[William Noble]

"Steven Sullivan" wrote in message
...
William Noble wrote:

but to bring this back to the general topic of audio, perhaps it is truer
now than 4 years ago that we are willing to tolerate digitization
artifacts
in our music due to the wide availability of highly compressed music.
You
may have noted a recent article about Mrs Zappa and how she is refusing
permission for her late husband's music to be distributed in any
compressed
form because of the violence it does to his vision. Surely she is to be
admired by this group?

Not really...first, data compression can be lossless. Second, even when
it's lossy, it
can be psychoacoustically benign.


Absolutely true - data CAN be lossless (good ol' ziv-Lempel being one
example), and it CAN be psychacoustically benign. However, my point was
that we (or at least the general public) is more tolerant of acoustic
artifacts introduced by digitization. There is also another phenomena in
recorded music - over compression - there was a good article in spectrum on
this subject. You will notice it most clearly if you play some LP or other
recording of popular music from say 1970 (or 1950, I don't care) and look at
the dynamic range on the recording, and then play an equivalently popular
(let's say it must be a top-40 tune) recorded item from the current charts.
I really notice this effect, and I don't like it. Everything has to be
louder. There are even measurements of bird songs in NYC that show that the
birds of central NYC sing louder than their country cousins.

[Steven Sullivan]

William Noble wrote:
"Steven Sullivan" wrote in message
...
William Noble wrote:

but to bring this back to the general topic of audio, perhaps it is truer
now than 4 years ago that we are willing to tolerate digitization
artifacts
in our music due to the wide availability of highly compressed music.
You
may have noted a recent article about Mrs Zappa and how she is refusing
permission for her late husband's music to be distributed in any
compressed
form because of the violence it does to his vision. Surely she is to be
admired by this group?

Not really...first, data compression can be lossless. Second, even when
it's lossy, it
can be psychoacoustically benign.


Absolutely true - data CAN be lossless (good ol' ziv-Lempel being one
example), and it CAN be psychacoustically benign. However, my point was
that we (or at least the general public) is more tolerant of acoustic
artifacts introduced by digitization. There is also another phenomena in
recorded music - over compression - there was a good article in spectrum on
this subject. You will notice it most clearly if you play some LP or other
recording of popular music from say 1970 (or 1950, I don't care) and look at
the dynamic range on the recording, and then play an equivalently popular
(let's say it must be a top-40 tune) recorded item from the current charts.
I really notice this effect, and I don't like it. Everything has to be
louder. There are even measurements of bird songs in NYC that show that the
birds of central NYC sing louder than their country cousins.


But from what was written, it appeared to me that Mrs. Zappa (and by
extension you) are conflating two very different meanings of 'compression'
-- data/psychoacoustic compression versus dynamic range compression.

For Mrs. Zappa to be against distribution of Frank's music in 'any
compressed form' sounds like she is against lossless/lossy data
compression, not dynamic range compression. Has she said otherwise?



--
-S
A wise man, therefore, proportions his belief to the evidence. -- David Hume, "On Miracles"
(1748)