Yes, this is the sticking point.
Maybe 'truth in advertising' laws will help here...as stated above, it is trivial to analyse a 'hi-res' file and see where it really came from.
Too many shonky files will ensure the demise of the concept, once the word gets out.
Now as studios are equipped with Pro Tools HD, future releases should be no problem.
The question is mainly with copies of older material...if the premium charge is for recent HD transfers from original/archive tapes, the premium price is sort of justifiable.
Premium prices for upsampled low-res files....no way.
Dan.
Unfortunately it is a bit more complicated than that. It is easy to show crude upsampling and zero-padding from 16 to 24 bits for what it is, but there are very simple ways you can use digital processing to hide the tracks.
If it looks bad on a spectrogram, it is bad. If it looks good, it *could* be good.
It is true that, during A/D, a given sample cannot predict accurately the value of the next sample. But the next sample(s) will contain information about the events that occurred between the two samples. Provided that the events contain no frequencies higher than half the sampling rate, they will be accurately digitised.
Have you watched this video?
D/A and A/D | Digital Show and Tell (Monty Montgomery @ xiph.org) - YouTube
The part most relevant to this discussion starts at 17:25, with the part illustrating subsample timing occurring between 20:55 and 21:55.
Call me cynical but everybody who appears in the Pono promo vid has a vested interest in people buying their back catalogue again in a different format and for a higher price.
At the same time their comments are extraordinarily gushing as if they've never heard their own stuff in the studio in the best possible quality.
Meanwhile even today the vast majority is still recorded at 24/48 so that will be the best quality possible.
Lastly the thing that is wrong with current audio quality is not sample rate or bit depth but the horrendous dynamic compression. To deal with this we need something like ReplayGain, not higher resolution players.
PS: My ancient ipod plays 24/48, I don't need a stupidly shape new player for that.
At the same time their comments are extraordinarily gushing as if they've never heard their own stuff in the studio in the best possible quality.
Meanwhile even today the vast majority is still recorded at 24/48 so that will be the best quality possible.
Lastly the thing that is wrong with current audio quality is not sample rate or bit depth but the horrendous dynamic compression. To deal with this we need something like ReplayGain, not higher resolution players.
PS: My ancient ipod plays 24/48, I don't need a stupidly shape new player for that.
No. Look at this picture.
The top row is a 5 kHz sine wave, then that same wave digitized at 44.1 kHz, and then finally the result of a reconstruction of the analog wave from that output, using an appropriate reconstruction filter.
The bottom row is the same 5 kHz sine wave, but phase shifted by 5 µs, then digitized and reconstructed. Notice how the digitized data is slightly different, and the resulting reconstructed wave is correctly shifted by the right amount.
Still think that a 44.1 kHz sample rate is not enough to reproduce time differences as small as 5 µs?
An externally hosted image should be here but it was not working when we last tested it.
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I noticed in the video that Rick Rubin was non-committal. He's one of the architects of the "horrendous dynamic compression."
Rick Rubin is also the guy there who has the least to gain financially out of Pono.
I would think the record company exec's would be all over this and have everything to gain financially. They're the ones who will need to spend $$ remastering their catalogs to 192khz/24bit FLAC and if this format becomes the rage, then they will be back in business. Not sure what their take will be but most of the money on album sales goes to them.
Plus I've read the remastering process could be pretty low cost to them. So if their bean counters agree with the ROI it will probably happen to some degree or another. The artists are the ones who get very little money unless they own their own catalogs...I'm sure Neil owns some of his stuff outright.
I'm sure even third party firms could be licensed by the labels to perform the mundane task and release of the FLAC remasters. It might be cheaper for them to just farm the whole thing out.
This seems to be their trend now anyway with a lot of the older catalogs like the Beatles coming out with re-issues.
To me this is their answer to leaving the pirated MP3's and lost revenue in the dust to wither and die and a way to stimulate new revenue going forward into the digital age.
After all how better to rejuvenate their catalogs with a new format.
I'm sure CD's and DVD's will continue to be made, but this means I can buy another form of my favorite music again in high quality FLAC...😱
For me that would be my fourth or even fifth time through....vinyl, cassette, RtoR, CD, MP3, now FLAC....hmmmmm
Indeed. So go with the program. Repeat after me: "hi-res is better than CD quality. Gotta buy, gotta buy..." 🙂
"Must buy Pono", "Must buy Pono"
I have no doubt that if these analog masters (or even later studio digital masters) are remastered and done properly it will truly and factually be an awesome result and experience. I'm not totally convinced 192k is necessary but I suppose you might as well go there and not get into a big debate over that. Use the highest possibly available now and be done with it. It's the same mentality the studios take with going for the best possible capture technology available at the time. We've always gotten a lower grade copy of studio recordings, unless you had access to a 30ips 2" multi-track tape deck and the monitors and room to go with it.
I'm always disappointing when I take my own recorded .wav file masters at 96khz/32bit float that sound perfect and export them down to 320kbps MP3. They never sound like the original .wav file and in almost every case sound pretty mushy and bad.
And the artist comments about the depth, space and reverb tails is absolutely true. I've heard that difference. MP3 compression does just suck all of that type of content out of the music. And that can make a big difference in your listening experience. Of course the consumer has no idea that content ever existed in the first place so they don't miss it or comprehend it's loss to the sound quality. So Neil's comments about a new experience is also perfectly valid!
I like how Neil in his speech at SXSW mentioned this "beat" culture being a dominant factor these days in new music and I think he was eluding to the current state of the music in general there without stepping on anyone's toes too much...LOL. But this current pablum of loudness wars, compression and sub beat tunes has grown and evolved out of that MP3 quality and sound.
I think that is good insight to the state of music on his part and I don't blame him at all for not wanting to do that!
I'd like to know what songs Neil used in his car demo's and how those were processed. No doubt he has masters of his own that he has processed.
What's their take? I doubt it will be 30% like Apple takes off the top, but I'm sure the online store will be compensated to cover operating costs..the people making the money on the content will be the record companies who own it.
That might be 70-75% of the revenue.
This isn't really about the player at all that is nothing but a device to play the content on....the real money is in the content and if the quality is delivered as promised then we'll all be waiting for our favorite album release and paying $25 for it if that's what we feel we need!
Rick Rubin left Columbia last year and is currently 'just' a producer who tend to get paid a flat rate for their work. As such he gains nothing or very little from re-issues.
Mastering was almost always done by third parties.
If record company execs were not so scared of digitals ability to be duplicated without loss of SQ we would have had hi-rez, non-DRM versions of everything since the inception of iTunes as this is what Steve Jobs was aiming for from the outset. It is the record execs who forced Apple to originally only sell DRM-protected lo-rez versions.
As for the lack of revenue there is nothing stopping FLAC version to be pirated and the kids (who traditionally were the main market and source of revenue of music) they won't suddenly stop spending their money on games instead.
Mastering was almost always done by third parties.
If record company execs were not so scared of digitals ability to be duplicated without loss of SQ we would have had hi-rez, non-DRM versions of everything since the inception of iTunes as this is what Steve Jobs was aiming for from the outset. It is the record execs who forced Apple to originally only sell DRM-protected lo-rez versions.
As for the lack of revenue there is nothing stopping FLAC version to be pirated and the kids (who traditionally were the main market and source of revenue of music) they won't suddenly stop spending their money on games instead.
Have a look at the link I posted earlier.
That question came up during a talk given by Neil Young and John Hamm, CEO of Pono.
At that point the CEO abruptly declared the talk over without actually answering. He only mumbled "It surprises most people that everyone who buys music from the record labels pays exactly the same amount.".
To me that would indicate that either Pono pays about 60 cents for each song like iTunes or that they take 30% off the top like iTunes.
Personally I think the former with the extra profits shared between Pono and the artist. Would explain that gushing endorsements by the artists in the promo vid and why Metallica jumped on that particular bandwagon.
Pono is not about sound quality and quality music; it's about righteous profits for the Pop artists.
I think we may be shooting ourselves in the foot by not supporting the product and service, despite possible flaws.
Any modality to get artist to record in higher res, and make that available is a win for me. Of course production is key here, but I think we are often limited by lack of good source material if you have spent a lot of time and $ building your Ultra-Fi system.
The product is unlikely to be perfect on the first run, but sounds somewhat impressive.
Just my 2 cents.
Any modality to get artist to record in higher res, and make that available is a win for me. Of course production is key here, but I think we are often limited by lack of good source material if you have spent a lot of time and $ building your Ultra-Fi system.
The product is unlikely to be perfect on the first run, but sounds somewhat impressive.
Just my 2 cents.
I love hi-res. I have recorded needle drops of about 100 LPs at 24bit/192k, (only a few thousand left to go!) and they sound much better than CDs to my ears. I've already laid down cash for my Pono and looing forward to playing my needle drops and other hi res files on the go.
I also love Neil Young. I saw him twice in Melbourne last year. He's 68 and still rocks out harder than any other band I've seen, I've been listening to him since I first heard Heart of Gold (I was 10 at the time) and still buy every new release.
So, I've bought every Neil Young product in the last 40 years. Pono is just another Neil product that I am proud to own (excuse future tense).
I also love Neil Young. I saw him twice in Melbourne last year. He's 68 and still rocks out harder than any other band I've seen, I've been listening to him since I first heard Heart of Gold (I was 10 at the time) and still buy every new release.
So, I've bought every Neil Young product in the last 40 years. Pono is just another Neil product that I am proud to own (excuse future tense).
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