The Distortion Of Sound -- rise of music accessability, decline of audio quality

[Plenum n Heather]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mDZcz-V29_M

[Jamie89]

That was great that, thanks. Unfortunately convenience dictates everything, the masses get what they want, and what they generally want is the easy convenient option.

[JDC]

A while ago I did A/B tests on a good quality headphone rig with my eye closed, personally I can't tell the difference between a decent quality mp3 and a lossless audio format, I'm much more bothered about the quality of an audio unit and the speakers/headphones

[Philly Q]

A similarly strange phenomenon is happening with video.  We all now have access to HD television (with 4k "Ultra HD" just around the corner) and surround-sound capability... and yet we're constantly told how bloody marvellous it's supposed to be to watch films and TV on poxy little tablets and smartphones. 

It seems we'd rather have gimmicks than real quality.

[JDC]

A similarly strange phenomenon is happening with video.  We all now have access to HD television (with 4k "Ultra HD" just around the corner) and surround-sound capability... and yet we're constantly told how bloody marvellous it's supposed to be to watch films and TV on poxy little tablets and smartphones. 

It seems we'd rather have gimmicks than real quality.

The thing with 1080p mobile screens is you've got more pixel density than a bigger screen so you get a sharper picture but obviously the screen size itself is a compromise. With 4K it depends how big your screen is and how far you sit away from it, at 5 feet away you need a 60-70"+ screen to benefit from the extra clarity of 4K over 1080p. It'll be a while before humongous 4K screens are decent prices let alone content is provided for them outside of online film streaming services, right now the only real benefit of 4K is PC gaming.

[Afghan Dave]

Very interesting attempt to communicate the problem.

I would still buy physical except....

I'm $%&#ing sick of buying albums to find that 1 maybe 2 songs are any good..then it's just filler. I've been burned too many times after about 2004ish.  

[Philly Q]

Going back to the sequence in the film where they followed the timeline from vinyl to 8-track to cassette etc, before getting to the nitty-gritty about the horrors of compressed audio.... I did find it a little odd that all the "talking heads" got all nostalgic about mix tapes and the Sony Walkman. 

Cassette tape may not be a deliberately, brutally compressed audio format (I know very little about the science!) but it always sounded bloody awful.  Even more so when listened to via the sh!tty headphones which came with personal stereos.  In a film about decline of audio quality, looking at the cassette through rose-tinted spectacles seemed more than a bit contradictory.

[Dmoney]

Interesting little video. I don't really care about the vast majority of opinions in here and their MP3 bashing. It's funny that when they mentioned MP3 they also said "now its digital". I bet the majority of the tracks used in that video were recorded digitally, and if thats the case, you can still apply the "filling in the blanks" argument because its all sampled quantised and coded to an extent. That process still throws audio information away, just not as much as compression. The trick is being able to say where the human ear can notice a difference, and that's difficult because people often think they can hear things when they can't (put simply) but a bloke called Nyquist did a lot of work on it. Interesting that they say CD isn't compressed. Compressed in comparison to what? Real audio? hmmmm. Those little compressed / uncompressed bits are nonsense as well, its not a typical example of an available MP3 or other audio file format... also compression as a format is more about reducing file size and bandwidth than deliberately reducing dynamic range. The quick comparison to TV isn't a great one either, since TV is massively compressed and so is the audio that goes with it! There are teams of people that get paid to evaluate the effects of the compression on TV. Great point is made about how music has become disposable hidden in there. I have no idea why they interview some of those people.

For me, compression has advanced a lot over the years. There are other formats and "lossless" compression formats for example. I can understand if you're an artist with no control over the final sound that reaches someones ears that must be frustrating, but "compression" is a very wide term. I think in most cases if the MP3 or whatever file is compressed in a sensible way and you have good headphones (whether they are ear buds or not) then you're probably getting a pretty decent sound in comparison to tape etc. I like vinyl but I'm not nostalgic about it. It has other things I like besides the sound. I also listen to a lot of ratty sounding punk records where hifi output wasn't exactly job number one to begin with.

Basically this is just a rant about "audio compression", which is interesting if it marks a move away from "analog vs digital" but otherwise it's just another group winging about formats, only in this case the end result can vary WIDELY because the end result is almost in the hands of the consumer.

I love buying new vinyl, and I always appreciate getting a card with said records to download the record in a digital format produced by the artist, so I don't have to hunt out or make cr@ppy MP3's directly from the record.

Anyway. I'm biased. I'm a Coding & Mutiplexing Engineer so I compress stuff all day long and spend my days watching uncompressed 1080i HD in 1.4Gbps on a high grade broadcast monitor. Compression is what I do. It's my bread and butter. ha

[Philly Q]

For me, compression has advanced a lot over the years. There are other formats and "lossless" compression formats for example. I can understand if you're an artist with no control over the final sound that reaches someones ears that must be frustrating, but "compression" is a very wide term. I think in most cases if the MP3 or whatever file is compressed in a sensible way and you have good headphones (whether they are ear buds or not) then you're probably getting a pretty decent sound in comparison to tape etc.

I was thinking when some of the artists in the film (nice PR exercise for them, incidentally), like Mike Shinoda, were bemoaning the fact that they put loads of effort into making a recording sound good then people listen to it in sh!tty MP3 with sh!tty headphones..... well yes, but it's not as if you don't know that in advance.

I guess as an artist you either say "no compromises" or you actually try to optimise the sound for MP3 knowing that's what most listeners will end up hearing.  Like when they used to optimise singles for radio.

[Dmoney]

Agreed.

At what point does it become shitety? I mean, I have a amp and standard speakers. Nothing special. Certainly not studio quality monitors. My turntable is a really cheap one with a cheap arm. I'd say forgetting MP3s, most people aren't audiophiles and don't own expensive setups to get all the quality these people are talking about. I listen to most music on the move, since I'm out the house at 6.30am and home late. I have so much to do its rare I can sit an enjoy a record with no distractions. I thought most people master songs with the end format in mind, so I have no issue buying vinyl and getting a download card for MP3's that are properly mixed and not too compressed. The content to be put on vinyl will most likely have been mastered differently before being pressed. There is nothing to stop artists listening to mixdowns of their songs as mp3's at various compression rates, or on car stereos, or small radios etc... then they could adjust.
However another broadcast point may be relevant. Everything in a broadcast chain is kept at the highest quality it can be up to the point just before it goes for transmission. By keeping to a high standard of production in the recording phase and using lossless codecs or uncompressed formats, you keep more quality at the after compression stage.

[Philly Q]

I like the idea of higher quality audio formats, but I generally only get a chance to listen to music after midnight so it's through headphones, sitting at the PC.  My standalone CD player and turntable broke years ago and I haven't really felt the need to replace them.

As someone in the film - the Jerry Garcia lookalike bloke, I think - said, nobody specifically asked for MP3, it just sort of happened as a way of delivering music in relatively small file sizes.  99% of people neither know nor care that it's a lower quality format, they just want loads of songs on their phone.  Not many would actively seek out an uncompressed (or less compressed) format, especially if they had to pay more for it.

I download very little, but a couple of times I've had the option of either mp3 or flac.  I would've gone for flac, but I couldn't find any way of actually playing it without downloading software from some slightly dubious-looking site.  It doesn't seem like iTunes or Amazon are terribly interested in offering better-quality formats, so presumably there's no money in it.

[Dmoney]

I can see the point they are making, but I think there are a lot of elements, mixed up little quotes and sound bites that make little sense and come across as pretentious without showing any understanding for the technology. They don't seem to offer an alternative or solution. It's just a few famous people willing to have a whinge about audio compression buy looking at it rather narrowly and glossing over the fact then any digital recording is inherently compressed in comparison to a true analog waveform.

Also, did anyone ask for 8 Track? Or cassette, floppy disc, mini disk or CD players?

[Toe-Knee]

I like the idea of higher quality audio formats, but I generally only get a chance to listen to music after midnight so it's through headphones, sitting at the PC.  My standalone CD player and turntable broke years ago and I haven't really felt the need to replace them.

As someone in the film - the Jerry Garcia lookalike bloke, I think - said, nobody specifically asked for MP3, it just sort of happened as a way of delivering music in relatively small file sizes.  99% of people neither know nor care that it's a lower quality format, they just want loads of songs on their phone.  Not many would actively seek out an uncompressed (or less compressed) format, especially if they had to pay more for it.

I download very little, but a couple of times I've had the option of either mp3 or flac.  I would've gone for flac, but I couldn't find any way of actually playing it without downloading software from some slightly dubious-looking site.  It doesn't seem like iTunes or Amazon are terribly interested in offering better-quality formats, so presumably there's no money in it.

You can get flac plugins for windows media player through the windows store.

Apple just want to make as much money as possible by spending as little as possible., If they switched to flac they would have to use up more storage space resulting in higher running costs which they wont be a fan of.

[Andrew W]

...and glossing over the fact then any digital recording is inherently compressed in comparison to a true analog waveform.

That's true up to a point. A digital signal is sampled so I guess you could argue that is compressed, but Claude Shannon and Harry Nyquist proved that a perfect reconstruction of the sampled signal back to the source is possible if you sample at twice the highest frequency you need to capture, plus a smidge. Hence CDs having a 44.1kHz sample rate. I know we can argue about bit depth here being a more limiting factor but even at 16-bit, the noise floor is below what you can actually hear.

I've always liked this article: http://xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html

For me the problem is much more in the mastering of recordings to compress and limit the audio for people listening in their cars than in it is in bit rates, sampling frequency or data compression.

[Dmoney]

Good article. Looks like its boiled down to a couple of things I already mentioned. Using decent headphones/speakers, decent levels or compression or different formats, and Philly mentioned being aware of mp3 as a final product and in my mind that means taking steps in the mastering phase for that.

Oh yeah, I know where the 44.1K comes from, but this just goes to show how the argument has moved from analog vs digital to being about what format of digital audio is best, but the video is in very simple terms. To say compression takes information and throws it away is an overly simplistic explanation and just sensationalises the issue, the same way those terribly compressed files and waveforms are used in that video. And compression of files for storage and streaming isn't the same as compression of dynamic range, which they also seem to confuse.

Another thing they don't touch on is who is the audience and what are their buying habits. It's like they're assuming everyone who listens to compressed audio doesn't care about what it sounds like. Like the composer guy... how many of his fans would really go and buy poorly encoded mp3's of his stuff? Really? Are there no pros to weigh up against the cons? I think there are bigger drawbacks to mp3 than just audio quality.