Are Technology Limits In MP3s and iPods Ruining Pop Music?

[Bob Olhsson]

http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB118953936892024096.html

I played my class some difference files made by mixing MP3s at various bitrates out of phase with the original files so you could hear exactly what had been removed.

It wasn't exactly what you would want to remove from a pop song. I don't have the rights to post the stuff but anybody who wants to try this little science project using some music they own is welcome to post 10 or 15 seconds of a wave file.

[nobby]

His article should really be titled, "ruining the sound of pop music". The music itself can be treated as a separate though related subject.

I heard on NPR this morning that the sex pistols were getting together for their 30th anniversary. The English announcer was talking about, blah blah, "made them so great".

I thought they were pretty much the worst band that had ever gotten famous, but that if you insist on listening to crappy music, you at least had crappy music with good audio.

I'll listen to those clips when I get home. These computer speakers make anything sound bad.

$500 ear buds? For some reason I find that amusing.

[bunnerabb]

Truth isn't arbitrary.

Fashion ain't passion.

It is or it ain't.

*hug* -the bunny

[mousdrvr]

Yeah,

I was watching Lawrence of Arabia on my iPhone. Ya remember that scene when he goes back into the desert to get that lost dude, and there's that shot of all that sand and all you see is a camel slowly making its way across the screen? ALL THE WAY FROM MY LEFT THUMB TO MY RIGHT. Bone chilling I tell you. Technology just keeps getting better and better :lol:



-mous

[nobby]

You had me at "I was watching Lawrence of Arabia on my iPhone".

Thanks for my morning laugh :lol:

[eagan]

The grandeur, the majestic cinematic sweep.... the.... YOW! look at the monster, what a fearsome beast!..... man, the effects in this movie are.......oh. Hang on. A fruitfly landed on the screen. Never mind.


JLE

[pounce]

just splitting hairs here. not generally in disagreement with the thrust of this thread.

but ipods can play full fidelity files. they are not, strictly speaking, mp3 players. they -also- play mp3's, and in most cases primarily play mp3's.

that said, with the recently released 120 gig ipod, i'd think the average person could have all of their uncompressed audio on there without much trouble. so the ipod and other players can play the full fidelity files, but everyone has MP3 on the brain and few folks are truly listening to the full version of their audio clips. on the mac, to extract the full fidelity files you simply put the cd into the computer, double click on it, and drag the files off the disc to wherever you'd like them. (lots of other ways to do it as well, my point is that obtaining full fidelity files from cd or playing them on the ipod is easy and has been. but the idea of instead converting them to MP3 for file size considerations seems to have won out.

what about the other conversion formats? apple lossless? it seems there are some options that are acceptable and offer great improvements over the mp3 format.

i wanted to throw a good post that didn't have an anti technology slant because i'm not inherently bothered by the technology.

[Bob Olhsson]

For the most part lossless files are not what is being promoted by the tech industry who have been falsely advertising that lossy coding is "CD quality."

[myrtlebacker]

I doubt the premise, because I learned to love Abba on C60 cassettes w/o dolby or even chrome whatever and listening to AM radio...

[myrtlebacker]

It was f***ing mono too! :D

[Cosmic Pig]

I'm not too concerned about mp3 and ipods. In my little corner of the world most of the kids buy better quality headphones. Once they hear the difference they all rush out to get them.

Same with MP3s. I told my kid never less than 192 kbps, now all his buddies do the same.

Thats just my little corner, but I figure what that means is when one of the idiots that sells the crap realizes they can make more money with better sound it'll spread fast. ipod got to where it is because it sounds better than the competition. Simple. The player of sound that sounds best wins. Before ipod the best sounding one was the Sony Walkman.

Eventually, one of the company's that makes the crap will figure out if they add "mp3's under 192 kbps not recommended" in the instructions they'll sell more.

Same goes for brick wall limiting. Eventually one album will break it. Fashion is the passion.

maybe.

Cos.

[Comte de St Germain]

All this talk of audio files and na'er a flamefest of 19 cent D-A converters.

[Bob Olhsson]

From the standpoint of "size" and "balls," I'm afraid the cassettes were probably better.

[myrtlebacker]

Maybe, but my playback technology then wasn't quite capable of making these advantage as noticeable as one would have liked. :Wink: In the picture, it's not exactly the same model as mine. Mine was a radio/cassette combination. I loved it.

[nobby]

I listened to the Ella Fitzgerald comparison. I just focused on the vox because that was of central importance... Mp3 sounded, for lack of a better word, "phasey" to me. Then I played the .wav. You could hear her throat, the fullness of her voice which was missing on the MP3.

Of course, comparing a 128kbps MP3 to a .WAV file is sort of like comparing a lawn tractor to a diesel locomotive, but it's true that some websites call 128kbps MP3s "CD quality", which is disingenuous at best -- fraudulent, really.

[PRobb]

I love my iPod. 320 mp3 on the subway is just fine.:grin:

[eagan]

Going back to something Bob raised....

Ever since MP3 files started appearing, I've thought, you know, given a choice, I'd rather hear a decent quality cassette on a good properly cared for deck. But the popular consensus has been "oh, no, it's digital! digital is golden, digital is perfect! you're nuts!".

Here's one that was kind of disturbing for me. A few years ago I was talking to a musician friend of mine. I've known the guy for some years now, good musician, generally good taste, intelligent guy. I'd done some recording at his place in the past when he very generously let me spend a bunch of time in his little 8 track home studio just because he liked my stuff and I didn't have any serious recording gear. Technically savvy guy, a background in electronics starting in the U.S. Navy as an aviation electronics tech and then years in electronics manufacturing (which was where I got to know him, when we both worked at the same day gig for a few years).

The scary thing was when we started talking about him having a little MP3 player that he used for a little in-ear entertainment at his day job. He mentioned whatever software he was using to take tracks from stuff in his CD collection and encode them as MP3 files for the player.

I said something about not liking the sound of MP3s much, and he said "hey, sounds as good as the CDs to me". When I expressed my doubts about that, he said that he used whatever bitrate setting in the encoding software that was described as the "CD quality" setting (and I'm not sure I remember this right, but I'm thinking that this "CD quality" setting was 128 Kbs). I could not convince him that this was not, in fact, "CD quality", and one thing he said was something to the effect that the people writing the program wouldn't put some label like that on it if it wasn't really CD quality, now, would they?

I sort of sat there in mild shock, thinking 'oh, man.... dude... you really should know better than this".


JLE

[Bob Olhsson]

The thing about cheap digital stuff is that people desperately want to believe that it's as good or better than what has come before.

[Goes211]

I'm guessing (hoping) most of us here can hear a 128 kbps mp3 and hear the artefacts. Even at 192. At 320, you're likely to fool me.

That being said, my daughter, whom I try to expose to as much music as I can, couldn't care less. If she likes the song (and that can be hyped Mika-type crap just as much as an old Stevie Wonder track), she doesn't care if it's 64 kbps or if she taped it from the radio speaker with a dictaphone.
Just yesterday she was trying to pick up a tune from Pirates III (musicbox type piano ditty) she has on her iPod by ear and to find the notes on the piano. I don't care how bad the mp3 is, but if it makes her want to play the piano more...I'm all for it.

And therein lies the rub : if the music somehow gives you chills, it works. Not playing devil's advocate at all here, but I remember taping songs from the television speaker with the device below, and listening in bed at night (one ear glued to it) until the batteries wore out. Trust me, at the rate at which I was wearing out my Agfacolor C90's, I can tell I wasn't too concerned about audio quality.

I'd rather kids got into music again, but I'm not sure it has much to do with audio quality. I got goosebumps from watching that link Bob posted about the Venezuelan orchestra a couple weeks ago. It was a Youtube/Dailymotion link, and we all know the audio is sucky, to put it mildly. Well, I still got goosebumps. Because the intrinsic quality of the music still translated somehow.
For kids these days music is mostly a backdrop for video games. I talked to a teenager sometime ago and told her : imagine a disco (or any place where kids congregate in order to meet the opposite sex) with NO MUSIC. She couldn't even fathom the concept. Yet she couldn't tell me ONE SONG title she'd heard the last week-end. Then there's the guy from the advertising agency with a commercial for a huge bank who wants to use a worldwide hit on said commercial but screams murder when we say he needs to pay rights. Music is a commodity. People see it as an added value but refuse to pay for it. And trust me, I do understand the arguments laid out here. The paradox is that music needs to be essential to attract people. Kids playing instruments can only be a step in the right direction.
I hope.

[Oberlehrer]

I have this little theory that GSM phones and their compression artefacts also have a part in this.
Given that cell phones are something of a status symbol for teenagers and they are using them so damn often it means that they are exposed to those artefacts and have gotten used used to them. Add the "digital = good" myth to it.

The thing about all those other older technologies (AM radio, cassette, analog phone and so on) is that they never tried to fool the listener into believing that they are the same thing as the original.

An analogy: Take a high-resolution black-and-white print and a highly compressed JPEG: Which one is closer to the original? How do we subconciously react to each?

[shlotzky]

I think someone mentioned converters.

One thing I definitely noticed when first using a decent converter (DAC-1) for home listening a few years ago, was that I stopped "zapping", i.e. flipping through individual songs on cds like channels on a tv, and just tended to listen to the whole album all the way through.

Before that, I sort of always had the constant impulse to "do something" in order to improve my listening experience.

Now this was nothing that happened consciously. In fact I only started noticing it after a few weeks.

I think a lot of the reasons why people are into music is the sort of hypnotic experience you get when listening, which kind of takes your attention away from the imaginitive film in your mind, and redirects it to something more universal, even more real.

Any reproduction technology, marketing strategy or A&R policy that does not recognise the supreme importance of this "hypnotic" element in music will have devastating long-term consequences.

[Bob Olhsson]

It's all about information.

What we see massively affects our experience with what we hear. Without sight, the amount of information in a recording becomes far more critical.

We also create lots (maybe as much as 2/3?) of additional information using our imagination but this is limited by our past experiences of music. The more experience we have, the easier we are to fool. This is the old tweaking the equalizer that wasn't hooked up syndrome and the "what was I thinking?" experience when a client points out something really stupid that we did in a mix. (The reason "self-produced" generally means not produced...)

MP3s have different forms of degradation that we have little or no experience with in analog technology. The more we know about audio, the more likely we are to be fooled. Anybody remember the early samplers most of us thought were great that sound awful now that we have better? How about the ones that got so good we needed to take a step back because the old ones were a more convincing illusion?

[eagan]

I'm not sure I'm with you on the sampler thing, Bob, although you raise an interesting point.

Going back to the early samplers, it did make an impression on me. I mean, it was a revelation to me, the first time I was in a local shop and they had the first Emulator out and set up. I thought it was just incredible, absolutely fantastic. But, at the same time, I was well aware that the sound was, shall we say, a little funky around the edges. It was still amazing, and something you could go with, despite the flaws, just because it was so amazing and incredible to realize the possibilities of what you could do with such a thing.

If you go back to 1980, through the early eighties, even if you listened to something "high end" like the Fairlight, examined closely and objectively, it was still pretty rough and crappy. But it was still fantastic, just because of what could be done.

I think of this kind of stuff as the Dancing Bear syndrome. Look at that. Wow. Now, if you really seriously consider the bear's performance, alright, it's not something that will go down as greatness in the history of dance. But... look! It's a bear! And it's dancing! Wow! How about that! Isn't it amazing?

You could go back and look at the Mellotron like this, too. I mean, nobody who has ever listened objectively to a straight, unprocessed Mellotron and has any sort of ears and functioning brain could honestly describe it as a great clean clear pristine sound that is just like a real string orchestra, choir, flute, whatever. In fact, really, they sound pretty shitty. But a lot of people really dug what they could do, accepting them for what they are. At the time they were a recent development, people were in awe of the possibilities, and even today, there is a certain charm to them among a lot of people (including me), even though you really can't make any reasonable arguments against anybody who listens to them and says "but.... my god... that really sounds like shit!".

So much of any of this kind of discussion depends so much on context and relative comparisons among things people are familiar with.


JLE

[bunnerabb]

Nuance.

It's why an Ansel Adams print is 700.00 for a litho and your 2GB memory card on your Nikon costs 39.99.

Film, chemicals, paper cones, electrons.

There's nuance in that.

It sure as hell doesn't keep kids from learning songs or listening, but wouldn't it be nice if they had the option?

If they had the nuance?

If they could get the frosting AND the cake?

I'd rather a kid could hear something they liked on a crappy rig and on a good rig and then hear the difference than to have them being told "This is digital. It doesn't get any better. This is the way it's done and that's it."

Does that make sense?

[nobby]

A good part of the way we perceive sound... or anything, has to do with direct comparison. A pretty girl has your attention until a knockout killer babe comes into view, and conversely, if you are in a room with a world class ugly woman and a kind of plain girl walks in, she looks quite attractive by comparison. The same thing works for all of our senses, including hearing.

The typical cellphone or digital answering machine has pretty much the worst sound imaginable, and a lot of people seem to spend a lot of time listening to that.

[Spock]

Nuance.

It's why an Ansel Adams print is 700.00 for a litho and your 2GB memory card on your Nikon costs 39.99.

Film, chemicals, paper cones, electrons.

There's nuance in that.


And I'm here to tell you that litho looks bad compared to the real silver print.

Just like others have said, sometimes you don't need to the quality to get the point across. Someone with a good eye and the ability to get the right look on the model's face can take a killer picture even with an old 110 format camera with a flash cube on top of it.

I do get upset when people think that digital is "better" just because it is digital. The ads for HD Radio are a case in point. They claim clear digital sound. Hell, the total bit rate on the digital subcarrier is about 96kbps. And you know stations are going to break it into more than one stream.

[Bob Olhsson]

I never realized the limitations of photography until the first time I saw a Monet painting. On the other hand there are reports of Edison's cylinder passing blind tests.

[eagan]

I had a thought about all this.

Reading this most recent stuff, I'm thinking, maybe, that the essence of what we're talking about is this.

In various forms of media (not just involving sound), there might (oh, what am I saying...WILL) be assorted flaws and imperfections.

So, really, what all of this comes down to are questions of what stuff is degraded gracefully, and what isn't degraded so gracefully.

The former we can accept, and might even decide we like a little, the latter makes us gag if we have any sense and taste.


JLE

[Oberlehrer]

I had a thought about all this.

Reading this most recent stuff, I'm thinking, maybe, that the essence of what we're talking about is this.

In various forms of media (not just involving sound), there might (oh, what am I saying...WILL) be assorted flaws and imperfections.

So, really, what all of this comes down to are questions of what stuff is degraded gracefully, and what isn't degraded so gracefully.

The former we can accept, and might even decide we like a little, the latter makes us gag if we have any sense and taste.

Very well put.

[Bob Olhsson]

Exactly plus the constant challenge of learning to hear degradations in sounds that are so familiar we overlook them while they may be painfully obvious to those who have not become biased by familiarity and expectation.

Listening bias is a bitch because it causes us to hear things that aren't real that we want to hear and not to hear things that are very real that we don't want to hear.

[bunnerabb]

And I'm here to tell you that litho looks bad compared to the real silver print.

Agreed.

But I don't think Ansel is working a lot, anymore.

[pounce]

how do you teach folks to listen critically so as to understand the fairly objective differences we are talking about here?

my wife doesn't listen to music the same way i do. we figured that out.

i learned via my music education, and on my own from just listening a lot. and being around live sound, high resolution digital, analog, and so forth. i have a better than average basis for comparison, probably typical for the folks in this forum. but this basis of comparison isn't typical in the general population. it's a they don't know what they're missing situation.

[Bob Olhsson]

There's a big difference between intellectually knowing why you like or don't like something and simply liking or not liking it on the gut level.

Our "expertise" can get seriously in the way of knowing what people's gut level reactions are going to be. This is how AutoTune has taken over so much of pop music. Too many producers don't understand that tuning the vocals can completely fuck up the phrasing and how it feels to sing along with the singer.

[Cosmic Pig]

There's a big difference between intellectually knowing why you like or don't like something and simply liking or not liking it on the gut level.

Our "expertise" can get seriously in the way of knowing what people's gut level reactions are going to be. This is how AutoTune has taken over so much of pop music. Too many producers don't understand that tuning the vocals can completely fuck up the phrasing and how it feels to sing along with the singer.

I agree Bob, I often ask people why they like a particular tune and the answer isn't always the obvious. Often it's something you wouldn't expect, some minor detail you didn't think twice about.

But could you expand on how autotune fucks up phrasing and singing along? I don't get that part. Are you talking extreme autotuning?

Cos.

[eagan]

Just a quick point on that stuff.

I think it's important to distiguish something between the "music pro" and "civilian" listening evaluation and feedback, when you get into stuff about "knowing why you don't like it" versus "just liking or not liking, but not knowing why".

Somebody who doesn't know anything about music and recording might possibly actually have a pretty good idea in their head about why they like or don't like something, but the problem is they don't know the technical concepts and details and the lingo to be able to articulate an explanation of what it is that hits them one way or the other.

It might actually be kind of clear in their mind, in terms of their own perception; they can hear it, maybe very specific stuff, they just don't have a fucking clue of how to explain it.


JLE

[pounce]

i remember that about learning compression. it was a difficult thing to talk about in until i got to know a lot more about it. but i could hear the difference it made.

[chrisj]

CD isn't perfect, but you can get it to be a hell of a lot more affecting than mp3s...

iPods aren't perfect, but you can get them to be a hell of a lot more affecting than a cheap walkman (note: this assumes you're pushing them to the limit, not playing mp3s on them! They do have very nice converters)

This is part of why I hate the idea of companies abolishing CDs and going to DRM-only media where the players actually will not play the old media anymore (because it's a big honking security hole)... it's a separate issue, but the fact is you CAN make raw CD quality be pretty damn impressive. You have to do it just right, and you have to be thinking in those terms rather than about the 'sound quality', but you can do it.

By that I mean, apparent audio quality isn't at all the same as this ability to connect people with the musical intention. Given a choice people will usually choose brighter, bassier, more upfront etc. even if it trades off some of that visceral musical force.

The desired goal is possible with modern tools, people just don't CHOOSE to do it. Once you're finished with all the EQ sculpting, compressing, gating, peak limiting etc. you're trying to put in the musical force yourself rather than sitting around dependent on the force of the performances.

Which might be a mistake...

[iqi616]

my wife doesn't listen to music the same way i do. we figured that out.
Real humans listen to the music, we listen to the sound. :)

[eagan]

Real humans listen to the music, we listen to the sound. :)

Actually, you'll find a bunch of us here who do both.


JLE

[Brendo]

ipod got to where it is because it sounds better than the competition. Simple. The player of sound that sounds best wins.i'm calling BS. the ipod's interface is what sold most people i've asked, and then from there, they see that hey, apple make computers that work like ipods, and then they switch to macs.

the sound of the player is only part of it.

Actually, you'll find a bunch of us here who do both.Sometimes I find it hard to switch off my "engineer ears", other times it's difficult to switch them back on again. Do you find you have any sort of control over this?

[Molly's Lips]

Sometimes I find it hard to switch off my "engineer ears", other times it's difficult to switch them back on again. Do you find you have any sort of control over this?
I think I tend to pay MORE attention to the sound, depending on how BAD the music is. And vice versa.

I think it's worth saying(and you guys have already kind of said it), that it's mostly kids we're talking about who listen to pop music. And kids just aren't that concerned with audio quality... Although I do remember being somewhat excited when I got a walkman that had "megabass".

Gimmicks. They like gimmicks.
Whether it's a bass boost button on a walkman, 40sec anti-skip on a discman, or being able to put 2 jillion songs on an ipod.

It is frustrating. I think that the mp3 is kind of like the modern 45, in that a step up in technology has actually resulted in a step down in quality.

[eagan]

Sometimes I find it hard to switch off my "engineer ears", other times it's difficult to switch them back on again. Do you find you have any sort of control over this?


Yeah. I'm not saying it's easy, necessarily, but, yeah.

I think I've developed in this over a bunch of years logged in "one guy alone in a studio" mode where it's just me doing all the roles involved, and having to juggle different modes of thinking and acting back and forth and integrating them.

I think on this particular point, it definitely developed during several years where I was doing stuff in a kind of musical and recording R&D period working with cheesy little 4 track cassette setups. There was a lot of time spent where there was a need to control focus and attention, listening to stuff in progress and saying, basically, "OK, yes, it sounds pretty shitty, really, and there may not be much I can do to improve matters given the tools at hand, but put that aside for now; what about the actual ideas, what about the performance?".


JLE

[Cosmic Pig]

i'm calling BS. the ipod's interface is what sold most people i've asked, and then from there, they see that hey, apple make computers that work like ipods, and then they switch to macs.

the sound of the player is only part of it.



I can't see how its the interface. I finally found Floola instead of that crappy itunes. All I wanted to do was drag a tune into an ipod or pull one out. That simple. Itunes couldn't do it. If anything itunes has convinced me that mac is complicated and non-intuitive.

Regardless though, I still think quality sound is the way to get out of the current doldrums.

I recall the first time I heard bass. Watching a band where the bass player was having trouble with his cable and it kept cutting in and out. It was a lightbulb moment firmly etched in my memory, and as a result reminds me what I used to hear in music as a kid. Good sound to me back then equaled good sense of space. I could get to where the song was taking me easier.

Whether that's on a mountain top with wind singing through my hair and majestic vistas blah blah or next to a lover whispering in my ear, a good stereo put me there. We killed that with limiting and mp3's but it shouldn't be too hard to get back.

Just some thoughts on it.

Cos.

[Brendo]

i was talking about the ipod itself - not itunes. on windows, itunes is a chore and a pain. on mac itunes is pretty decent.

[nobby]

Itunes works great on windows for most things. File conversion is dodgy... you click on convert to mp3, it says successfully converted, but it's still a .wav.

OTOH, I like the itunes burner better than the WMP. I put a file on windows, it says can't burn file because blah blah, so I just drag and drop it in into an itunes song list and burn it.

[Bob Olhsson]

I haven't found much difference assuming the same version is involved.

[bunnerabb]

I got an old pair of Altec Model Four Mantarays, at home, and when I get back to the main I'm going to get my turntable tweaked, get the tens refoamed, slap them on a good receiver and play records in my dining room.

Wow, I'm so OLD and such a LUDDITE and.. um, no, wait.. Luddites destroyed machines.

I just use the ones with the highest quality results.

I'd say your mileage may vary but you can't compare Eldorados to scooters.

[Molly's Lips]

I got an old pair of Altec Model Four Mantarays, at home, and when I get back to the main I'm going to get my turntable tweaked, get the tens refoamed, slap them on a good receiver and play records in my dining room.

Wow, I'm so OLD and such a LUDDITE and.. um, no, wait.. Luddites destroyed machines.

I just use the ones with the highest quality results.

I'd say your mileage may vary but you can't compare Eldorados to scooters.
Back a few years ago I lived in a house where one of my roomates had a pair of Altec "studio monitors" from the 70's. They were unbeleivably huge, with oxblood grills, horns, 15" drivers, and I think they had passive radiators too. They were the BEST FUCKING SPEAKERS I have ever had the pleasure to listen to music on. And I've heard far more accurate and precise speakers, but these just sounded great. FUCKING MASSIVE sounding. And they were so efficient, you only had to give them like 5 watts and they were blasting. I could sit there and listen to Pink Floyd albums for days on them and they just sounded perfect. OK, I'll stop ranting now. Just thought I'd share.

edit -I think they were model 19's

[Bob Olhsson]

Those Altecs actually weren't all that inaccurate!

Bob Ludwig used them along with a stack of Quad electrostatics before he got his Duntechs. They required a relatively high source impedance for the crossover to be at the right frequency and the low-end to not be rolled off. This made them sound pretty harsh and thin with solid state amps.

[Molly's Lips]

Woah. So was he using the electrostatics instead of the altec high frequency drivers? That must have sounded pretty darn good, to say the least. I've never heard electrostatics, but I had a physics teacher in highschool who was always talking about his homemade electrostatic speakers. He said they were extremely transparent, but they couldn't do low frequencies. And something about insanely high voltages that sounded scary. Can you kill flies with those things or what?

[Bob Olhsson]

He used both sets of monitors depending on what he was doing. The electrostatic stack had a pair of 24" subs and a Decca/Kelly ribbon tweeter. The tweeter was also used with the Altecs.

[bunnerabb]

edit -I think they were model 19's

Nice. (http://www.lansingheritage.org/images/altec/specs/home-systems/model-19/page1.jpg)

[Molly's Lips]

He used both sets of monitors depending on what he was doing. The electrostatic stack had a pair of 24" subs and a Decca/Kelly ribbon tweeter. The tweeter was also used with the Altecs.
Oh yeah, I forgot electrostactics are limited in their high frequency range as well. That's a crazy setup. Must have sounded amazing coming straight off the tape.


(http://www.lansingheritage.org/images/altec/specs/home-systems/model-19/page1.jpg)http://www.lansingheritage.org/images/altec/specs/home-systems/model-19/page1.jpg
(http://www.lansingheritage.org/images/altec/specs/home-systems/model-19/page1.jpg)Yup. Them's the ones. I sure miss them.

Funny how talking about stuff that sounds bad leads to talking about stuff that sounds great.

[knightsy]

What a topic... you'd have to be an unbelievable marketing genius to get kids to spend their limited cash on high end audio when they can still play songs on their Iphones through their Ibuds.

Good luck with that. This horse has bolted.

[eagan]

You can get them to listen to comparisons and hear the difference and let them figure it out themselves.

Which is hardly a new thing. It's just that it's now something different. In the past it was crappy little portable cassette players or all in one shitbox "phonographs" with vinyl-grinder tonearms carrying ceramic cartridges, garbage low powered mono amplifier circuits, and cheesoid little speakers in cases one step above cardboard.

Then one day they would hear a really good system at a friend's house or something and have a revelation about how stuff was supposed to sound and they never knew.

What's that French saying about "the more things change, the more they stay the same"?


JLE

[maccool]

plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose?

[RWC]

MP3s wouldn't even line up with the original file so the out of phase info would be disgusting. Were the files lined up? MP3 encodes in chunks. Codecs like Vorbis don't.. so you have to line it up manually, which is nearly impossible, before you can do a comparison.

If you do manage to line it up, try doing an ABX test instead. Where A is the original WAV, B is the MP3, and X is what you have to guess. Do it with a well encoded MP3(not iTunes, blade, xing, audiocatalyst, or any number of substandard MP3 encoders out there). Use LAME, and see if you can tell a difference between the 16/44 WAV you hear on the CD and the encode, in a true blind test, with a proper encoder.

The whole point of MP3, musepack, vorbis, and all of these other codecs is to take out sound that's going to be masked. Playing the encoded file out of phase with the original, while interesting, defeats the purpose. Do you listen to the song without the 99% of the information in it that is going to mask the 1% you're going to be hearing now?

I've done this test on NS10s to Genelecs to ipod earbuds to Thiel's high end, and excluding test clips that were made with the codec's weaknesses in mind, I could never find someone who could tell a well encoded VBR MP3 from the original, much less another codec. Not even by fluke did someone get the 14/20 I require to believe they could tell the difference.

I do think that youtube/myspace are killing quality in a way though. Where one might have went to the trouble of making an, even badly encoded MP3 of their music, they now link to a myspace page. Even a bad encoder at 128k owns the myspace encoder 4 times over.

iTunes is evil for its terrible MP3 encoder. :(

[Pancho Ballard]

I've said it before and I'll say it again; people don't care.

Okay, they do to the extent that if something sounds really, really bad then they'll say so but as long as it sounds 'okay' at worst they're not bothered. Some of the earlier points about growing up and listening to music on cheap cassette players are spot on. I used to tape the radio by sticking my portable cassette player in front of the speaker and pressing record and that's how I learnt to love music.

There's a time and a place for everything and I like it all - even anonymous foriegn songs on tinny shortwave stations.

[Bob Olhsson]

I don't buy for a minute that people don't respond to sound quality!

My experience has been that musicians tend to care the least of anybody. They are so familiar with the sound of music that anything that's in tune and doesn't flam seems acceptable because their imagination will just fill in the rest. The more knowledgeable we are, the easier we become to fool. The equalizer we tweaked for five minutes only to discover it hadn't been hooked up is the perfect example.

The ordinary listener doesn't know what to expect. A recording either engages them or it doesn't. Nobody ever stops to examine why something has or hasn't engaged them.

[Starfucker]

+1 for people don't care about mp3 quality

I also just read about Bob's terrible cassette recording of a great performance in another thread and I think that also proves that point.

What I do think ruines pop music is the limiting, perfect pitch, perfect timing,... everybody under a certain age is so used to. Those kids don't like older (like 90's) stuff because it sounds so wimpy.

Another thing that ruins it is that it has become one neverending commercial. for phones, clothes, cars, fucking handbags,...

Another thing is that popular music is by definition not cool. The Bigger a hit, the less people like it (or dare to admit they like it). Somebody explain that to me...

[Bob Olhsson]

The audio quality of that cassette had more balls than most MP3s despite its obvious tonal and noise artifacts. The same used to be true of relatively unprocessed AM radio on a pocket radio. There's tone and then there's visceral impact at moderate volume levels. Ask any club DJ about the latter and why most stick to vinyl.

[bunnerabb]

I always think of vinyl as a sandwich I can taste and .mp3 as a sandwich on a shelf in cellophane.

I can see it, tell what it is and I know what it would taste like but I can't taste it.

[Sounds Expensive]

I think the worse part of the itunes thing is the fact that you're actually paying for something that sounds worse than a CD.

Record vs. cassette tape or CD vs. cassette tape is not the same as CD vs. AAC 128 - it does not sound good, and it's a shame.

I uploaded a track from the Lord of the Rings soundtrack at 128 to see if I would really notice a difference. I figured if I imported the entire three CD soundtrack it would take a lot of HD space, so AAC would be a good way to keep size down to a min., but not sacrifice the sound too much . . . or so I've been led to believe.

Anyhow, I'm listening to the imported test track while studying, now, it was in the background because I was focusing more on my studies . . . all of a sudden my brain goes, "hey, what gives?!" So I listened more closely to the brass section and the room interaction, took note and then put on the CD. Yeah, the CD was like removing the blanket . . . I felt like I could breathe again.

I tried the same experiment with 256 and 320, same thing. :Thumbdown:

Needless to say, I imported LOTR at the standard Wav. format and bit the bullet on the 2 gig size - it was worth it, I just couldn't handle the sound quality of the AAC.

[RWC]

Anyhow, I'm listening to the imported test track while studying, now, it was in the background because I was focusing more on my studies . . . all of a sudden my brain goes, "hey, what gives?!" So I listened more closely to the brass section and the room interaction, took note and then put on the CD. Yeah, the CD was like removing the blanket . . . I felt like I could breathe again.

I tried the same experiment with 256 and 320, same thing. :Thumbdown:

Needless to say, I imported LOTR at the standard Wav. format and bit the bullet on the 2 gig size - it was worth it, I just couldn't handle the sound quality of the AAC.

I wish just once I could read something like this and believe any of it.

Placebo effects everyone to an extent. To the extent that, on websites that cater to people who develop and do testing on these codecs, you get threads locked and accounts banned if you post results without ABX blind test data. It's a necessity to be able to draw any conclusions from these results.

There's so much shit you can hear a difference on when it's not a blind test, that just isn't there. Even if you "think you heard something wrong", try ABX.

I don't buy from the iTunes store because I think 128 is too low. I did tests with Vorbis at 128 on ABX and it was a very tad bit too bright, and MP3 a tiny bit too dull on some joe satriani stuff I have. 192 made it impossible for me to ABX.. and VBR is way more transparent than CBR. I doubt AAC is much worse/better than vorbis so I doubt AAC would cut it at that bitrate, and certainly not enough for me to pay for it. I wouldn' take that stuff for free.

I wish the stuff were at least encoded with VBR, or that there were a lossless option. Or something not bottom of the barrel. But, I guess it has to be 128k exactly so you can advertise "50000 songs/1000000 minutes of time" and be exactly right. :Mad:

[Sounds Expensive]

I wish just once I could read something like this and believe any of it.

Not sure I'm following you . . .

[Bob Olhsson]

If you study the papers about how the perceptual models for lossy codecs were developed, you'll find that ABX tests rarely gave any meaningful results. People need to be taught exactly what to listen for and even then the process generally favors tonal aspects rather than dynamic. In most ABX tests the subject has imagined differences that aren't real instead of learning to hear the differences that are real and will grow annoying over time. Normal variations in hearing and the presence of hearing damage also have a huge effect on any individual's sensitivity to particular artifacts.

My understanding is that anything below 192 is band limited to 11kHz. That said, bandwidth isn't nearly as big a deal as artifacts created by some methods of limiting bandwidth.

[Sounds Expensive]

If you study the papers about how the perceptual models for lossy codecs were developed, you'll find that ABX tests rarely gave any meaningful results. People need to be taught exactly what to listen for and even then the process generally favors tonal aspects rather than dynamic. In most ABX tests the subject has imagined differences that aren't real instead of learning to hear the differences that are real and will grow annoying over time. Normal variations in hearing and the presence of hearing damage also have a huge effect on any individual's sensitivity to particular artifacts.

My understanding is that anything below 192 is band limited to 11kHz. That said, bandwidth isn't nearly as big a deal as artifacts created by some methods of limiting bandwidth.

And, presumably, the LPF curve is also affecting the audible range even at 320 . . . affecting "air" - the upper harmonics of brass instruments and their interaction with the room they're in?

I found that it was really apparent with studio-grade headphones and monitors, but not so much with walkman-style ear buds (obviously).

So, to have band limited material in an iPod environment is not so bad given the use of ear buds and any environmental noise (subway, cars, etc) that leaks in.

[Bob Olhsson]

I suspect it's more a question of artifacts masking or congesting the sense of "air" than the LPF causing the opaqueness.

[Pancho Ballard]

But if people really cared about sound quality why are MP3's so popular? Because they're small files, easy to share and you can fit a load on a disc? Yes. People don't really care about the quality of an MP3 when you can put loads on a DVD, when you can listen to them on your cell phone, on your iPod, on your toy dog whose tail wags to the music. I agree that they aren't the best sound quality in the world but they aren't the worst either.

So what engages a listener? A good song first and foremost and then hopefully a well recorded and mixed song. Look at some of the early Motown songs (I believe you've heard a few Bob!). Compare something like The Hunter Gets Captured By The Game with something like Beautiful by Christine Aguilera. The latter song is clean and crisp, very polished and shiny. The former is less so, it's a bit more muddy (not in a bad way, but in an old way). However, the former is a much better song with a fantastic performance while the latter is a bit more formulaic and contrived to my cynical ears.

If sound quality was what mattered I'd be listening to Aguilera. Fortunately it's song, song, song, so I'll stick with the Marvelettes.

Hang on, I think I've just blown my own argument. Why don't the kids on the back of the bus listen to the Marvelettes on their phones?...

[eagan]

I suspect Bob is right on that. Not so much a lack of high end, but a sense of some odd and hard to describe blurring or warpage, a subtle sonic mutilation that might be tough to recognize and describe exactly, but just gives a listener a sense of "something's not quite right here".

Especially when considering something I already mentioned about what sort of high end frequency perception many people actually have. You always read all the textbook stuff that says human audio perception is over the frequency range of 20 Hz to 20 KHz, but that's pretty optimistic and unrealistic. As far as this is concerned, a lot of actual sonic material doesn't necessarily require nearly as much high end as might be assumed sometimes.


JLE

[RWC]

Bitrate and LPF have little to do with each other. I can encode a 48k file that keeps the highs to 22 KHz if I wanted to with the right encoder if I wanted to. The LPF is there so the frequencies you will more likely hear get more attention than those you won't.

That is totally encoder and setting dependent, there's no rule that 11 KHz is where a LPF starts at 192k. I find myself 19K is a sensible rolloff at higher bitrate and 17.5 at lower bitrate. I'd rather 15K sound awesome and 20K not be there than 20K be there and 15K ring.

ABX tests do mean a lot. It's the only way to tell if the results are in your head or not. I follow this rule with expensive cables, with power amps. With almost everything. If I can't hear it when I cannot identify what I am listening to, then it's not there. You can save tons of money on equipment this way, too. Instead of buying a $50000 converter, maybe spend that on room treatment or something.

There is lots of music old obsolete codecs like MP3 mess up on, but I don't think it is as bad as people are making it out to be. There are lots of bad encoders out there that LPF at 14K(xing), encoders that just sound bad because(iTunes), but there are encoders that do it right that I've yet to get people to ABX continously. LAME 3.90.3, which is pretty old now, with --alt-preset standard, is still impossible for anyone I know in recording, or regular hi-fi aficionado, to ABX at all.

I have done extended ABX tests, however, that have demonstrated an intolerance to any lossy compression over long periods of time though. I'm talking about 2 hours of listening, then 2 hours of listening to something else. It was during the snowstorm here a few years ago. I did some other stuff while playing the music. In long term tests, weirdly enough, I was able to guess the right option every time.

[Bob Olhsson]

ABX tests mostly prove that it's really easy to fool yourself. A screwed up ABX test always gives random results. It doesn't mean you won't eventually hear differences.

My understanding is that the sample rate must be halved below 192 for stereo or 96 mono. What encoder do you mean? That amounts to a low pass although it's a good idea to try and do a better job than the encoder probably will.

[radiationroom]

I'm guessing (hoping) most of us here can hear a 128 kbps mp3 and hear the artefacts. Even at 192. At 320, you're likely to fool me.

Ugh.... Even 320K falls short of perfect, although it is a far-shot better than 128K. I do a good bit of syndicated radio programming, and most of it is distributed as 320K MP3 (because the popular radio automation systems for some reason lock-up/crash/freek-out when attempting to play the industry standard .BWF format as outputted from Pro-Tools or RADAR). When you get to hear the before/after as often as I do, the little glitches that most people would miss become readily apparent, even at 320K.

[radiationroom]

Then there's the guy from the advertising agency with a commercial for a huge bank who wants to use a worldwide hit on said commercial but screams murder when we say he needs to pay rights. Music is a commodity. People see it as an added value but refuse to pay for it.

And there lies the rub. Far too many people do NOT view playing music as being a legitamate way of earning a living. If there is zero investment in music, there will be NO music at some point. The French are getting smart about this by clamping down on online piracy to prevent "culture destruction". In sharp contrast, the Canadians are getting stupid about this by proposing a five dollar monthy tax on all internet subscriptions which would essentially act as a compulsory license.

[radiationroom]

The audio quality of that cassette had more balls than most MP3s despite its obvious tonal and noise artifacts. The same used to be true of relatively unprocessed AM radio on a pocket radio. There's tone and then there's visceral impact at moderate volume levels. Ask any club DJ about the latter and why most stick to vinyl.

One of the dirty little secrets about my radio shows is that I now source EVERYTHING off of vinyl including my work for XM, storing and editing at 24-bit. The primary reason why I now source from vinyl is due to the brickwall compression found on most CDs these daze, including reissues.

Multiband brickwall compression is arguably the #2 reason why music sales are down (the #1 reason IMO is the stagnation of music radio. While online piracy is part of the story, it is NOT the whole story). Brickwalling is by far the most abused process in the music recording process, sucking the life out of whatever is being brickwalled. But as Bob pointed out, typically musicians are clueless about these things.

Even worse is when whole tracks are HARD CLIPPED during mixing or mastering. The most famous example of this is the Red Hot Chili Peppers "Californication" CD, but clipped tracks are all over the place. I frequently found clipping on the Promo Only DJ subscription CDs, which is why I stopped using them for my radio programming. http://www.promoonly.com The Promo Only CDs can sound dreadful at times. I wonder how the quarter-hour ratings of stations that source from Promo Only are affected by the overcompressed and sometimes clipped audio on the Promo Only disks. Calling Bob Orban....

NOTE: It is also my opinion that the killing off of the LP by the majors in the late 1980s is a key factor in the decline of recorded music. LPs were pretty much gone from the chain music retailers by 1991 and it was about that time that the sale of current chart titles started to slip. The music business boom of the 1990s was mostly due to boomers replacing their LPs, 8-tracks, and cassettes of the 1970s with CDs of the same titles. This could be a discussion for a new thread.

[Bob Olhsson]

Great to see you here Peter!

To the best of my knowledge, the majors did not kill off vinyl. The big retail record chains stopped ordering it. They had killed off mono the same way 25 years earlier. The only thing the majors ever killed off that I'm aware of were singles.

Of course now it seems they are headed for killing off music...

[radiationroom]

The only thing the majors ever killed off that I'm aware of were singles.

Of course now it seems they are headed for killing off music...

Don't get me started. Edgar Bronfman, Jr is the poster child for music business incompetency. And Chris Anderson is the poster child for tech industry "business model" scams. Between the two of them they are perfectally capible of destroying what is left of the biz. I sincerely wish both of them would go away.

[Bob Olhsson]

Amazing when rich posers are being cited as "industry professionals!"