[Audio Empire]

On Tue, 28 Sep 2010 06:39:46 -0700, Sebastian Kaliszewski wrote
(in article ):

Audio Empire wrote:
On Mon, 27 Sep 2010 04:00:45 -0700, Romy the Cat wrote
(in article ):

What I found the most amassing in this story is that presentation was
made for Audio Engineering Society and it looks like they were
AMAZED!!!


I think that they were amazed by the sound of the difference signal between
the unaltered master and the compressed copy. It was that so much
"extraneous" info was removed from the master that it was apparently
possible
to still tell what the music was supposed to be and who was singing it.
That's a lot of loss.


But that's the whole point of psychoacustic compression! Remove what
psychoacustic model deems unhearable (because it's masked by the other
parts of the signal, and our brain could not preceive it).

Wether that psychoacustic model is right or wrong is another story,
though. And that's why telling that you hear artifacts with 320bps mp3's
without disclosing encoder used is pretty useless. In lossy compression
world 320bps does not necessarily equal 320bps (from another encoder).

rgds
\SK


I'm not withholding the encoder used, Other than the fact that it's the one
used in Audacity, and the one used in Apple iTunes, I don't know what encoder
it is. I assume that since audio that's encoded with these plays back on any
MP3 player, that these encoders follow the MP3 standard (whatever that might
be). Since I eschew MP3 as much as possible, and do not rip music using it, I
haven't spent any time learning anything other than a cursory amount about
the subject. Lossy compression simply doesn't interest me except as something
to avoid when practicable.

OTOH, my main interest in Mr. Massenburg's comments had to do with his take
on "high-resolution" recording, not necessarily his condemnation of lossy
compression schemes (although I do agree with him on that subject). I think
that high resolution recording formats yield recordings that transcend the
digital vs analog debate and make it moot. The fact is that analog does not
(at it's best) sound better than digital, but it does sound better than SOME
digital, like many that are recorded at low sampling rates, or are
indifferently recorded and mastered, and of, course, those produced using
lossy compression schemes such as MP3 or AAC (which, in my humble opinion, is
all about the triumph of quantity over quality).

What's sort of ironic (at least to me) is that the "hobby" of high-fidelity
came into being simply because the record companies, starting in the mid to
late 1940's, were interested in putting out the best sound possible on their
product. People with cheap players didn't, and couldn't appreciate that
quality, but the nascent, niche market of the hi-fi enthusiast did and could
appreciate the sound being recorded and pressed onto record. The fact that
the better one's playback equipment was, the better the sound being extracted
from those records, was a constant challenge to those designing the playback
(not to mention the recording) equipment. The record companies, especially in
their classical music lines (Columbia Masterworks, RCA Red Seal, Mercury
Living Presence, et al), took pride in their product, and that pride allowed
for product that drove the rest of the high-fidelity industry to continually
improve the hardware. Testimony as to how well these record companies met and
even exceeded their goals is the fact that many of these 50 + year old
recordings are still revered today and are released and re-released on
everything from "boutique" vinyl to CD, SACD, DVD-A and now, Blu-Ray and even
digitized high-resolution downloads. In other words, high-fidelity exists
because the music formats aspired to a higher standard of quality than most
of the market required. This is in rather stark contrast to today's ethos
whereby many of the formats available to us are reduced to a lowest common
denominator with heavy, lossy compression (DAB, satellite radio, Internet
Radio, as well as low-data-rate DRM'd MP3 sales through the likes of Apple's
iTunes and similar sales venues). One wonders if this was the attitude of
record producers at the dawn of the LP era - " most people are listening on
cheap portable record players anyway, so why make anything that sounds any
better than what those players can reproduce?" - where the high-fidelity
industry would be today.