The Death of High Fidelity

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Re: Death of High Fidelity

chascode said:
Victor Campos just sent me a link to this article "The Death of High Fidelity. Unfortunately, it is all too true. But keep the faith, keep working for excellence in music reproduction.

http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/17777619/the_death_of_high_fidelity

Best, Chuck Hansen

How is Victor, I haven't talked to him in years. Dick Sequerra and I talked about how Victor used to get FM air time to play his BSO master tapes with the limiters and opti-mods turned off. I never heard an LP sound as good as those FM over the air broadcasts.

One tough customer though.
 
Not dead, just resting. MP3s are a temporary infestation designed to deal with 30 meg drives and 14.4 modems. Storage capacity and network speed are advancing at explosive rates, it won't be long before the balance of convenience rests with not compressing. $100 worth of drive already hold ~$50K worth of iTunes, what's the point? Once Internet speeds make uncompressed downloads quick the average consumer will figure this out. No matter what the usual audio authoritarians insist, sampling rates and bit depths will increase for the simple reason that they can trivially at minimal to no expense.
 
The argument that storage requirements will drive fidelity sounds kinda iffy to me. After all, look at what happened with CD. They could have gone for better sampling rates, etc. from the beginning, but no...they went for more content, not more quality.
And your underlying assumption that the hoi polloi will give a flip about sound quality has been proven wrong over the last twenty-odd years. Things will still be sold "radio ready" and the people dispensing the recordings will not go to the expense and trouble to have two versions of every album--one for the lowest common denominator, another for the ever-shrinking minority who care about sound quality.

Grey
 
I said nothing about demands for fidelity, I'm arguing convenience coupled with near-free/Gb storage. CD was a compromise of a time thirty years past and as relevant as cassette to today's situation. A brilliant compromise but I carry 10x more storage (R/W) than a CD holds on my keychain. Why would anyone choose to data compress ten years from now when a $50 drive holds 50000+ 16/44 songs? No digital recording studios operate in 16/44 native, why bother with the extra steps and expense of downconverting?

Holding that acclimation with MP3s drove sound quality down but acclimation with coming formats (direct to 24/96 live recordings are already easy to find online) won't be a force in the opposite direction is self-condradictory to my eye. Buying music on physical media is on the way out anyway, mechanical storage readers can't compete with commodity memory formats forever. So are set audio formats, CPU power is nearly free. Where will we be in another 10 years? Could be anywhere but no matter which way I spin it around extra work for the sake of 10meg songs isn't here to stay.
 
The article is really high lighting problems with the recording/mastering process which I think is a different but just as important issue as the distribution format.
THEY ARE NOT TALKING ABOUT COMPRESSION MEANING COMPRESSING CD QUALITY DOWN TO MP3s.
 
A track with high dynamic range compression will most probably still sound poor even if you have 96kS/s 24 bit studio masters to listen to. Nevermind then taking that and then passing it through MP3 compression.

I think that the CD sampling rate was set based on some video standard as video tapes of some kind were used a storage medium for digital data. Also they had to get over an hour of music into 650MB.

Maybe some vendors will provide customers the option of downloading files in varying quality formats like on the Linn records site. I don't think this would be a great deal of expense or trouble when selling as downloads over the net.

Still doesn't solve the dynamic range compression issue during the mastering process though.
 
I made A/D conversion of some of my best and most valuable LPs and stored it on CDs. Yesterday, when I was listening to these CDs made from LPs, my son came with a request to show him where were these CDs located. He was interested to play them on his PC system ;)

Sadly, commercial mp3 sound sells, but, as shown, does not kill hearing abilities :D

Dynamic range compression is one of the worst enemies of good sound.

Fortunately, it is still posible to find very good recordings. They are just a niche, same as our hobby.
 
From the article:
And today's listeners consume an increasing amount of music on MP3, which eliminates much of the data from the original CD file and can leave music sounding tinny or hollow. "With all the technical innovation, music sounds worse," says Steely Dan's Donald Fagen, who has made what are considered some of the best-sounding records of all time. "God is in the details. But there are no details anymore."

Crappy audio reproduction is blamed as a root cause of crappy audio production. Repeatedly.
 
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PMA said:
Might be one of the reasons of so heavy use of dynamic compression.

Currently, compression is popular, with artists as well as 95% of the listening public. Musicians choose compression to make their songs sound good, just as they might choose a Les Paul over a Strat. It's an artistic decision, to make their music sound the way they want it to. Would you go up to Eric Clapton or Buddy Guy and criticise their choice of guitar? "Good solo mate, but would sound much better on a Flying V". ;)

As always, things will change eventually.
 
pinkmouse said:
LMAO. That must nearly be a record.

I agree with rdf that as storage in SS memory becomes even cheaper that high SQ releases will be far more possible and likely, at least by the smaller labels. Larger ones may not bother, or see the market with an interest in high SQ recordings too small for even the small effort it would take to do. I hope this isn't the case.
May not make a difference in mastering quality though for general releases.
 
IIRC some of the popularity of compression is a spinoff from the use of compander "encoded" cassettes back in the 80's and 90's. compression really wasn't used much before that, except for the occasional special effect (the piano chord at the end of "A Day in the Life). then there was a "compander craze", the idea being that the listener who cared about sound quality would shell out the extra cash for a compander, and that the studio could produce compressed material. well, the compression remains, but how many of us own a compander to restore the dynamic range? besides a lot of the consumers out there actually like the compression, or don't know what they're missing. i once saw an article about "Catastrophe Theory. catastrophy theory goes something like this......
you watch your TV every day for 10 years. you get invited to a friend's house to watch a game or a movie. when you come home you turn on your TV to watch the news and weather. all of a sudden your picture is green, really green, and a bit blurry. what happened, did a component suddenly fail? no. over the period of ten years, component values in your TV slowly drifted out of tolerance, and your picture got greener and fuzzier a tiny bit at a time. you never noticed it because your mind slowly adjusted to it. when you went to your friend's house, seeing his crisp color balanced picture "reset" what your mind interprets as "normal". so you get home, and suddenly you see the green tint and fuzzy picture that your mind has been "correcting" for years. same thing with compression. compression when it was introduced actually served a purpose, but people got used to hearing it, and their minds applied it's built-in correction. now if we were to return to not compressing music, most people would think the recording sounded unnatural in some way (but probably wouldn't be able to identify).
 
My $0.02
More bits will become available as technology allows.
Just as amps compete with 0.002%THD vs. 0.001%THD
There's a limit to how much one can cut price.
Eventually, more needs to be offered.
24 bit rather than 16 bit. Why? because thay can.
192k samples or even 768k samples. Why? because thay can.

got to offer something for the $$$

People may not pay for higher fidelity, but they will pay for more numbers.

768k sounds like more/better than 48k
 
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Good point, Unclejed.

Alas, compression is not applied in any standard way and is often broken up into frequency bands. Each mastering suite is going to do it differently, even from one CD to the next.

No real way for use to know how to uncompress it properly. Unlike the RIAA curve or Dolby noise reduction or the compander of yore. =(
 
one of the reasons for the compressing of recordings was to overcome the somewhat limited dynamic range of broadcast audio. even the best fm stereo signal has a limited dynamic range. the idea was to compress the audio at the transmitter and expand it at the receiver. since most of the noise sources would be far below the level of the compressed audio, when the audio was "reconstituted" with the expander, the noise from all of the broadcast chain would be reduced to the point of being almost nonexistant. let's say that we have a piece of audio that has 80db of dynamic range. peaks are at +10db and valleys at -70db. let's say that the total noise in the broadcast chain adds uo to -30db. there's a problem here, since the noise in the chain will mask everything from -30db to -70db. so we compress the source material so that the dynamic range is -20db to +3db, then we transmit it through a chain with -30db of noise. after detection and demuxing, we run the audio through an expander that restores the original dynamic range. the audio output now goes from -70db to +10db as it did at the source, and the noise is now more than -10db below the wanted signal. this is the way compression was intended to used in broadcast audio. only problem is that companders didn't make a big enough dent in the market, and people got used to hearing compressed audio. part of the reason companders fizzled out was that they weren't built into receivers, and were seen as another complex gadget. now with the popularity of using DSP in receivers, i think companding could make an extremely user friendly comeback. the receivers already have the necessary hardware built in, and just require somebody to come up with the software to execute it. face it, DSP is now in everything, might as well make good use of it.
 
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