One thing that's consistent with the "Everything-Sounds-The-Same" club is the
notion that the Redbook CD standard (16-bit/44.1 Khz sampling rate) is so
good that going to 24-bits and either 96 KHz or 192 KHz sampling rate (or
SACD) makes no audible difference in music recordings. The flip side of this
rather incredible assertion (and just as incredible itself) is the claim, by
many of these same people that MP3, AAC and other lossy compression schemes
are, at the higher bit-rates, totally benign and invisible and that one
cannot hear any compression artifacts.
One who disagrees strongly with both of these views, apparently, is
"legendary" producer/ designer George Massenburg (Frank Sinatra, Linda
Rondstadt, Earth, Wind, and Fire, etc.).
At a presentation he gave at the recent Audio Engineering Society Convention
held in London earlier this year, Massenburg wondered why, with bandwidth so
plentiful, and storage so cheap why people still sell compressed music
online?
"These systems (compressed music formats) take something essential from the
music, and lop it off. With so much bandwidth and memory now available, the
question is not how to make a better Codec, but why we are bothering to use
codecs at all..."
In his presentation, Massenburg showed where he took 24-bit/96 KHz recordings
of Phil Collins and Diana Krall and ran them through different Codecs. He
used MP3 at 128kbps, and AAC at 256kbps and showed the results on the screen.
These graphics showed how the compression/expansion cycle destroyed the
dynamic range of the original recording.
"These are standard systems and they are not good enough for us to use. By
coding the hell out of the music, and slashing the sound, we are missing a
market."
Massenburg then used a demonstration to drive his point home. He
electronically subtracted the MP3 compressed music from the original
24-bit/96 KHz recording and then played ONLY the difference signal which was
comprised solely of the information lost by the compression.
"These are distortion levels of 15 * 20 percent! ", he said as he played the
difference signal for all to hear. The distortion amazed everyone in
attendance because it was a grotesquely, but very recognizable version of the
original recoding!
He went on to say that while AAC was clearly better than MP3, it still
generated 5% to 10% distortion.
"Don't think that this doesn't matter for loud rock music", he said while
playing an analog Neil Young track that had been quantified to 24/192KHz
before being compressed to MP3. "If anything, it's worse (than with many
types of music) because of the complexity of the sound."
On the subject of high-resolution audio, Massenburg said that it captures
the"...small sounds and localization cues that truly bring music to life..."
He went on to say that he has high-hopes for Blu-Ray as a way to resurrect
the promise of DVD-A. While I don't share his optimism, I certainly hope he's
right. I recently read that the failure of DVD-A is being blamed on the music
industry's feet dragging because of the DRM issue. I don't know if that's
right or not. I'd tend to blame the outright failure of DVD-A (and to a
lesser extent SACD) simply on consumer ennui. To a society told for decades
that CD represents "perfect sound, forever" and that MP3 is "good enough"
what could possibly be the appeal of a format that (1) costs more. (2)
requires pretty high-end playback equipment to appreciate, and (3) can't be
played in the car?
Massenburg goes on to say, at the 103rd AES convention in New York, "To those
among us that believe that things are just fine the way they are, that
44.1/16 two-channel is ³good enough², let me give you the bad news.
Technology, and silicon technology in particular, has bounded ahead since the
CD standard was cast. For instance, the rather expensive 1 MIPS minicomputer
from 1980 has been eclipsed by inexpensive 200 to 300 MIPS PCıs today.
Converter technology, likewise, has improved tremendously since 1980. Weıll
soon have faster, more accurate, inexpensive A/D and D/A converters, and
engineers who will inevitably ask, ³Uh, so, how does it sound if we use
these?² Again, the inadequacy of todayıs efforts will be better illuminated
from the perspective and the wisdom that the future holds."
Here a producer and designer so well thought of in the world of recording
that he gives keynote addresses at international symposiums on audio and at
AES conventions who is telling us that MP3 et-al is very distorted and that
those artifacts are both audible and destructive to music, and that the
improvement to the sound of music afforded by so-called high-resolution
recording and playback formats is not just merely gilding the lily as some
here have maintained, but add realism and palpability to the music in a way
that CD-quality recordings cannot.
And for a list of Massenburg's other keynotes and published articles, look
he
http://www.massenburg.com/c/gml/essay.html?open=