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Quality of recorded music today has much more to do with mastering than bit rates and codecs. I certainly would prefer a 128 kbps version of a twenty year old m
by xorcist 11y ago
Quality of recorded music today has much more to do with mastering than bit rates and codecs. I certainly would prefer a 128 kbps version of a twenty year old mastering than a 192 kbps version of the modern remaster.
That has led to a consumer revolt of sorts, for people who care about audio. That's not a large enough group to make a difference to the big record companies, but it is large enough that catering to them is a good business model in itself.
- SwellJoe 11y agoThe two are unrelated issues. 128kbps mp3 files do sound pretty bad, especially on the high end and during very dynamic parts. It is audible to me, regardless of the quality of the original recording and its mastering. And, while we're talking, I'll point out that the loudness wars began roughly 20 years ago, so you may need to go back to an even earlier mastering to get the really good stuff. Certainly it was more pronounced through the late 90s and 00s, but I remember the first few records I bought that suffered badly from over-compression, and they were released around 1994-1996. The multi-band compression that has killed many great recordings began to see usage around that time as well, though it peaked much later (it was expensive to start with).