Ipods "sucking the life out of music"

[Happy Face 29]

For whoever complained about £300 earphones in the Materialism thread....

 

In Mobile Age, Sound Quality Steps Back

 

A onetime audio engineer who now works as a consultant for Stereo Exchange, an upscale audio store in Manhattan, Mr. Zimmer lights up when talking about high fidelity, bit rates and $10,000 loudspeakers.

 

But iPods and compressed computer files — the most popular vehicles for audio today — are “sucking the life out of music,” he says.

 

The last decade has brought an explosion in dazzling technological advances — including enhancements in surround sound, high definition television and 3-D — that have transformed the fan’s experience. There are improvements in the quality of media everywhere — except in music.

 

In many ways, the quality of what people hear — how well the playback reflects the original sound— has taken a step back. To many expert ears, compressed music files produce a crackly, tinnier and thinner sound than music on CDs and certainly on vinyl. And to compete with other songs, tracks are engineered to be much louder as well.

 

In one way, the music business has been the victim of its own technological success: the ease of loading songs onto a computer or an iPod has meant that a generation of fans has happily traded fidelity for portability and convenience. This is the obstacle the industry faces in any effort to create higher-quality — and more expensive — ways of listening.

 

“If people are interested in getting a better sound, there are many ways to do it,” Mr. Zimmer said. “But many people don’t even know that they might be interested.”

 

Take Thomas Pinales, a 22-year-old from Spanish Harlem and a fan of some of today’s most popular artists, including Lady Gaga, Jay-Z and Lil Wayne. Mr. Pinales listens to his music stored on his Apple iPod through a pair of earbuds, and while he wouldn’t mind upgrading, he is not convinced that it would be worth the cost.

 

“My ears aren’t fine tuned,” he said. “I don’t know if I could really tell the difference.”

 

The change in sound quality is as much cultural as technological. For decades, starting around the 1950s, high-end stereos were a status symbol. A high-quality system was something to show off, much like a new flat-screen TV today.

 

But Michael Fremer, a professed audiophile who runs musicangle.com, which reviews albums, said that today, “a stereo has become an object of scorn.”

 

The marketplace reflects that change. From 2000 to 2009, Americans reduced their overall spending on home stereo components by more than a third, to roughly $960 million, according to the Consumer Electronics Association, a trade group. Spending on portable digital devices during that same period increased more than fiftyfold, to $5.4 billion.

 

“People used to sit and listen to music,” Mr. Fremer said, but the increased portability has altered the way people experience recorded music. “It was an activity. It is no longer consumed as an event that you pay attention to.”

 

Instead, music is often carried from place to place, played in the background while the consumer does something else — exercising, commuting or cooking dinner.

 

The songs themselves are usually saved on the digital devices in a compressed format, often as an AAC or MP3 file. That compression shrinks the size of the file, eliminating some of the sounds and range contained on a CD while allowing more songs to be saved on the device and reducing download times.

 

Even if music companies and retailers like the iTunes Store, which opened in April 2003, wanted to put an emphasis on sound quality, they faced technical limitations at the start, not to mention economic ones.

 

“It would have been very difficult for the iTunes Store to launch with high-quality files if it took an hour to download a single song,” said David Dorn, a senior vice president at Rhino Entertainment, a division of Warner Music that specializes in high-quality recordings.

 

The music industry has not failed to try. About 10 years ago, two new high-quality formats — DVD Audio and SACD, for Super Audio CD — entered the marketplace, promising sound superior even to that of a CD. But neither format gained traction. In 2003, 1.7 million DVD Audio and SACD titles were shipped, according to the Recording Industry Association of America. But by 2009, only 200,000 SACD and DVD Audio titles were shipped.

 

Last year, the iTunes Store upgraded the standard quality for a song to 256 kilobits per second from 128 kilobits per second, preserving more details and eliminating the worst crackles.

 

Some online music services are now marketing an even higher-quality sound as a selling point. Mog, a new streaming music service, announced in March an application for smartphones that would allow the service’s subscribers to save songs onto their phone. The music will be available on the phone as long as the subscriber pays the $10 monthly fee. Songs can be downloaded at up to 320 kilobytes per second.

 

Another company, HDtracks.com, started selling downloads last year that contain even more information than CDs at $2.49 a song. Right now, most of the available tracks are of classical or jazz music.

 

David Chesky, a founder of HDtracks and composer of jazz and classical music, said the site tried to put music on a pedestal.

 

“Musicians work their whole life trying to capture a tone, and we’re trying to take advantage of it,” Mr. Chesky said. “If you want to listen to a $3 million Stradivarius violin, you need to hear it in a hall that allows the instrument to sound like $3 million.”

 

Still, these remain niche interests so far, and they are complicated by changes in the recording process. With the rise of digital music, fans listen to fewer albums straight through. Instead, they move from one artist’s song to another’s. Pop artists and their labels, meanwhile, shudder at the prospect of having their song seem quieter than the previous song on a fan’s playlist.

 

So audio engineers, acting as foot soldiers in a so-called volume war, are often enlisted to increase the overall volume of a recording.

 

Randy Merrill, an engineer at MasterDisk, a New York City company that creates master recordings, said that to achieve an overall louder sound, engineers raise the softer volumes toward peak levels. On a quality stereo system, Mr. Merrill said, the reduced volume range can leave a track sounding distorted. “Modern recording has gone overboard on the volume,” he said.

 

In fact, among younger listeners, the lower-quality sound might actually be preferred. Jonathan Berger, a professor of music at Stanford, said he had conducted an informal study among his students and found that, over the roughly seven years of the study, an increasing number of them preferred the sound of files with less data over the high-fidelity recordings.

 

“I think our human ears are fickle. What’s considered good or bad sound changes over time,” Mr. Berger said. “Abnormality can become a feature.”

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/10/business...ia/10audio.html

[LeazesMag 0]

Well. I've still got my stacked Hifi and have no plans at all to replace it.

[Happy Face 29]

Unfortunately it's not something your kit can resolve in many circumstances.

 

My Apocalypse is on the last Metallica album (Death Magnetic). The top waveform is the CD, the bottom is the Guitar Hero version....

 

[Guest alex]

Most people listen to rubbish music anyway

[Andrew 4969]

Unfortunately it's not something your kit can resolve in many circumstances.

 

My Apocalypse is on the last Metallica album (Death Magnetic). The top waveform is the CD, the bottom is the Guitar Hero version....

 

 

is that not because the album was for some reason made loud?

[NJS 4446]

I think like most things in life, you can spend a bit of money for a bit of quality without going daft - using MP3 players with the standard placca headphones is pretty criminal but I think the bloke in the article who thought he wouldn't notice a difference is probably right for a lot of people and music.

 

I now listen to music almost exclusively on the train so I guess that's halfway between sitting down to appreciate it and it just being background (as I often nod off).

[Happy Face 29]

Unfortunately it's not something your kit can resolve in many circumstances.

 

My Apocalypse is on the last Metallica album (Death Magnetic). The top waveform is the CD, the bottom is the Guitar Hero version....

 

 

is that not because the album was for some reason made loud?

 

Yeah....like most CDs tend to be these days, that's what the article is saying. No record companies want their songs to sound quiet when your ipod is on random.

 

This is the comparison between Snow (RHCP) on CD and vinyl...

 

 

A problem often pointed out by audiophiles is Vlado Meller's mastering for the CD release. It can be regarded as a product of the loudness war, with heavy use of dynamic range compression, and suffering of frequent clipping. In contrast, Steve Hoffman's mastering for the vinyl release was praised for its quality.

[Park Life 71]

It's all fucked.

[SloopJohn 0]

Unfortunately it's not something your kit can resolve in many circumstances.

 

My Apocalypse is on the last Metallica album (Death Magnetic). The top waveform is the CD, the bottom is the Guitar Hero version....

 

 

you sure the top wave form is the cd?!

 

[Happy Face 29]

Unfortunately it's not something your kit can resolve in many circumstances.

 

My Apocalypse is on the last Metallica album (Death Magnetic). The top waveform is the CD, the bottom is the Guitar Hero version....

 

 

you sure the top wave form is the cd?!

 

 

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_Magneti...ding_production

[JonGoodwyn 1]

Aye, a pretty big deal was made out of it, made a lot of people aware of the whole 'sound war' thing

 

Ironically, Ipods have just about the best sound quality of mp3 players out there, if you spend some money on some decent earphones rather than use the ones they come with. A lot of people download their stuff, or rip it at a far from lossless rate, and Itunes itself doesn't give completely lossless stuff, as far as I know.

The massive size of mp3 players and external hard drives available these days means you can quite easily store a huge amount of music completely lossless, its just most people don't bother.

I'm sure people said the same sorts of things when CDs started to replace Vinyls and cassettes

[AgentAxeman 199]

Unfortunately it's not something your kit can resolve in many circumstances.

 

My Apocalypse is on the last Metallica album (Death Magnetic). The top waveform is the CD, the bottom is the Guitar Hero version....

 

 

you sure the top wave form is the cd?!

 

 

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_Magneti...ding_production

 

aye, loads of metal bands are doing the same thing now, ie. recording overly loud. that wiki article explains why very nicely indeed.

[Happy Face 29]

Thankfully i've mp3/sound check to stick the volume at the same levels

 

Further compressing the track.

[Cid_MCDP 0]

Unfortunately it's not something your kit can resolve in many circumstances.

 

My Apocalypse is on the last Metallica album (Death Magnetic). The top waveform is the CD, the bottom is the Guitar Hero version....

 

 

Reading your original post, that was the first thing that came to mind- so much music of recent production is so compressed is doesn't matter if you have a $20,000 system or a $20 car stereo playing it- it's going to sound like shit anyway.

 

Do you know when compressing the fuck out of a single track became the norm? I'm thinking it was around 2004, because that My Chemical Romance album was just chock full of it, but it was probably long before that (that was the year we went in the studio and some of this stuff started making sense to me).

[Park Life 71]

Fact is that people accept shit and then whine about the fact that they have shit.

[Cid_MCDP 0]

Fact is that people accept shit and then whine about the fact that they have shit.

 

I think in this case, it's more people have shit and don't know it until some twat with a golden ear pisses on them and tells them it's raining.

 

I have a pretty good (untrained) ear- I can hear distortion levels and have nearly perfect pitch and I can't tell you the difference between an CD and a tape or vinyl or whatever.

 

I remember reading an article back in '95 or so with Neil Young and he was pissing all over CDs and how he couldn't listen to them and all that. Then back in around 2000 when MP3 was getting big, he did the same deal.

 

I'm not saying there isn't a difference in sound quality between media, but I am saying that 99% of the people listening won't hear it (and if it's mixed for shit, it's a moot point anyway).

Edited May 10, 2010 by Cid_MCDP

[Happy Face 29]

Do you know when compressing the fuck out of a single track became the norm?

 

 

Wikipedia has a nice condensed history...

 

The practice of focusing on loudness in mastering can be traced back to the introduction of the compact disc itself but also existed to some extent when vinyl was the primary released recording medium and when 7" singles were played on jukebox machines in clubs and bars. Jukeboxes were often set to a pre-determined level by the bar owner, yet any record that was mastered "hotter" than the others before or after it would gain the attention of the crowd. The song would stand out. Also many record companies would print compilation records, and when artists and producers found their song was quieter than others on the compilation, they would insist that their song be remastered to be competitive. Also, many Motown records pushed the limits of how loud records could be made, and record labels there were "notorious for cutting some of the hottest 45s in the industry." However, because of the limitations of the vinyl format, loudness and compression on a released recording were restricted in order to make the physical medium playable—restrictions which do not exist on digital media such as CDs—and as a result, increasing loudness levels never reached the significance that they have in the CD era. In addition, modern computer-based digital audio effects processing allows mastering engineers to have greater control over the loudness of a song; for example, it gives them the ability to use a "brick wall" limiter which limits the volume level of an audio signal with no delay (hardware equivalents have a short delay caused by processing time).

 

The stages of the CDs loudness increase are often split over the two-and-a-half decades of the medium's existence. Since CDs were not the primary medium for popular music until the tail end of the 1980s, there was little motivation for competitive loudness practices then. CD players were also very expensive and thus commonly exclusive to high-end systems that would show the shortcomings of higher recording levels.

As a result, the common practice of mastering music involved matching the highest peak of a recording at, or close to, digital full scale, and referring to digital levels along the lines of more familiar analog VU meters. When using VU meters, a certain point (usually -14 dBFS, or about 20% of the disc's amplitude on a linear scale) was used in the same way as the saturation point (signified as 0 dB) of analog recording, with several dB of the CD's recording level reserved for amplitude exceeding the saturation point (often referred to as the "red zone", signified by a red bar in the meter display), because digital media cannot exceed 0 dB. The average level of the average rock song during most of the decade was around -18 dBFS.

 

At the turn of the decade, CDs with music louder than this level began to surface, and CD volumes became more and more likely to exceed the digital limit as long as such amplification would not involve clipping more than approximately two to four digital samples, resulting in recordings where the peaks on an average rock or beat-heavy pop CD hovered near (usually in the range of -3 dB) 0 dB but only occasionally reached it. The Guns N' Roses album Appetite for Destruction from 1987 is an early example of this, with levels averaging -15 dB for all the tracks.

 

In the early 1990s, some mastering engineers decided to take this a step further and treat the music's levels exactly as they would the levels of an analog tape and equate digital full scale with the analog saturation point, with the recording just loud enough so that each (or almost every) beat would peak at or close to 0 dBFS. Though there were some early cases (such as Metallica's Black Album in 1991), albums mastered in this fashion generally did not appear until 1992. Dirt by Alice In Chains and Faith No More's Angel Dust are some examples from this year. The loudness of releases during this period varied greatly depending on the philosophies of the engineer and others involved in the mastering process. This style of "hot" mastering became commonplace in 1994, though exceptions, such as the album Superunknown by Soundgarden from the same year, still existed. The most common loudness for a rock release in terms of average power was around -12 dBFS. Overall, most rock and pop music released in the 1990s followed this method to a certain extent.

 

The concept of making music releases "hotter" began to appeal to people within the industry, in part because of how noticeably louder releases had become and also in part to the notion that customers preferred louder sounding CDs. Engineers, musicians and labels each developed their own ideas of how CDs could be made louder. In 1994, the digital brickwall limiter with look-ahead (to pull down peak levels before they happened) was first mass-produced. While the increase in CD loudness was gradual throughout the 1990s, some opted to push the format to the limit, such as on Oasis's widely popular album (What's the Story) Morning Glory?, which averaged -8 dBFS on many of its tracks—a rare occurrence, especially in the year it was released (1995). In 1997, Iggy Pop assisted in the remix and remaster of the 1973 album Raw Power by his former band The Stooges, creating an album that, to this day, is arguably the loudest rock CD ever recorded. It has an average of -4 dBFS in places, which is rare even by today's standards, though getting more and more common.

 

Loud mastering practices caught media attention in 2008 with the release of Metallica's Death Magnetic album. The CD version of the recording has a high average loudness that pushes peaks beyond the point of digital clipping, resulting in distortion. These findings were reported by customers and music industry professionals. These findings were later covered in multiple international publications, including Rolling Stone, The Wall Street Journal, BBC Radio, Wired and The Guardian. Ted Jensen, a mastering engineer involved in the Death Magnetic recordings, offered recalcitrant commentary that criticized the approach employed during the production process. An online petition calling for the album to be remixed or remastered was endorsed by over 20,000 people (as of 13 June 2009). A version of the release without dynamic range compression was included in the downloadable content for Guitar Hero III.

 

The standards of loudness would reach their limit in the 2000s. -10 dB had been the standard for the past several years, but this was often pushed to -9 dB. However, -6 to -5 dBFS is common in rock, contemporary R&B, pop, and hip hop music. Quieter exceptions to today's standards are rare. The releases of 2008 reached average levels as high as -3 dBFS, such as Angels & Airwaves' I-Empire, which yields almost 30 times the loudness of a THX standard recording (-20 dBFS). However, in late 2008, mastering engineer Bob Ludwig offered three versions of the Guns N' Roses album Chinese Democracy for approval to co-producers Axl Rose and Caram Costanzo, and they selected the one with the least compression. Ludwig wrote, "I was floored when I heard they decided to go with my full dynamics version and the loudness-for-loudness-sake versions be damned." Ludwig feels that the "fan and press backlash against the recent heavily compressed recordings finally set the context for someone to take a stand and return to putting music and dynamics above sheer level."

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war#History

[Cid_MCDP 0]

Interesting...

 

It'll sound like I'm making it up, but I actually remember Angel Dust being louder than the rest of my CDs when listening to them in the car. Lols...

[Jusoda Kid 1]

I use these as I'm strictly west coast

 

[Cid_MCDP 0]

I use these as I'm strictly west coast

 

 

Westside is the bestside, after all.

[sammynb 3640]

We had a similar conversation a few years ago about mp3s and digital music files being the death of the LP release.

Floyd's recent court case against the sale of individual tracks from Dark side of the Moon being case in fact.