and make that crap format sound reasonably acceptable.
By the early '80s and the arrival of Dolby C the lowly cassette sounded better in a decent deck, and that's pathetic when you consider cassette was invented as a dictation medium. Unfortunately most pre-recorded tapes were poorly made, and the only thing you had to record from was either FM radio or (you guessed it), f'in vinyl.
Re: (Score:3)
The magic words you are looking for is:
* laser turntable
It uses a laser for its pickup so the vinyl is never touched.
i.e.
http://www.elpj.com/ [elpj.com]
Of course it is not without its critics:
http://www.high-endaudio.com/RC-ELP.html [high-endaudio.com]
Now if only the dam price was so obnoxious ...
You make some good other points.
Re:huh (Score:5, Informative)
112dB? Ha! Hilarious.
You're lucky to get 70dB out of audiophile grade vinyl. See http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=Vinyl_Myths [hydrogenaudio.org]
There's also an interesting discussion of the dynamic range of both vinyl and 16-bit/44kHz digital audio here:
http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=47827&st=0&p=425794&#entry425794 [hydrogenaudio.org]
The dynamic range of vinyl does vary by frequency. For example, in that thread a poster notes he measured 84dB at 300Hz for vinyl. A 300Hz tone recorded to a 16-bit wave file with noise shaped dither exhibited a dynamic rage of 151dB!
Vinyl has extremely limited dynamic range in the bass - something like 30dB at 20Hz. The needle would pop out of the groove if you tried to record more than that. Vinyl also suffers from constant negative signal to noise ratio incidents, when impulse noise (clicks and pops from scratches, dust and defects in the groove, static discharge) completely drowns out the signal. Unacceptable, in any format.
See also this recent article, which, while skewering the distribution of 24-bit/192kHz audio, notes that 16-bit digital audio has an overall dynamic range of 120dB with dither:
http://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html [xiph.org]
Vinyl's a shitty format for reasons apart from its inferior dynamic range, but that's not terribly surprising since it's like 100 years old, mechanical, and prone to a plethora of issues - rumble, wow and flutter, phase issues caused by the RIAA equalization / de-equalization process, scads of unwanted harmonics and harmonic distortion, ultrasonic noise, preamp hum, static clicks, etc., etc., etc.
Probably should have been replaced by some other analog disc-based format by the early '70s - maybe something based on RCA's capacitance discs, which wound up being used for video, and had scads of bandwidth - more than enough for near-flawless reproduction of the original studio master tapes. But at the time most industry attention was focused on the emerging lo-fi but convenient tape formats, first 8-track then cassette, as well as the failed competing quad systems. And then by the middle of the decade everybody knew a digital format was coming, with Sony and Philips working first separately, and then by '79 or so together on what would become the Compact Disc.
Re: (Score:3)
I can hear the difference listening to Dave Brubeck on original vinyl vs. modern CD.
That is because the mastering is different. It is a well known fact that during the times when several media were on sale, there were different masterings for cassette/Vinyl/CD.
Resiiues of older tracks on CD are allways remastered. That change is clearly audible.
Of course, pressing the same master on to vinyl will also change the sound, as there are more sound changing steps involved between you and the master.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:huh (Score:5, Funny)
I've been playing bass for 30+ years now, guess where they always stick the bass player? Right next to the crash.
First, wear hearing protection. Too few artists actually do this and it hurts them in the long run.
Secondly, why are you standing near the crash? I mean, you're in the band. Can't you stand wherever you wa-
bass player
Oh... nevermind.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:huh (Score:4, Funny)
it makes me literally trip over my own fingers.
Some hate it when people use "literally" when they mean "figuratively".
Not me. I picture you literally tripping over your fingers. Which body parts were you playing your bass with before that happened?
Re:huh (Score:4, Interesting)
First, if people ever give you shit about being a bass player, show them Victor Wooten [youtube.com]. Too many bass players just jam on one string, move down a note, and repeat. There's a lot of potential with the instrument.
Secondly, the idea isn't to block out the music you're playing - it's to block out the volume. The standard solution I've heard of is to have noise-cancelling headsets with everyone's instrument piped into them but at a much lower volume. The point is volume reduction.
I see very, very few musicians that actually give a shit about their hearing, sadly.
Re: (Score:3)
It isn't the hardware -- its the FANS ...! (Score:5, Insightful)
This isn't a hardware issue, this is the issue of music fans thinking a CD is low quality if the volume doesn't red line their music player.
As an artist, if you make a recording and your CD/master is lower in volume than the typical commercial tripe people will assume it is of low quality. So you end up taking your CD/master to places like Music Masters where they apply the $50-60,000 compression units, and noise reducers to enhance its "red-line" potential.
This is the way the industry has been since at least 1993, and the only thing that has changed has been the introduction of lossy codecs. Lossy codecs have some interesting effects on their own where they tend to compress a sound, and ruin dynamics. Stuff that might only be a hidden layer on a CD can be very much front and center on an MP3/OGG.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
While heavily compressed MP3s sound worse than FLAC, even FLAC doesn't sound like a recording of natural music. And that's because of the simple fact that a 44.1 KHz sample rate isn't fast enough to catch the details of sounds like:
Re:huh (Score:4, Insightful)
Typically, when a single person experiences reality in a way that the majority of people don't, we consider them delusional, yes.
If you want to not be considered delusional, pass a double-blind ABX test where A is a direct feed from an analog signal source and B is the same source being run through an A/D and D/A conversion at 44.1/16bit.