The death of high fidelity

[fernando_g]

Interesting read, in the latest issue of Rolling Stone Magazine.

http://www.rollingstone.com/news/sto..._high_fidelity

[Netlist]

Nice article, Fernando.
You will want to read this thread as well:
Modern cd's - over compression

/Hugo

[fernando_g]

The sad thing is that, as technology improves, the sound reproduction quality has taken several large steps backwards.

[vasyachkin]

this "news" just keeps coming back over and over again ... i would rather slit my wrists than read about it again

i think i saw this loudness war come up on digg.com twice in just the last month or two ... and its been coming up for years

if you can understand why the speed limit is 55mph even though your car can do 150 then you should be able to understand why they leave maybe 30 decibels of dynamic range on recordings even though your system can do 120.

people who are too cheap to fix the brakes on their car, replace worn tires, broken shocks or pay for gas also drive on the same road as you do ... at 30mph. people who are too cheap to replace the 99 cent earbuds on their ipod also listen to the same music that you do.

AND THEY MUST ALL BE PLEASED.

by the way if you think a person cannot be too cheap to fix the brakes on his car you would be surprised ... i know some personally whose solution to broken brakes is to drive slower ...

[Theli]

Nice article, but if you read some of the comments in the blog you may feel like doing this :

[fernando_g]

To me the saddest part of the article was the following Quote:

"You can make anyone sound professional," says Mitchell Froom, a producer who's worked with Elvis Costello and Los Lobos, among others. "But the problem is that you have something that's professional, but it's not distinctive. I was talking to a session drummer, and I said, 'When's the last time you could tell who the drummer is?' You can tell Keith Moon or John Bonham, but now they all sound the same."

[Brett]

Hifi is long dead, except for the extreme core group of 'philes, whether DIY or buy-the-gadget types. My housemate, who's an accomplished guitarist got an ipod for Xmas and has been madly ripping thousands of songs onto it. Yesterday he told me with total conviction that mp3's sound better than CD's.

[Irakli]

Here is an idea:

Why not include in The CD release both versions of album: mastered properly and compressed (for ipod listening).
A lot of albums now come with suplemental material (like DVD, etc). So, hi-fi version can be recoded on the DVD at least. Would not take too much space. Production cost would not be much higher I think.

[vasyachkin]

Originally posted by Irakli
Here is an idea:

Why not include in The CD release both versions of album: mastered properly and compressed (for ipod listening).
A lot of albums now come with suplemental material (like DVD, etc). So, hi-fi version can be recoded on the DVD at least. Would not take too much space. Production cost would not be much higher I think.

if you had to master it twice means the added cost could be substantial. plus its only a handful of people who would use that proper version so to include it with every CD would be kinda silly.

maybe they should instead offer 24bit/96khz FLAC properly mastered downloads on the labels site for like $50 per album ...

[Irakli]

if you had to master it twice means the added cost could be substantial. plus its only a handful of people who would use that proper version so to include it with every CD would be kinda silly.

I thought compression was done as a final step of mastering (first you make a decent master and then you compress it).
But I guess life is more complicated.

Besides, a lot of people will use both versions. I prefer compressed ones everywhere except home listening (car, office, club, etc).