Good morning all, More years ago than I'd care to contemplate, I had a headphone rig which consisted of an old, tube(el 84s I think) Zenith Fm receiver which I'd yanked out of one of those "portable" stereos where the speakers swing out and the turntable drops down. I used this to drive a pair of Numark electrostatic headphones. With the aid of a rooftop antenna the sound was incredeble! The best of the best were the live broadcasts of the Philadelphia orchestra conducted by Eugene Ormande. To this day I've not heard better sounding, sweeter, more soul nourishing music! Back then they really cared for FM radio and sound in general. If they used any compression, I'll eat my hat. I feel privliged to have been around back in the day when giants strode the earth. MP3s?................THRIPPPPPPPP!!!
Oh, Pavel, please do not generalize.
Again, the MISUSE of dynamic compression is bad, not the compression itself. Same as clipping/harmonic distortion, we owe all the rock and planty of blues and pop to this nasty THD.
Back to compression, one may actually create great sounds with conscious use of compressor, especially when applied to a single track.
Too much compression (1:4 and more with bad timing) at the mastering stage to please the average FM listener in their car is the other thing.
Regards
Adam
Yes, but why even bother with that when we know that a master tape recorded well on tube gear in 1958 STILL sounds better? 50 years to get back to repro levels of the late 50's?
I have heard, not with my own ears, that the best Beatles and Pop sound was to be had with the reel-to-reel of the 60's as those had to be spun off at low speeds or even real time from a safety master.
Then, of course, the first gen of SS came in and that took another 15 years to fix.
I recently heard a 15 IPS reel to reel on a Tape Project recorder with master dubs from Abbey road studios at an MBL demo. Led Zepplin, Beatles, Talking Heads, an hour of the most amazing music uncompressed with detail you would not believe existed. I left very unhappy that I've spent a life time with the compressed multiple generation copies. We've paid for and listened to the crap versions the music companies have sold us in 5 or 6 formats.
It's been a very long time since I last worked with open tape but I doubt it bests, for example, 96/24 linear, a format easily within the storage capabilities of commodity consumer electronics. The Internet Archive has a very large selection of hi-rez live recordings. Highly variable but worth a browse. For an extreme example, sts-123_launch_2496.flac is a space shuttle launch. Reel to reel machines would collapse from magnetic saturation.
What do I think? Most people, including audiophiles, can't tell the difference between uncompressed and 320Kbs MP3. In a blind test, some could, but not without an A/B comparison.
Anyway, most people don't care. And it's probably better than a lot of the junk vinyl that was pressed in the 70s and 80s.
Anyway, most people don't care. And it's probably better than a lot of the junk vinyl that was pressed in the 70s and 80s.
It's consumer demand that drives what the record makers produce. If enough people were willing to pay for the higher quality, then they'd make more of it. A good analogy is probably wine. Most people can't taste the difference between fine wine and junk wine, but there are a few who can and there is then a small market for fine wine. Likewise, most people can't hear very well (like me) so they can't really tell the difference between good audio and bad, but there are enough that can hear well such that there is a small market for them as well. It's unfortunate that the really popular music isn't usually available (as far as I know) in a high resolution format in addition to the normal stuff sold to the masses.
Seems like "mastering" is largely a process of detail-removal. On '60s recordings that sound like they were mixed for AM radio, I bet the live mic feeds were amazing. After about 1969 or 1970 it suddenly became fashionable to start allowing some leading edges.
We must be looking in different places. MP3 is far from obsolete, I see it for download everywhere. Why? Because just about everything can play it. MP3 has become universal.
It would be interesting to know if the higher bitrate downloads have moved significantly away from MP3. I wonder if there are any numbers or industry surveys of this?
I do agree that there are better compression schemes, but once you get >220Kbs it's hard to tell them apart. The advantages over MP3 are at lower bitrates. If you play a decent >220Kbs MP3 for most people, they won't know it's compressed. Tell them, and they'll complain about how bad it is, right after not noticing.
It would be interesting to know if the higher bitrate downloads have moved significantly away from MP3. I wonder if there are any numbers or industry surveys of this?
I do agree that there are better compression schemes, but once you get >220Kbs it's hard to tell them apart. The advantages over MP3 are at lower bitrates. If you play a decent >220Kbs MP3 for most people, they won't know it's compressed. Tell them, and they'll complain about how bad it is, right after not noticing.
There's enough detail still remaining in low bite rate MP3, and "poor" transfers from the 60's, etc, to create amazing sound. If the right pre-processing is done, and the playback system is up to it, then I doubt that anyone would complain about what they were hearing, even from the worst of the "worst" source version ...
Don't forget also that most people listen to BAD QUALITY MP3 files instead of GOOD QUALITY MP3 files.
The rate of the compression itself is not so severe, but the result of the process is often so. This may create complaints more than it actually deserves.
And to sound good, certain music requires less compression than others.
The rate of the compression itself is not so severe, but the result of the process is often so. This may create complaints more than it actually deserves.
And to sound good, certain music requires less compression than others.
In the UK, digital radio (DAB) uses MP2 at mostly 128Kbs and lower. Its claimed that 160Kbs comes close to FM sound quality. Only one station (Radio 3 which is classical oriented) uses 196Kbs. Classical at 160Kbs sounds awful with strings. When DAB launched it was under the "promise" that 256Kbs would be used (CD quality) but as ever commercial pressure (read lots of trash channels) ate into the bandwidth available. Some channels use as low as 48Kbs which sound like you have your head under water.
I find that .wma files at as low as 64Kbs (which I use in the car) sound "better" or lets say less objectionable than 128 or even 160 Kbs MP2.
I find that .wma files at as low as 64Kbs (which I use in the car) sound "better" or lets say less objectionable than 128 or even 160 Kbs MP2.
It is, but that's the raw data rate given by the sampling rate 44.1K and 16 bit depth. But you have to remember that CD is a non compressed format.
MPEG 1/2/3/4 etc all use compression, whereby a lower bit rate can achieve the same as "quality" as a higher uncompressed data rate.
As I remember it, 256kbs was originally described as near-CD quality. 192 was deemed to be similar to FM, but 'sometimes annoying'. 128, now used by most music stations, was just 'annoying'.Mooly said:
I bought a DAB tuner about 8-9 years ago. After using it for a few months I stopped. It stayed in its box after I moved house 6 years ago. Radio 3 was no better than FM. All others were noticeably worse. Classic FM at 160 was particularly bad: applause at the end of a piece sounded just like someone was varying the volume of a white noise generator, clearly the coder could not cope with all those transients. The many 'pop' stations were always unlistenable on FM anyway, due to severe compression and limiting.
I now hope that DAB will disappear from the UK. The public clearly don't like it. Even those not bothered about sound quality find DAB unreliable. DAB+, if used properly, could be OK so then I would be happy to bin my tuner and buy a new one (its too old to be upgraded). I expect politicians/Ofcom/BBC etc. to continue to make the wrong decisions, so we will eventually be the only nation still using the 'world standard' which everyone else has dropped.
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