Howdy, Anatoliy ...Nice to meet you Frank. My name is Anatoliy.
I am not advocating neither dynamic range compression, nor lossy file compression. I just posted a link on a blog of a guy that advocates dynamic range compression. He is a typical audio engineer of the modern era.
Following what others have just said, I tried a bit of fancy fiddling just recently, experimenting with trying to uncompress the accelerator flat to the floor material. Mixed results, a lot of the problem is that all sorts of other "clever" processing has been done in the studio, unraveling it all is a major nightmare - is it worth it?
Frank
Amen.
When I was still consulting for Harman Multimedia, at one point there was a shared lab space with individual benches. There was a radio and CD player and modest amp and speaklers.
Most of the techs and engineers liked to have music going in the background. I could tolerate it, barely, as it was a significant distraction. But when I was bringing up a prototype I had to insist that it be turned off, which made me decidedly unpopular. I could see them looking at me and thinking "Doesn't he like music??"
Yes. I like music very much, and a wide spectrum of genres at that. When I listen to music, that's the activity.
Now, if there is a truly mindless task (and most tasks that seem such could be the better done being mindful) I can manage, possibly even enjoy something as an accompaniment. But that's a rare event.
I'm reminded of people who believe that they are possessed of the rare ability to multitask. There was the person who told another of this, and said "You know, many times when I talk to you on the telephone, I'm also doing something else". The other: "Yes. I know those times".
No, he's not. He's just stating the very real reasons why it is done in commercial music. Most recordings benefit from judicious use of a little compression. And when you have to sell to the vast public - and compete with everyone else who is selling, compression is a tool for being heard.
Purist like us are a tiny minority.
The pendulum is swinging back the other way. A lot of people now realize how bad the compression war has been and want something better. It will take time for the general public to catch up, but it will happen.
Many recordings I hear that audiophiles rave about being so well recorded are heavily produced and use compression in clever and artful ways. I doubt they would get the raves and the sales without it.
Automatic? No. Too many factors to guess during processing. But if recordings contained some pilot channel with information about processing it would definitely help.
In that case, maybe I (and some others) am taking this hobby too seriously!
You'd be hard pressed (LP pun intended) to find commercial recordings that don't go through this, though some (admittedly few thesedays) to a lesser extent than others. Probably 95+ percent of commercial recordings (basically all rock/pop music, accounting for 99-odd percent of sales) goes through some amount of dynamic range compression between the microphone and the recording you buy. Even traditional jazz and classical recordings may have some compression.
Nowadays if you want a recording guaranteed to be free of compression, limiting, EQ, and any other "secrets" of modern music production, you pretty much have to record it yourself.
You were quoting a post discussing the difference between FLAC and MP3. FLAC is lossless data compression, and is equivalent to Redbook CD (unless the FLAC file is made from a source other than 16bit/44.1kHz sample rate)
I don't know what "joint stereo" is.
And yes, I can, and I believe many others could as well. If you play a bouzuki and/or a guitar, 1 will get you 10 that you could as well, easily.
That said, I must point out that I am speaking about the set of tools as provided by the Nero program, version 8.0; I have no idea how it rates overall, could be one of the worst, or one of the best.
Until now, WMA and such like were of exactly zero interest to me, it's only now that the new car forces me to get into it (well, not literally, I could always fall back on classic CDs) that I have taken any interest at all. And frankly, I am not very concerned about absolute quality, I don't think cars are ideal environments for critical listening of music.
My home system is a different story altogether.
Oh, for the love of God ...
Exactly how is that different from what I said?
How can a product be successful if it has not been optimally made overall? The problem is that both you and Wave take the term "optimally" far too rigidly. In theory, you are right, but in real life, "optimal" by default includes certain compromises, much like chess, you sacrifice the pawn to get the queen.
Ultimately, do check out Leontief's input-output matrices and you will soon see how flexible "optimal" can be in real world terms. It's never perfect as you and Wave seem to think of it.
Any set of any criteria for any product ever made must include its sales results. The only questions is how much of the technical side are you willing to compromise on to improve your sales. To a manufacturer, "optimal" by default means well selling; if it doesn't sell well, no matter how perfect technically it may be, it is suboptimal. He's not in it to make technically perfect product no-one will buy, he's in it to sell as many as he can.
The only time I can go for technically optimal is when I'm doping something for myself, in which case I don't give a hoot how much it will cost.
It seems so. The fact that I have a degree in economics, majoring in foreign trade, is obviously of no consequence.
The fact that I have been profesionally engaged in starting up small companies for over 15 years is also obviously irrelevant.
Lastly, also irrelevant is the fact that I have stablished my own company and have been working it since 2000, exporting to 28 countries in the world.
Because here comes an engineer who knows it all better.
As I said before, in my meaning 'optimal' is not a matter of opinion so it does seem we've been talking at crossed purposes. I propose to halt the discussion here
Yes, there seems to be no further point to this discussion.
@benb
Having seen the process of making an LP and a CD several times over, Ben, I realize that it will be compressed to an extent - by how much, and exactly how is what separates what we call a good and a poor recording.
However, I still disagree that compression as such is good, I see it more as a must to a certain degree, but going over that produces a poor sounding recording in my view. Not many music types which are happy with a 3 or 6 dB dynamic "range".
Re: FLAC. I agree, and that's why I was quick to point out that my comment was NOT related to FLAC as compared with Red Book CD, but to MP3 compared to Red Book CD. I have heard FLAC only a few times, and feel I need more personal experience before I can comment on it.
Actually, I'm not even sure it's MP3 I am commenting, I assume the Windows WMA format is a version of MP3. It's the only compressed format I have any hands-on experience with, all of it very recent, as I said, I had no interest in these formats before, and hence no experience with them. May seem odd, but the standarded Red Book CD format was quite enough for me until recently.
Having seen the process of making an LP and a CD several times over, Ben, I realize that it will be compressed to an extent - by how much, and exactly how is what separates what we call a good and a poor recording.
However, I still disagree that compression as such is good, I see it more as a must to a certain degree, but going over that produces a poor sounding recording in my view. Not many music types which are happy with a 3 or 6 dB dynamic "range".
Re: FLAC. I agree, and that's why I was quick to point out that my comment was NOT related to FLAC as compared with Red Book CD, but to MP3 compared to Red Book CD. I have heard FLAC only a few times, and feel I need more personal experience before I can comment on it.
Actually, I'm not even sure it's MP3 I am commenting, I assume the Windows WMA format is a version of MP3. It's the only compressed format I have any hands-on experience with, all of it very recent, as I said, I had no interest in these formats before, and hence no experience with them. May seem odd, but the standarded Red Book CD format was quite enough for me until recently.
Perhaps a technical, rather than personal, criticism might be more appropriate.
I want to publicly apologise to dvv for my previous comment. It was, at best, uncalled for. At worst, insulting.
flac is the same, aurally, as redbook CD. About mp3: joint stereo along with some other parameters sacrifice channel separation for filesize. I have no idea if wma supports these parameters. wma is a different beast to mp3 and it is a slightly worse version of mp3. Mainly because you can not tweak it. (set aside that mp3 has a buttload of faults which i am bored to list here)
I still maintain that you will not be able to tell the difference between uncompressed and a 320kbit mp3 with high quality encoder (not "mp3pro") and no "joint stereo"or others.
flac is the same, aurally, as redbook CD. About mp3: joint stereo along with some other parameters sacrifice channel separation for filesize. I have no idea if wma supports these parameters. wma is a different beast to mp3 and it is a slightly worse version of mp3. Mainly because you can not tweak it. (set aside that mp3 has a buttload of faults which i am bored to list here)
I still maintain that you will not be able to tell the difference between uncompressed and a 320kbit mp3 with high quality encoder (not "mp3pro") and no "joint stereo"or others.
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Only the channel differences are stored to reconstruct stereo. (as opposed to
two independent channels for left and right.)
Joint (audio engineering) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Thank you, GK7.
As I said several times over, I am completely lost in this world of lossy compression in general, I know only the very bare of facts, which is not enough to find my way.
I never needed to know anything about it, because I never needed nor wanted to use it. And probably never would, if my car didn't dictate one of those formats. To me, throwing away parts of the signal is sacriledge, it's something one deserves to be, well not burnt at the stake, but at least expelled from the audio community as a vandal and a hooligan. And I don't give a damn if 90% of the kids today are getting high on that sound.
All my life, I was hell bent on getting as much as could from the signal into the loudspeakers or headphones, appearently the opposite what MP3 is about. As I understand it, it is effectivvely a 4-bit format after compression, but it does cut the file size, in my case, by a factor of 5:1.
The manual says the device will recognize files with extenstions .m3u and .pls. It also says WMA files will be rocgnized only if mase with Windows Media Player 8.0 or higher - I use Windows 7 64-bit professional, I tried this and it works perfectly.
Because of the 5:1 compression ratio, I assumed WMA was some version or subvariant of MP3, so I am hardly surprised to learn from one of messages above that it's an inferior version - I'm used to Windows having the junk built inside, which needs to be replaced.
N.B.: My previously posted comments on bloated bass and lacking treble refer to standard 16-bit WAV files converted to WMA by Windows itself. Thus, they should not surprise anyone.
Fortunately, my Nero program has its own MP3 converter, and it has a LOT of choices, including a compression ratio selector. I gather from all your comments that I should get to know it better and preferably forget the WMA format as made by Windows.
Any suggestions on better quality MP3 conversion from CDs as the signal source would be greatly appreciated.
@tsiros
No offence taken, hence no apology necessary. I'm still going for my summer vacation to Afitos, Kassandra, 110 km from Thessaloniki, 16th year running. I remain undaunted.))))
Besides, realistically speaking, you are quite right, perhaps not so confused, but very definitely most underinformed. Never needed it, was never interested in it. I spent my time doing whatever I could to make a CD copy as similar to the original as I knew how to make it.
FLAC was demonstrated to me by a friend who's very interested in it, but it was not a real auditioning session, so I honestly cannot comment on it. It will take at least some hours of comparing for me to have any general opinion of it. At this time, all I can say is that the idea is intrguing.
No offence taken, hence no apology necessary. I'm still going for my summer vacation to Afitos, Kassandra, 110 km from Thessaloniki, 16th year running. I remain undaunted.
))))Besides, realistically speaking, you are quite right, perhaps not so confused, but very definitely most underinformed. Never needed it, was never interested in it. I spent my time doing whatever I could to make a CD copy as similar to the original as I knew how to make it.
FLAC was demonstrated to me by a friend who's very interested in it, but it was not a real auditioning session, so I honestly cannot comment on it. It will take at least some hours of comparing for me to have any general opinion of it. At this time, all I can say is that the idea is intrguing.
Given the fact that harddisks are getting bigger and cheaper every month I think lossy compression is a thing of the past. (My iPod, which I use in my car has 160G and almost anything on it´s disk is stored lossless).
If you need to use MP3 the lame encoder ( LAME MP3 Encoder :: Related Links ) is regarded
by many as the best, you might want to use it with EAC ( ripping CDs). Both programs are free.
Lame comes with some presets, the highest quality setting (at the cost of bigger files) is called "insane", so lame --preset insane some_file.wav some_file.mp3 would be the command
line.
Presets and settings are explained here:
LAME - Hydrogenaudio Knowledgebase
If you need to use MP3 the lame encoder ( LAME MP3 Encoder :: Related Links ) is regarded
by many as the best, you might want to use it with EAC ( ripping CDs). Both programs are free.
Lame comes with some presets, the highest quality setting (at the cost of bigger files) is called "insane", so lame --preset insane some_file.wav some_file.mp3 would be the command
line.
Presets and settings are explained here:
LAME - Hydrogenaudio Knowledgebase
dvv, the best quality lossy encoding will be 320kbit/s, current - best quality- codec, 22050 maximum bandwidth, no "mid-side Joint Stereo", no "intensity JS" and no "narrrowing of stereo image".
the mp3 encoder licensed from fraunhoffer institut (they created mp3) allows these options. I have not much experience with LAME the past years because ever since i got hold of the original manufacturer encode, i think lame can only be worse. It still allows configuration though so YMMV.
the mp3 encoder licensed from fraunhoffer institut (they created mp3) allows these options. I have not much experience with LAME the past years because ever since i got hold of the original manufacturer encode, i think lame can only be worse. It still allows configuration though so YMMV.
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