Amazon Remasters Streaming Tracks in Effort To Woo Subscribers (ft.com) 70
Amazon has teamed up with Universal Music and Warner Music to remaster thousands of popular streaming tracks to better-than-CD audio quality [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source], as the music industry tries to lure listeners to pricier subscriptions. From a report: In addition to a standard $10 a month streaming service comparable to Spotify, Amazon offers a high-definition option that delivers songs to smartphones at CD sound quality or better. This service costs $15 a month, or $13 a month for members of its Prime shipping programme. The ecommerce group has spent the past year working to boost its pricier streaming service with albums from stars including Lady Gaga, Nirvana, Ariana Grande and Bob Marley in what it calls "ultra high-definition." To do so, Universal Music went back to the original recordings of albums such as Diana Ross and Marvin Gaye's Diana & Marvin and worked with sound engineers to remaster them. Amazon says the audio will "reveal nuances that were once flattened in files compressed for digital streaming or CD manufacturing." The move comes as the inflow of cash from music streaming has slowed over the past year as the market matures
I hope... (Score:2)
...a brick and mortar store (Best Buy? Walmart?) will have a demonstration showcase. Until I hear the remastered difference from pre-CD recordings, I'm not going to believe there's a significant difference.
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Just going off of how much A/D converter tech has evolved since the initial CD push, I'm sure you'd hear a difference. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that the A to D and D to A converters in my smartphone has significantly more fidelity than the top tier converters from 1991 (when the CD "remaster" push was really kicking into gear).
Adding in the fact that the mastering engineers that I know abhor the loudness wars, which seems to have the industry moving away from them. And now that all these different
What I don't get (Score:2)
Is that for years everyone was screaming how 44khz 16bit was more than adequate for music. Then all of a sudden Bluray comes along and we can do 192khz 24 bit for movies? Why the sudden change? Now of course movies have too much dynamic range and music has too little. I don't have a surround sound setup nor do I care for one. Audio from my tv goes into a DAC and then into a studio compressor before the power amp. Now I can watch movies and hear dialogue without suffering hearing damage from music or action
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Is that for years everyone was screaming how 44khz 16bit was more than adequate for music. Then all of a sudden Bluray comes along and we can do 192khz 24 bit for movies? Why the sudden change? Now of course movies have too much dynamic range and music has too little. I don't have a surround sound setup nor do I care for one. Audio from my tv goes into a DAC and then into a studio compressor before the power amp. Now I can watch movies and hear dialogue without suffering hearing damage from music or action scenes. There is no reason why music should be 20dB louder than the actors.
Is the BluRay outputting in stereo or does it think you have a surround sound system? The reason I ask is most dialog in a surround sound mix is in the center channel and if your system thinks it's feeding surround, that's likely where some of your drastic differences are...
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On a phone, these will be completely wasted, especially if listened to with wireless headphones that some mobile devices push. There's no much point in listening to a 32bit 384khz 6 channel audio track when the device itself only outputs a lossy AAC 2-channel sub-CD audio quality recording.
Bluetooth (Score:3)
Wouldn't the compression and general poor audio quality of Bluetooth make this pointless.
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I would think. But I'm assuming this is for music streaming to music/theatre sound systems or wired headphones.
This is a difference...for some people. (Score:1)
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I would suggest this as evidence that it has already been tried and failed:
Pono (digital music service) [wikipedia.org]
The problem was not a lack of quality in the 16/44 PCM distribution format of compact disc, it was in bad mastering, loudness wars, etc. that created worse mixes than were used on vinyl. Data rates of 24/96 and 24/192 have their place, and that place is in the studio, where mixing causes round-off errors. Even if it is somehow better, most people don't have good enough ears to tell the difference. The d
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The difference was that Pono was a startup that got most of its funding from Kickstarter. Amazon is backing this effort, and Bezos is known to go long with money losing startup ventures to own a market. The market is currently littered with music streaming services, but they can't take advantage of Amazon alternate revenue sources (physical media, music equipment). Amazon takes control of a catalogue (perhaps by buying out a music label) and hires the right audio engineers to remaster the original record
Will they upgrade my ears? (Score:3)
I don't think my ears can even pick up CD quality at the high end any more.
I'm all for uncompressing stuff, but the reality is that that's a fairly recent problem, not something that Marley's work would show, I think, even for the CD releases.
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not something that Marley's work would show, I think, even for the CD releases
You'd think so. But the problem was the masters not the originals. Take for example Led Zeppelin. The best version of stairway to heaven is not on the 1983 CD release which sucked even by standards of the day. The remastered version on "Remasters" sounds cleaner than the original CD, but both are absolutely floored in dynamics and stereo presentation from the original 7.5" reel-to-reel release.
Early music suffered from gear quality.
Current remasters suffer from stupidity (also known as dynamic range compres
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I've not. Only the 1990 remaster and the reel-to-reel sounds much better than it. I've got a digitised copy of the reel here. Thanks for the tip though. I'll see if I can find a copy of the 2007 soundtrack to compare and maybe go out and buy something :-)
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Hey help me out here, The Song Remains the Same in 2007 saw a live studio album release. Are you talking about the 2014 re-release of Houses of the Holy which has the track "The song remains the same" on it?
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Oh okay. But there's really no comparing a live recording to a studio recording. That's not just different masters at that point :-)
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Re:Will they upgrade my ears? (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't see this as being of any benefit of any music for the most part that has been put out in the last decade or more.
The modern pop music (like they listed , Gaga, etc)...is mostly cut and paste (ProTools) synth music, requiring autotune, quantization (to keep tempo) and other computerized corrections for the "artists" of today who might look good or cool, but can't play an instrument, sing or know anything about music.
You can polish a turd, but it's still a turd.
You must have forgotten past pop music... (Score:2)
Well, while this might work well for older music...
I don't see this as being of any benefit of any music for the most part that has been put out in the last decade or more.
The modern pop music (like they listed , Gaga, etc)...is mostly cut and paste (ProTools) synth music, requiring autotune, quantization (to keep tempo) and other computerized corrections for the "artists" of today who might look good or cool, but can't play an instrument, sing or know anything about music.
You must have forgotten about past music. I don't think Tiffany or Debbie Gibson were particularly talented and the Spice Girls and Brittney Spears definitely were not.
There's also the phenomena where you remember the good songs from the past more because they were played a lot more. You remember the iconic songs of Nine Inch Nails from the mid 90s because they were great, but forget Stabbing Westward and Machines of Loving Grace, played heavily on the same stations, because no one plays them any more
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Interesting thing with Van Halen. I've heard the 4 or 5 songs of theirs that get played on the classic rock station over and over, and always hated them. I still hate those songs. The lame hair-metal machismo that gets presented makes them worse than a group that's simply bland like Nickelback, which was your point of comparison.
But recently I saw live video of Van Halen. Not the band - just the lead guitarist. Playing, not technically a song, as it didn't have lyrics. Yes, it was a 13-minute guitar [youtube.com]
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As fate would have it, 4 days later, Eddie Van Halen Dead at 65 [pitchfork.com] of throat cancer.
I was aware he did the solo for Beat It... I didn't say he wasn't a legendary guitarist. I said his band wasn't much good when it comes to songwriting.
I did play the Pretty Woman cover just now, first time hearing it, not bad at all. Compared to You Really Got Me, it's a better cover.
My last comment is that I'm glad I quit smoking at the beginning of Corona, and I'm doubling my resolve never to start again. Once they legalize e
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Of course EVERY decade has horrible trash songs..BUT, I would posit, that you still hear some great one hit wonders from the 60's and 70's that are played today on some radio stations, and are better crafted that may of today's mainstream "artists" .
And as for the big bands....well, it's amazing to me to hear kids as young as 10-12yrs old wearing AC/DC t-shirts and actually knowing the songs.
Something happened
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com] :)
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LOL...not too bad considering all the acid that was going on back stage and ON stage.
I'd not seen this before...sad it was cut out of the movie.
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What happened was something called Napster. People stopped paying for good music so record companies stopped creating it. Any artist that did not fit the mass appeal formula was shunned because the economics made it impossible to to support them.
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Something happened and good music kinda stopped.
Good music got destroyed by two trends.
At some point starting in the early to mid 1980's, popular music became monopolized by recording labels, which were really bankers that stamped ownership to popular tunes. Those recording labels became conglomerates that also had ownership in radio stations, where music got publicized. It got to the point where these labels would promote no talent acts, because they owned them, and wouldn't let independent artists get airtime on a radio station, because they didn't o
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You must have forgotten about past music. I don't think Tiffany or Debbie Gibson were particularly talented
How dare you sir!
But, yes. We tend to think of music in the past as being better because a) the past is a lot larger than the present, so there's more to choose from, and b) we only replay the best stuff.
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The SAD thing is....20-23 years from now, there will be precious little from today that will be replayed, much less remembered at all.
Shouting over an electronic drum machine, with no melody, just doesn't stick in one's brain for the ages.
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There was a lot of music from the 1980s badly transferred to cd. They even had fine print stating something about the original source material. One my of Cure cds is like that and with headphones you can really tell.
Re: You must have forgotten past pop music... (Score:2)
Sammy Hagar Van Halen or Dave Lee Roth Van Halen? They're very different beasts. As for Nickleback, that's some pretty misogynist jock rape rock. Seems like any song I've ever heard of theirs mentions being abusive towards women.
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The modern pop music (like they listed , Gaga, etc)...is mostly cut and paste (ProTools) synth music, requiring autotune, quantization (to keep tempo) and other computerized corrections for the "artists" of today who might look good or cool, but can't play an instrument, sing or know anything about music.
You can polish a turd, but it's still a turd.
In other words, you don't listen to it and don't know anything about it, so it must be bad.
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No...I've TRIED and tried to listen to it.
And I just can't fin
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There is no shortage of great singers and musicians and never has been. It's all a matter of taste and exposure.
Even in your Lady Gaga example. You may not like her, but anyone who has even a vague knowledge of her knows she plays the piano in spite of you saying she can't play an instrument. She's played piano since she was 4, studied music before launching her mu
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I have seen a bit about her and I actually do appreciate her drive and work ethic.
Now...let's talk more the likes of Katie Perry?
Ugh.
Even Taylor Swift...for the most part all of her stuff is simple and formulaic....
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Is "modern pop music (like they listed , Gaga, etc)" really a significant fraction of recently-recorded music? That's hard to believe. For every Lada Gaga I bet there are ten thousand bands who don't use autotune.
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Well, and just how many of those will I find on the common outlets like radio?
They love to resell what they already resold (Score:2)
Some of the remasters are already worse because of the loudness wars. Remastering music because they butchered it in the 1st place is really a bad joke IMO, they should be giving current owners of CDs properly mastered music for free.
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Here's hoping they actually remaster things well. Though I'm not sure my biggest complain with Lady Gaga is that her music was compressed.
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Ambiguous wording (Score:2)
revealing nuances that were once flattened in files compressed for digital streaming or CD manufacturing
Are they referring to file size reduction, or dynamic range compression?
If the latter, it'd be good news; undoing the damage done by the Loudness Wars.
Remastering can provide a huge improvement... (Score:2)
... but not from better-than-CD audio quality.
If you don't know what loudness wars are, you should read about it [wikipedia.org]. Basically, any CD in the last 20-30 years is engineered to sound louder. As loud as possibly, in fact. Since not all parts of a song are very loud, softer parts are amplified so everything is loud, losing details. Early on, this normalization process used to be reserved for "FM tracks", different remasters of a song exclusively designed for FM broadcast (note that analog FM radio is designed to
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90% of the time, vinyl is cut from the same master as the CD and the streaming release. (Obviously excepting releases from before the CD era.) In contemporary recording practice, the compression gets applied waay early in the process, no later than the mixing stage. It sometimes gets applied while the track is being recorded, like when a guitarist plugs into a compression pedal.
I've actually heard of more compression being applied occasionally to vinyl releases, to compensate for the higher noise fl
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Check out the bottom two screenshots http://brianstagg.co.uk/p_t_a_... [brianstagg.co.uk]
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90% of the time, vinyl is cut from the same master as the CD and the streaming release. (Obviously excepting releases from before the CD era.) In contemporary recording practice, the compression gets applied waay early in the process, no later than the mixing stage.
You seem to be confusing compression that is applied during the recording and compression that is applied during the final master. In many cases the latter is quite different from vinyl out of sheer necessity. Many CDs the way they are mastered (if you can use the word "master" to describe the practice of aggressively clipping bass lines) if they were simply pressed into the vinyl will cause the needle to eject from the groove.
No there are differences in most vinyls from CDs. The differences may be minor or
Hahahaha. Nope (Score:2)
I would rather buy and rip the music myself. Plus tool always has interesting album boxes.
Universal Music Masters (Score:3)
About 12 years ago there was a huge fire at Universal Studios. They lost a significant portion of their studio masters, meaning the only copies they have of a lot of their music are whatever digital copies they have made before that time. Whatever "new" master you are going to get from them isn't going to be any different than what they had 12 years ago. Maybe it's a good quality master, maybe not. The only way you would get a new mastering is if the musician themselves, or maybe the recording engineer, still had backup/safety copies, but those are owned by the engineer or musician, not Universal music.
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The only way you would get a new mastering is if the musician themselves, or maybe the recording engineer, still had backup/safety copies, but those are owned by the engineer or musician, not Universal music.
Is that true? Do artists and/or studios really allow engineers ownership of backup copies?
Backups (Score:2)
From what I've read, when a recording studio would send tapes to the label for mastering, they'd keep backup copies in case they got destroyed or damaged in transit. Sometimes the label would eventually ask for the backups, sometimes they wouldn't. Sometimes the band would take the backups. Depends on what the contract said or, more often in the olden days, whatever the label felt like doing. Back then there wasn't really a concept of re-releases or anthologies - the label cared about the master to press a
It's NOT remastered. (Score:1)
I just tried four random songs claiming to be Ultra HD, including Lady Gaga who is specifically mentioned. It's overcompressed (dynamic compression) loudness war squarewave garbage just like the original releases. There is nothing remastered about this. Do not waste your time.
I wasn't expecting greatness but I was hoping maybe it would be what it says on the tin.. alas not.
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It's overcompressed (dynamic compression) loudness war squarewave garbage just like the original releases..
I'm a newly minted audiophile. Can you please help me understand what sine I can use to determine that the music is square wave?
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If your ears aren't telling you (ignorance is bliss!) then you can use an oscilloscope. The waveform isn't supposed to be lopped off at the top and bottom, it's supposed to have peaks and valleys. Google "loudness war" for more information -- it's unfortunately been going on since the 1990s. The cleanest, most dynamic popular music CD releases were made 1985-1992. That's a very, very long time ago at this point.
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Remastered? (Score:2)
Don't change things (Score:2)
A 4K remaster of a 35mm film is one thing. But when you go trying to fix things, you tend to Lucas it up. This will probably be as bad as colorizing B&W films. Eliminating the original style and replacing it with something that sounds more modern.
And how exactly will we play this back? (Score:2)
Amazon remasters (Score:2)
So basically they will just brickwall the compression?
I thought CD audio exceeded human ear capabilities (Score:2)
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Another bit of information: There was a thing called DVD-Audio that used the extra capacity of DVDs to carry 24bit/192KHz
Hype will sell the limited actual benefit (Score:2)
Amazon has certainly factored in the "sound quality is good enough for the vast majority of users" wall, the point at which sound quality is adequate for use during every-day activities like traveling in moving vehicles, during physical activities, background for parties, etc. The pool of serious audiophiles is not that large, and even among them not all will be willing to pay more for what might be only very minor improvements, easily heard only by the discerning ear, when played on high end devices, in
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>If so, these new formats will be winners based only on merit..
Damn - this sentence should read: " If so, these new formats will NOT be winners, based only on merit".
For whom? (Score:2)
Hearing declines rapidly after teenage years. The only people who will be able to hear the difference will not have money to spend on it.
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The ability to hear changes in remastering has nothing to do with audio decline. It's not about reproducing some magical 20kHz tone. Many albums are just poorly mastered. There's a reason people bootlegged Metalica songs from the PS3 guitar hero release, some studio albums were mastered by deaf people.
The Sound of Marketing (Score:2)
"Better than CD" is rather pointless since most people will still listen using crappy Beats or similar headphones.
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Not true. The difference between good quality mastering and some of the shit that makes the final CD can be heard by even by a deaf man half the time. This isn't about some fancy high res audiophile wank.
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good quality mastering
But good mastering is (mostly) orthogonal to the actual medium - you can have both well and badly mastered pieces on any of CD, vinyl, tape or digital. That a slew of badly mastered works were released on CD is mostly a historical artifact: CD happened to be the predominant medium when those pieces were produced.
I interpret "better than CD" to mean "better dynamic" or "better bandwidth", or "fewer digitization artifacts" - all of whom would be lost on Beats users, so "better than CD" is, IMO, just marketing
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But good mastering is (mostly) orthogonal to the actual medium
Indeed, but the medium isn't changing. It's digital.
I interpret "better than CD" to mean "better dynamic" or "better bandwidth", or "fewer digitization artifacts"
If that's all you wanted you wouldn't need a remaster, you just copy out the highest resolution of the existing final master.
But in any case this isn't open up to interpretation. The fact that it says right in the summary they are going back to the original recordings, not just getting the final masters out and are actually remastering means the final result will be fundamentally different in ways not at all to do with the resolution or dynamic range of th
don't re-master, re-stage (Score:2)
One of the best things about "Boardwalk Empire" was that they re-staged some of the best-known songs of the day. This let us hear songs which have been popular for decades, recorded using modern equipment. Rather than re-mastering the old songs, Amazon should hire good singers, musicians, producers and mastering engineers to re-create the songs. In the music industry this is called "covering" a song.