17 ms·

Problem with music sounding bad doesn’t really have much to do with the distributed format: V0, V1, or 320 mp3s should sound pretty much the same compared to 16

by mruts 8y ago

Problem with music sounding bad doesn’t really have much to do with the distributed format: V0, V1, or 320 mp3s should sound pretty much the same compared to 16-bit flac. You can only the difference between mp3 and flac at shitty bitrates no one uses anymore (like 120). The reason why a lot of recent digital music sounds bad is because of the intentionally terrible mastering. Since everyone is listening of crappy earbuds, they compress the hell out of it and destroy all dynamic range. This is why when downloading music you should avoid remasters (there are some exceptions, like the Beatles mono and stereo boxed sets that came out awhile ago) and go for the first edition presses. This is also why modern vinyl releases sound a lot better than digital: they are mastered differently since its assumed everyone is going to be listening on good equipment. That being said, I think flac is generally a good choice for a music collection. You can’t transcode mp3s without killing the quality so if you ever want to convert formats (like for a mp3 player), you should stick with flac (16-bit, 48hz). The original idea of 24-bit 192hz flac was for vinyl rips, where hypothetically you might be getting more information.

martin_a 8y ago
But who is using MP3 players these days any more? I found myself to buy an iPod in... like... 2011 or so. Converted all the CDs I had to FLAC because losless was the way to go. Two or three years (let it be 5, doesn't matter) pass by, I got a better Smartphone, Spotify Premium and don't touch my 1xx GB of FLAC music anymore, because I don't want to carry around another device etc. I'm not sure but I think "owning" music like in "I got some files here on my drive" seems dead to me. That obviously has downsides but I feel lucky to use Spotify these days and being able to discover new music every day and listen to all of it on the go without buying something, converting it and more.
- mark-r 8y ago
  I rip my CDs in a two-step process: first to FLAC, then convert to mp3. The mp3s go in my phone, I have 33GB so far and my collection isn't even half ripped. I haven't checked how big the FLACs are lately but I'm sure they'd be a much bigger burden.
  - vortico 8y ago
    This is pretty reasonable. 16/44.1 FLACs aren't that large, especially considering that 4TB HDDs are available for $70 these days.
  - brewdad 8y ago
    I do the same. MP3s of yy entire CD collection sit on an SD card in my car and a Sandisk Ultra Fit USB drive in my wife's car. The FLAC files live on an external USB drive in my home. I still have Spotify for the times I want to listen to something I don't own or want to listen to one specific song without drilling down multiple menus to find it.
  - aidenn0 8y ago
    If you are concerned about space, consider vorbis, AAC, or opus. They all will achieve a higher quality at a given bitrate (or equivalently a lower bitrate for a given quality).
    - vortico 8y ago
      Note that the difference is not large. A 128 kbps opus or AAC might be comparible to a 160 or 192 kbps MP3. So it's less than 2x improvement of file size.
      - leetcrew 8y ago
        AAC has an additional advantage though, which is that many phones and receivers can transmit AAC files over Bluetooth without reencoding. this is technically possible for MP3 too, but very few devices implement it. the loss of quality from transcoding lossy to lossy is usually a lot worse than the difference in quality between codecs and bitrates (within reason).
        vortico 8y ago
        Interesting, didn't know the Bluetooth fact. I don't usually deal with AAC myself, since opus is so close in every quality/feature, and the AAC patent license is sometimes costly to use commercially ($0.98 per software sale).
- npongratz 8y ago
  > But who is using MP3 players these days any more? I use my iPod Shuffle exclusively for portable music listening. Cannot beat the form factor, only have to charge it once a week or two (and sometime far longer between charges), and helps me relegate my mobile surveillance/communications device to phone-duties-only as much as possible.
- mruts 8y ago
  Well I never used CDs. Unfortunately what.cd got taken down, but a couple years ago, it was probably the biggest and most complete collection of music in the world. Nowadays, I also just use spotify since I don’t have a quality source for music. But if what.cd was still around, I would dump spotify in a second.
  - some-guy 8y ago
    what.cd was continued by redacted.ch, and the community is currently quite strong.
    - ValentineC 8y ago
      There is also Orpheus (nee Apollo, Xanax) and notwhat.cd, which spread the community out a bit, but also helps increase the bus factor.
- Arnt 8y ago
  Your smartphone or laptop is like an MP3 player with respect to mastering, not like an expensive amplifier and speakers. Your smaryphone/laptop has an amplifier that's optimised for low energy usage, not fidelity, and loudspeakers optimised for size. Music which has been mixed and mastered without regard for how it sounds on your smartphone is sold as "24/192" or "vinyl" or such. The 192 does not matter technically, it's just an identifying mark, and some sort of identifying mark is necessary.
- lucideer 8y ago
  I don't think this advice is aimed at your typical Spotify user (i.e. the majority of people). Spotify is fine for casual listening, but if you're picky about quality, you're going to diy it, and if you're diying, 24/192 is pointless.
- jlarcombe 8y ago
  But aren't you worried you'll lose access to your music? I have to own it! I can't have it at the whim of multiple third parties to take down as they see fit. It's too important.
  - matwood 8y ago
    So where do you store these files that you'll never lose access? CDs? People with a room full of 8 tracks or cassettes would like to have a word. HDDs? Those fail all the time, plus any sort of natural disaster could wipe out your collection. Online backup? This seems like the only real option, but for me the risk/reward just doesn't fit. At least for now, the record companies and the service providers are both incentivized to have as much of their catalogs as possible on streaming services. Until that changes, streaming works for many.
    - behringer 8y ago
      Your beef with CDs is they'll become out of date? Did you not read the article, CDs are already pretty much the pinnacle of audio formats.
    - magduf 8y ago
      You don't back up your hard drive?
    - aw3c2 8y ago
      > Online backup? This seems like the only real option, but for me the risk/reward just doesn't fit. What risk? You can privately store your music anywhere, it's completely legal to do so.
      - matwood 8y ago
        I wasn't clear. The risk of a streaming service turning off some music vs. storing and backing up everything in some lossless format like FLAC.
      - KozmoNau7 8y ago
- _jal 8y ago
  > I'm not sure but I think "owning" music like in "I got some files here on my drive" seems dead to me. I really don't think that's true. I think the "listening market" looks a lot like it did before; a large number of casual listeners and a smaller number of people who are in to their music enough to care about details. The second category does things like talk about differences in mastering between different releases, for instance, and Spotify or Apple are not going to offer you that 1973 Berlin recording or whatever. Tidal tries to cater to this market, but they don't have a massive amount of stuff. And then you get to bootleg collecting and people who record performances, old music that didn't make the digital jump and all sorts other recordings that will never make it commercial services. I'm not a "real audiophile" or obsessive about collecting things, but I do have a lot of music (last I looked, about 60k distinct artifacts - mostly individual songs, but some of those are albums or nonmusical, also some dupes and garbage). And a lot of that is not on commercial services.
- themodelplumber 8y ago
  I hike a lot and hate using my phone's battery power for music. On top of needing that power for other things, it just feels wasteful. I bought a cheap MP3 player to try out in 2016 and have been hooked ever since. These devices are smaller and lighter than spare phone batteries or power banks. In addition, I find that I use the MP3 player when I'm out running normal errands precisely because I've organized my music by hand and even edited tracks by hand in some cases. Examples would be things like rare covers that can only be found on YouTube, or favorite songs from niche internet music communities which were poorly mastered. It's also a bit of a gear hobby now since there are so many MP3 players on the market. Prices are low and performance is great. I have to agree about the iPod though, as I found the need for proprietary software, and really annoying software at that, made me use it less and less until my 32GB iTouch was mostly used as an ebook reader. I also prefer physical buttons for my mp3-listening while on the go.
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- KozmoNau7 8y ago
  I use my phone as an MP3 (Opus, actually) player, with a selection of music from my ~20K track collection. This works better for me than unlimited access to all music, because it makes me have to listen to a smaller selection of content, so I give each album more attention. While I do also have a Spotify Premium subscription, I am using it a lot less now than I used to. At least 10% of the album's I have simply aren't available on Spotify, and possibly never will be. Underground self-released artists very often don't bother with streaming services, or are outright against the entire concept in the first place, claiming that it devalues the music. It certainly doesn't pay very well. There's also the issue of music disappearing because of rightsholder disputes, such as most of the Motörhead discography being unavailable for an extended period of time. That sort of thing just isn't acceptable. Honestly I've come to realize that I prefer a smaller nicely curated collection over a massive unwieldy semi-unlimited library, with questionable curation. I have reported hundreds of curation errors to Spotify, but they keep popping up, especially errors involving two identically-named artists being mixed together. I will admit that I am very particular about tagging, labeling and sorting by genre. Spotify is woefully inadequate in this regard. For my own collection, I am in full control, which makes it much easier to sort and handle.
aidenn0 8y ago
MP3s at any bitrate cannot properly reproduce certain sounds, as preecho can happen and it is fairly easy to train yourself to notice it. Pretty much any modern lossy format can be made transparent at high enough bitrates though.
- bch 8y ago
  Example?
  - vortico 8y ago
    Playing a set of high-frequency pure sine waves is the failure point for MP3, AAC, Vorbis, and Opus. Dial-up noises are close to this, which you can try encoding/decoding. And this is no surprise, since the point of the V.90/92 protocols is to cram as much information as possible into analog frequencies, and the point of psychoacoustic lossy codecs is to remove the least efficient frequency information of our log-frequency scaled ears. But this is kind of a pedagogical example. Not the point of who you're responding to.
    - bch 8y ago
      So, a high frequency DTMF[0] construction should render a pre-echo? What’s the lowest definition of “high” pairs that would satisfy showing this encoding breakage but be hearable by a majority of people[1]? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual-tone_multi-frequency_signaling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual-tone_multi-frequency_sign... [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presbycusis https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presbycusis
      - vortico 8y ago
        No, pre-echos are unrelated to high-frequency sine waves. And DTMF aren't what I'd consider high-frequency. I'm talking about 4-20kHz.
        bch 8y ago
jscheel 8y ago
So this is why streaming Google Music on my fairly nice sound system ends up sounding like total crap?
- stcredzero 8y ago
  In 2019 music streaming should be more like video streaming, in that different bitrates should be user selectable, and processing ("cinema" vs. "night mode") is done by the playback equipment.
stcredzero 8y ago
Since everyone is listening of crappy earbuds, they compress the hell out of it and destroy all dynamic range. More compression and less dynamic range is beneficial for certain environments. Noisy subways. Watching TV in a noisy downtown apartment. Basically, crappy, noisy environments. In those, compression will help you actually hear the music and speech. However, the fact that this should be done in the master is an artifact of an earlier time. Now that signal processing is small and cheap enough to be ubiquitous, music should be mastered for the best equipment, then appropriate signal processing should be done by playback. The problem is, that there is a lot of older equipment out there that wouldn't be able to do this. So the signal gets compressed before distribution, as a compromise for the least common denominator of equipment out there. Otherwise, a big chunk of the population would think the master sounds like crap. To them, in their particular situation, it would. EDIT: Come to think of it, the current system, where most music is more compressed, but where the people who care can still get a high dynamic range version, is a very good compromise. The problem is that the latter group's selection isn't quite filled out by the market.
- glitchc 8y ago
  Isn’t radio a big factor in this? Broadcast radio is noisy and has pretty limited dynamic range. This may be a cause.
  - deleted 8y ago
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  - ovao 8y ago
    Radio is actually compressed in real-time by use of broadcast compressors, so they solve the problem rather directly.
    - hunter2_ 8y ago
      Exactly, radio would be relatively unaffected by masters having high dynamic range.
rsync 8y ago
"Since everyone is listening of crappy earbuds, they compress the hell out of it and destroy all dynamic range." For readers of your comment and your child comments, it is important to note that the compression you are talking about in that sentence is not the same as the compression that most people are thinking of when discussing digital file formats (mp3, etc.). This might be helpful: https://forums.stevehoffman.tv/threads/the-common-audiophiles-terror-of-compression-limiting.335257/ https://forums.stevehoffman.tv/threads/the-common-audiophile...
tomc1985 8y ago
So vinyl has only about the equivalent of 10-14 bits of resolution (I don't remember the exact number I heard and it has been a while) and waveforms within our hearing range are far larger than what 192khz can potentially accomodate. The only use I've found for such high-resolution is audio is using it as base material for further effects processing... certain distortion units and whatnot that operate on a sample level can sometimes give nicer output when fed super hi-res audio
- teilo 8y ago
  Yes, but we are not talking about the mixing/mastering sample rate, but the distribution sample rate/resolution. High resolution is absolutely important in some mixing scenarios to prevent pre-ringing and aliasing in the effects chain (distortion effects or otherwise). But once you have your hi-res master, there is zero advantage to distribute it that way. At that point, a 48Khz/16-bit FLAC is as good as it gets.
- Applejinx 8y ago
  No, not at all. Vinyl has a wildly inconsistent noise level where rumble predominates, and people conflate this with bits of resolution. Vinyl's behavior is not easily pinned down relative to 'bits of resolution', because the noise floor is skewed so intensely towards low frequencies. To say nothing of how generally available vinyl records (especially old ones) have wildly different rms/peak measurements than generally available CDs and digital recordings have. This is partly 'Loudness War' and partly vinyl's inability to even do the loudness war thing and cope with blocks of heavily limited audio in the first place. So you'll end up with a record where you can play it, and the peaks are 30 freaking dB over the RMS and it sounds amazingly open and uncompressed… while there's also groove noise that is every bit as loud as the music is (admittedly annoying). A person arguing the vinyl/CD dynamic range thing would make the claim that the record was equivalent to maybe TWO bit digital audio, or four bit. The most cursory listen to such a comparison will show how inadequate it is.
  - criddell 8y ago
    Plus, the groove on the outside is moving past the needle faster than the inside. The best sounding track on an album is going to be the first one.
Kaiyou 8y ago
> mp3s should sound pretty much the same compared to 16-bit flac I did a blind test between 128-mp3, 320-mp3 and flac hearing classical music. While it's true that the 128-mp3 is obvious to find, it also isn't too difficult to find the 320-mp3. Flac just sounds better. Described as a feeling, flac is more voluminous and doesn't feel cut short. For fun, I also let my parents take this test and they could tell, too. That's why I converted all our CDs to FLAC. Storage is cheap anyway.
- widerporst 8y ago
  Interesting. Are you sure you were using the right settings and a recent version of LAME for this? The only artifact I can reliably hear in 320 kbps MP3s is pre-echo, for instance with castanets, and only in a few very specific situations. Apart from this, V2 and above sounds completely indistinguishable from the original to me.
  - jrace 8y ago
    Which is great ...for you... but what if in the future you could hear the differences? And now your entire collection is in MP3 V2 - now what? No reason to not rip everything in uncompressed FLAC these days. But if your happy with your audio now, great!
    - em500 8y ago
      The reverse is overwhelmingly more likely. For 8khz+ frequencies (where most compression takes place) your hearing declines pretty quickly once you hit 30 years. Whatever real compression differences you're hearing at 20 will be largely gone 10 years later, and almost certainly 20 years later.
      - jmulho 8y ago
        But in 20 years there will be new 20-year-olds. And one day there may be 40-year-olds that didn't damage their hearing with leaf blowers and rock concerts. And there may be a future compression algorithm so good that no one can tell, but you need a lossless original to take advantage of it.
heywire 8y ago
> This is also why modern vinyl releases sound a lot better than digital: they are mastered differently since its assumed everyone is going to be listening on good equipment. I had always assumed they were taking the same master and just carving it into vinyl. I wonder what percentage of "modern vinyl releases" are actually remastering before pressing...
- nitrogen 8y ago
  At minimum they have to move all the bass to the center and apply RIAA EQ.
- mruts 8y ago
  You're certainly right, many aren't (I always check). A lot are though. I'd give it maybe like 50/50.
bloopernova 8y ago
My anecdotal experience is that music sounds the best to me currently via my good headphones connected to either my phone's good DAC, or to my PC's separate sound card. Phone = LG V20 which has an [ES9218](https://www.androidauthority.com/lg-v20-quad-dac-explained-713587/ https://www.androidauthority.com/lg-v20-quad-dac-explained-7...) chip for its DAC. Headphones = Sennheiser HD380 pro, pretty good for under $200. Soundcard = "ASUS Xonar DGX PCI-E GX2.5". Sound source = FLAC, Google Play Music subscription) I'd like to upgrade to a really nice DAC and headphone amp to connect to the PC via USB, but that's way down the list of spending priorities. I know that I'd probably have trouble distinguishing between audio components and sources in a blind listening test, and of course I have tinnitus, but I think my current "setup" if you can call it that is good enough for most stuff. I am absolutely with you on the loudness wars though. It's a joy to listen to stuff that has real dynamic range, but it's not something I obsess over when I'm listening to music in the car for instance.
shams93 8y ago
Exactly if it’s mastered wrong the nitrate has nothing to do with the issue this music would sound just as awful cut to vinyl from a bad master. Now you just can’t hear beyond 22050 so 192 is insanely wasteful. But poor mastering is absolutely the core issue not encoding algorithms
- magduf 8y ago
  Actually, no, it might sound better cut to vinyl. Remember, vinyl doesn't have the frequency range or dynamic range that digital audio does, and it has to be mastered using the RIAA Curve because of the properties of the medium. One factor here is that the stereo separation on vinyl can't be too large, or else the needle will literally jump out of the groove! In short, you can't just take CD music (no matter how well or poorly mastered) and cut it to vinyl as-is.
  - sjwright 8y ago
    > it might sound better cut to vinyl There's nothing extra in a 192kHz signal that would help with the vinyl mastering process. You could make a technical argument for the benefits of a 24-bit source, but in practice even those benefits would be utterly swamped by the SNR of vinyl.
    - magduf 8y ago
      You're completely misunderstanding. No, there's nothing extra in the 192kHz signal that would help, but that's not the point. Just remastering it for vinyl, which has certain limitations, might make it sound better than the digital format. As I said, you cannot just cut CD audio to vinyl; the medium won't allow it. You'll probably have the needle bouncing out of the track. So remastering for vinyl might actually make it sound better than the abomination that is the sound of modern CD-audio (because of the Loudness War and extreme compression), not because the fidelity is better (in fact, quite the opposite), but because vinyl's limitations will prevent them from making the audio sound as horrible as it does on CD.
      - 8y ago
magissima 8y ago
One of the "nice" things about being hard of hearing is that I can't hear any difference between flac and mp3s down to around 96 or lower for most music, so hypothetically I don't have to worry about this stuff. Of course in practice I do still keep flac rips around because I'm a data hoarder and what if I decide I want to reencode all my music to opus or something? But at least I have the option to stop caring.
hindsightbias 8y ago
The problem is that they aren't being mastered differently - there's a website that lists vinyl releases (can't find the link) and compares it to the CD masters and they're often the same thing. Older CD masters from the 80's or 90's are re-released compressed to drive sales. The latest vinyl fad has just become a new means for record companies to to exploit a "new" medium and race for the bottom - they know many new listeners on cheap players actually just want to hear what they get out of the earbud. Releated: https://thevinylfactory.com/features/analogue-digital-vinyl-mastering-interviews/ https://thevinylfactory.com/features/analogue-digital-vinyl-... There are, of course, those brands that care about remasters, but I don't think they're a majority of the market unless you're looking at classical and older jazz.
rixrax 8y ago
Here is a link[0] to CD dynamic range database from where you can check how a particular mastering fares. [0] http://dr.loudness-war.info http://dr.loudness-war.info There are of course multitude of other factors impacting mastering quality, but as far as DR goes, this DB is a pretty good source.
- mrob 8y ago
  This website is a useful resource, but it has some limitations. The algorithm used does not take into account the frequency response of the human ear. If a track contains a lot of very deep bass, it's possible for it to have a low DR score but still sound like it has a high dynamic range. The measurement can also be fooled by surface noise and filtering when measuring vinyl: https://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=Myths_(Vinyl)#Effect_of_vinyl_mastering_on_dynamic_range https://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=Myths_(Vinyl)#Ef...
iaresee 8y ago
> This is also why modern vinyl releases sound a lot better than digital: they are mastered differently since its assumed everyone is going to be listening on good equipment. I'm going to disagree here. They are mastered differently because the physical limitations of the media require them to be mastered differently _and_ it just so happens that the physical limitations help limit mastering tricks in a way that produces less fatigue-inducing, brick-wall-limited mastering output. A heavily compressed master creates huge peak-to-trough cuts in the vinyl which can cause the needle to literally jump out of the groove, even with RIAA limiting applied. The assumption of the gear is definitely not true in any mixing or mastering experience I've had. Mastering tries to balance the final product across a range of listening devices, not some unobtainable ideal system. NS10s are kicking around because they sound like arse and make for mastering results that work well on car stereos and other "inferior" systems.
- mruts 8y ago
  That may be true, but I've seen some vinyl mastering jobs that looked as bad as digital. I won't claim to be a mastering engineer or anything, but after comparing many vinyl releases and digital releases, it seems like there is something going on besides the physical limitations of the medium.
- mrob 8y ago
  You can put brickwalled audio on a vinyl record and have it play just fine if you cut it at a lower volume. This negates the reason for mastering it that way in the first place, but it's cheaper than redoing the mastering, and many people buying vinyl only do so for the image. See: https://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=Myths_(Vinyl)#Myth:_Vinyl_requires_a_better-sounding_master_because_it_is_physically_incapable_of_reproducing_the_hypercompressed_sound_mastered_to_CD https://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=Myths_(Vinyl)#My...
  - iaresee 8y ago
    That's a fair point. And I totally agree on that second statement. :D
- 8y ago
tigeba 8y ago
Vinyl releases are mastered to be less loud than digital releases because vinyl cannot reproduce mixes that digital systems can. The side effect is that lots of times they sound better. I think in a perfect world an artist would offer you vinyl if you want it, along with a digital version of the vinyl master. You could skip the whole ripping vinyl process entirely.
SloopJon 8y ago
> That being said, I think flac is generally a good choice for a music collection. One other consideration for a music collection from CDs is getting a good rip in the first place. I've had some horrible rips in iTunes, even with error correction enabled. I have much more confidence using a tool like XLD that supports AccurateRip, which probably doesn't work with a lossy format. If you want to transcode after the rip, fine, but you may as well hang on to the FLAC.
- stordoff 8y ago
  IIRC, XLD rips to WAV first anyway, then compresses it to FLAC (I know EAC does).
zepearl 8y ago
> This is also why modern vinyl releases sound a lot better than digital: they are mastered differently since its assumed everyone is going to be listening on good equipment. Sorry, I don't know much about sound so here comes probably the most stupid question of the day (but hope never dies): does this mean that I might get better sound if I would buy a vinyl & one of those turntables which can directly digitize to USB, then if I would buy & download the digital song directly (or maybe even the CD)? Thx
- ValentineC 8y ago
  (Assuming you're okay with piracy…) You're better off searching for vinyl rips where people with good equipment have done the heavy lifting for you.
  - zepearl 8y ago
    Actually you're right (what shall I say, for some mysterious reason I didn't think about it) => I'll first do a comparison with whatever I find and then if it does sound better I'll try to achieve the same results on my own (I'm obsessed with owning originals). Thx :)
wnevets 8y ago
> (there are some exceptions, like the Beatles mono and stereo boxed sets that came out awhile ago) Didn't the beatles famously create their music to be listenable on the terrible radios of the time?
Florin_Andrei 8y ago
> modern vinyl releases sound a lot better than digital Look, I actually grew up with vinyl and 4-track tape, and audio cassettes. Unlike most folks being all trendy and hip nowadays, I've years of using that stuff. Analog is shit. It's noisy, has a ton of distortion, and it gets shittier every time you copy it. Oh, and if you just keep it in storage, guess what, it decays just by sitting there (vinyl collects dust and scratches when used, slightly different). In 2002 I built my DAW (digital audio workstation) and recorded my first tracks in 24 bit digital. Zero noise, zero distortion, no generation loss. It was like alien technology. Digital is better in every way, by a wide margin. Period. https://www.reddit.com/r/headphones/comments/awyy1q/this_preamp_reveals_the_dark_side_of_the_hifi/ehr58dz/ https://www.reddit.com/r/headphones/comments/awyy1q/this_pre... Current mastering practices prevailing in the industry make no difference on this matter. Analog is still garbage. Find digital copies that are mastered properly and you'll be fine.
- madengr 8y ago
  Couldn’t agree more. I grew up with cassette and LP. First time I heard a CD, specifically Pink Floyd’s Money with the cash register, it was jaw dropping. LPs are cool for the artwork, but that’s it. That being said, I still only buy music in CD, due to all the hassle of DRM and playback. I just want to drop in a CD and listen to the entire album, not futz with computers, encoders, and software. I have a simple CD player, kit built tube amp, and homemade single driver speakers.
  - Florin_Andrei 8y ago
    > I still only buy music in CD That's what I do. I tend to favor old master copies. I rip them to both FLAC and MP3. The former is for listening at home, the latter for mobile scenarios. I store everything on the Linux server at home, and share via UPnP. VPN into the home network gives me access from anywhere. Foobar2000 is my preferred player on Windows, BubbleUPNP on Android. > kit built tube amp What's the distortion on that thing? The vast majority of tube kit schematics are very old tech, stuff that engineers from the 1930s would recognize. Their THD (coefficient of total harmonic distortion) is very high. What is known as "tube sound" is basically just huge THD, along with a specific distribution of energy across the harmonic orders. It's fun as a hobby, and for the satisfaction of building stuff on your own, but even the simplest schematics built on modern principles vastly outperform these things by essentially all metrics. Some tube amps are built specifically for low THD, but unfortunately they are rare. When in doubt, use solid state. > homemade single driver speakers I used to build everything myself back in the day. Speakers and amps was just part of it. Also did automation, radio frequency (I'm a licensed HAM radio operator), digital circuits from logic gates to DAC/ADC to systems with microprocessors to small computers. It's a small miracle I didn't actually go into electrical engineering. You really need multiple drivers and likely a subwoofer also, to cover the whole audible spectrum.
reaperducer 8y ago
The reason why a lot of recent digital music sounds bad is because of the intentionally terrible mastering. I guess that's why the vinyl versions of my wife's albums always sound better than the downloaded versions. Even to my really quite bad ears.
kazinator 8y ago
Some time ago, I stumbled across a YT channel of some guy, a self-professed studio expert, who "remasters" some 80's metal albums to give them a big, "modern" sound. The uploads are heavily commented with positive reviews. Basically, to my ears, it just sounds like a bunch of early reflection reverbs were added (an effect that was mature in the 1980's in its high-end implementations and used in studios to get "bigger" guitar sounds and whatnot.) Of course, it sounds great for all the viewers who are using cheap (or even not-so-cheap) earbuds, or computer speakers. What these nincompoops don't get is that these albums were made to be cranked up on a powerful stereo, with full sized speakers, in some kind of room. That guy is basically just ruining great albums who were actually recorded and mastered by people who did know what they were doing. Like, oh, Detonator by RATT and whatnot.
- gmueckl 8y ago
  Back up for a second with the last paragraph there: if the record was mastered for a room sized stereo, it assumes that the room adds its reverb to the sound. With loudspeakers, the room is a distorting filter in the signal path. This and the HRTF distortion are skipped over when listening to headphones/earbuds. So it does make a lot of sense to add these effects to the audio signal in the headphones case. Done right, the headphone playback is indistinguishable from a stereo in a room - mounted to your head, because the spatialized speakers are relative to your head, no matter where you look. So, there is a case to be made for this kind of processing. But I won't trust a random mastering "guru" with unknown credentials to get that right.
  - kazinator 8y ago
    Right. Only, the accompanying obnoxious rhetoric was along the lines that those studio engineers didn't have the techniques and equipment for this modern sound, and that these old albums need a face lift.
    - gmueckl 8y ago
      Urgh, this is just crazy talk.
xkcd-sucks 8y ago
Oh another cool thing about vinyl is the needle can couple to the environment too, try driving its case with another speaker or putting it in front of it's own big amp for feedback. Also, I'm a little bit surprised that nobody focuses on more "out of the box" perception of sound. One can absolutely sense hgh frequencies, personally feel kind of like pressure where you can't pop your ears to equalize. Playing around with this feeling adds emotional tension and color to tracks. Also, interference patterns are perceptible, and they sound kind of... Different from pure tones, idk.
KozmoNau7 8y ago
Most LPs these days are made from the same masters as the CDs (or downloads/streaming), with only the bare minimum of processing done to make them viable to pressing to vinyl, ie. mono bass and RIAA equalization. Only releases marketed specifically to audiophiles tend to get any extra effort put into them, and that is a vanishingly small segment of customers. The loudness war isn't happening because of "crappy earbuds", the earbuds included with smartphones have been rather good for a long time now. The ones that came with my Samsung S8 were designed partially by AKG (Samsung owns the Harman Group, including AKG) and are really damn good. Apple's included earbuds are also very good now, a far cry from the original iPod earbuds, which were decidedly mediocre. The real issue is radio and Youtube/streaming services from before they implemented loudness targets, and it's been going on since the 50s at least, just listen to some old singles from back then, they're mastered as loud as they possibly could, with the technology of the day. The objective has always been to make your song sound louder than the next song, because louder music sounds more impressive to a casual listener, it's simply more attention-grabbing. In the beginning of the digital era, there was actually some hope that better dynamics would happen. In the guidelines for Sony's earliest digital recording equipment, the recommendation was to target an average level of -20dBFS, to use very little or no compression, and "let peaks fall where they may". Just imagine that, 20dB headroom! In the worst days of the loudness war (~early 2000s) lot of music was mastered with barely 3-4dB of dynamic range, with peaks banging hard against 0dBFS. I have some CDs from that era, and they clip and distort like crazy, because everything was just pushed to 11, to be as loud as possible. "Californication" by Red Hot Chili Peppers is an excellent example, it's absolutely horrid. Since then, two major things have happened to improve sound quality somewhat. Firstly the compression devices and plugins have improved massively, modern sidechain compression is really impressive, entire genres like EDM/dubstep simply wouldn't exist if not for the improvements in compression tech. Secondly, all of the streaming services use volume normalization now, with a set average sound level. Songs can peak over this average value, but the average must be in line with the target. This also results in brickwalled "turn everything to 11" tracks sound a lot quieter, because they have no peaks to use the additional dynamic range available.
thirdsun 8y ago
> This is also why modern vinyl releases sound a lot better than digital: they are mastered differently since its assumed everyone is going to be listening on good equipment. In my opinion that‘s a myth and certainly not a given. There are plenty of subpar vinyl masters and terrible pressings out there. And it‘s not that difficult to find good digital masters these days. More important than the medium is the genre, label and target audience - I have a pretty obscure and diverse taste, including rarities from past decades which are finally being re-issued for the first time and while mixdowns certainly vary in quality it‘s mostly fine and the result of a careful process these days. However things might be worse when it comes to mainstream music.
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zepearl 8y ago
> This is also why modern vinyl releases sound a lot better than digital: they are mastered differently since its assumed everyone is going to be listening on good equipment. I have just downloaded "Radiohead - The bends" and "Smashing Pumpkins - Mellon_collie_and_the_infinite_sadness", both apparently from vinyl and in highest quality but I don't hear any difference from the CDs I bought and ripped years ago (using headphones "Beyerdynamic DT 770 pro" directly connected to a Lenovo P71 notebook). Maybe you meant some more modern music or something else...? Thx

by mruts 8y ago

martin_a 8y ago

But who is using MP3 players these days any more? I found myself to buy an iPod in... like... 2011 or so. Converted all the CDs I had to FLAC because losless was the way to go. Two or three years (let it be 5, doesn't matter) pass by, I got a better Smartphone, Spotify Premium and don't touch my 1xx GB of FLAC music anymore, because I don't want to carry around another device etc. I'm not sure but I think "owning" music like in "I got some files here on my drive" seems dead to me. That obviously has downsides but I feel lucky to use Spotify these days and being able to discover new music every day and listen to all of it on the go without buying something, converting it and more.

mark-r 8y ago
I rip my CDs in a two-step process: first to FLAC, then convert to mp3. The mp3s go in my phone, I have 33GB so far and my collection isn't even half ripped. I haven't checked how big the FLACs are lately but I'm sure they'd be a much bigger burden.
- vortico 8y ago
  This is pretty reasonable. 16/44.1 FLACs aren't that large, especially considering that 4TB HDDs are available for $70 these days.
- brewdad 8y ago
  I do the same. MP3s of yy entire CD collection sit on an SD card in my car and a Sandisk Ultra Fit USB drive in my wife's car. The FLAC files live on an external USB drive in my home. I still have Spotify for the times I want to listen to something I don't own or want to listen to one specific song without drilling down multiple menus to find it.
- aidenn0 8y ago
  If you are concerned about space, consider vorbis, AAC, or opus. They all will achieve a higher quality at a given bitrate (or equivalently a lower bitrate for a given quality).
  - vortico 8y ago
    Note that the difference is not large. A 128 kbps opus or AAC might be comparible to a 160 or 192 kbps MP3. So it's less than 2x improvement of file size.
    - leetcrew 8y ago
      AAC has an additional advantage though, which is that many phones and receivers can transmit AAC files over Bluetooth without reencoding. this is technically possible for MP3 too, but very few devices implement it. the loss of quality from transcoding lossy to lossy is usually a lot worse than the difference in quality between codecs and bitrates (within reason).
      - vortico 8y ago
        Interesting, didn't know the Bluetooth fact. I don't usually deal with AAC myself, since opus is so close in every quality/feature, and the AAC patent license is sometimes costly to use commercially ($0.98 per software sale).
npongratz 8y ago
> But who is using MP3 players these days any more? I use my iPod Shuffle exclusively for portable music listening. Cannot beat the form factor, only have to charge it once a week or two (and sometime far longer between charges), and helps me relegate my mobile surveillance/communications device to phone-duties-only as much as possible.
mruts 8y ago
Well I never used CDs. Unfortunately what.cd got taken down, but a couple years ago, it was probably the biggest and most complete collection of music in the world. Nowadays, I also just use spotify since I don’t have a quality source for music. But if what.cd was still around, I would dump spotify in a second.
- some-guy 8y ago
  what.cd was continued by redacted.ch, and the community is currently quite strong.
  - ValentineC 8y ago
    There is also Orpheus (nee Apollo, Xanax) and notwhat.cd, which spread the community out a bit, but also helps increase the bus factor.
Arnt 8y ago
Your smartphone or laptop is like an MP3 player with respect to mastering, not like an expensive amplifier and speakers. Your smaryphone/laptop has an amplifier that's optimised for low energy usage, not fidelity, and loudspeakers optimised for size. Music which has been mixed and mastered without regard for how it sounds on your smartphone is sold as "24/192" or "vinyl" or such. The 192 does not matter technically, it's just an identifying mark, and some sort of identifying mark is necessary.
lucideer 8y ago
I don't think this advice is aimed at your typical Spotify user (i.e. the majority of people). Spotify is fine for casual listening, but if you're picky about quality, you're going to diy it, and if you're diying, 24/192 is pointless.
jlarcombe 8y ago
But aren't you worried you'll lose access to your music? I have to own it! I can't have it at the whim of multiple third parties to take down as they see fit. It's too important.
- matwood 8y ago
  So where do you store these files that you'll never lose access? CDs? People with a room full of 8 tracks or cassettes would like to have a word. HDDs? Those fail all the time, plus any sort of natural disaster could wipe out your collection. Online backup? This seems like the only real option, but for me the risk/reward just doesn't fit. At least for now, the record companies and the service providers are both incentivized to have as much of their catalogs as possible on streaming services. Until that changes, streaming works for many.
  - behringer 8y ago
    Your beef with CDs is they'll become out of date? Did you not read the article, CDs are already pretty much the pinnacle of audio formats.
  - magduf 8y ago
    You don't back up your hard drive?
  - aw3c2 8y ago
    > Online backup? This seems like the only real option, but for me the risk/reward just doesn't fit. What risk? You can privately store your music anywhere, it's completely legal to do so.
    - matwood 8y ago
      I wasn't clear. The risk of a streaming service turning off some music vs. storing and backing up everything in some lossless format like FLAC.
    - KozmoNau7 8y ago
_jal 8y ago
> I'm not sure but I think "owning" music like in "I got some files here on my drive" seems dead to me. I really don't think that's true. I think the "listening market" looks a lot like it did before; a large number of casual listeners and a smaller number of people who are in to their music enough to care about details. The second category does things like talk about differences in mastering between different releases, for instance, and Spotify or Apple are not going to offer you that 1973 Berlin recording or whatever. Tidal tries to cater to this market, but they don't have a massive amount of stuff. And then you get to bootleg collecting and people who record performances, old music that didn't make the digital jump and all sorts other recordings that will never make it commercial services. I'm not a "real audiophile" or obsessive about collecting things, but I do have a lot of music (last I looked, about 60k distinct artifacts - mostly individual songs, but some of those are albums or nonmusical, also some dupes and garbage). And a lot of that is not on commercial services.
themodelplumber 8y ago
I hike a lot and hate using my phone's battery power for music. On top of needing that power for other things, it just feels wasteful. I bought a cheap MP3 player to try out in 2016 and have been hooked ever since. These devices are smaller and lighter than spare phone batteries or power banks. In addition, I find that I use the MP3 player when I'm out running normal errands precisely because I've organized my music by hand and even edited tracks by hand in some cases. Examples would be things like rare covers that can only be found on YouTube, or favorite songs from niche internet music communities which were poorly mastered. It's also a bit of a gear hobby now since there are so many MP3 players on the market. Prices are low and performance is great. I have to agree about the iPod though, as I found the need for proprietary software, and really annoying software at that, made me use it less and less until my 32GB iTouch was mostly used as an ebook reader. I also prefer physical buttons for my mp3-listening while on the go.
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KozmoNau7 8y ago
I use my phone as an MP3 (Opus, actually) player, with a selection of music from my ~20K track collection. This works better for me than unlimited access to all music, because it makes me have to listen to a smaller selection of content, so I give each album more attention. While I do also have a Spotify Premium subscription, I am using it a lot less now than I used to. At least 10% of the album's I have simply aren't available on Spotify, and possibly never will be. Underground self-released artists very often don't bother with streaming services, or are outright against the entire concept in the first place, claiming that it devalues the music. It certainly doesn't pay very well. There's also the issue of music disappearing because of rightsholder disputes, such as most of the Motörhead discography being unavailable for an extended period of time. That sort of thing just isn't acceptable. Honestly I've come to realize that I prefer a smaller nicely curated collection over a massive unwieldy semi-unlimited library, with questionable curation. I have reported hundreds of curation errors to Spotify, but they keep popping up, especially errors involving two identically-named artists being mixed together. I will admit that I am very particular about tagging, labeling and sorting by genre. Spotify is woefully inadequate in this regard. For my own collection, I am in full control, which makes it much easier to sort and handle.

aidenn0 8y ago

MP3s at any bitrate cannot properly reproduce certain sounds, as preecho can happen and it is fairly easy to train yourself to notice it. Pretty much any modern lossy format can be made transparent at high enough bitrates though.

bch 8y ago
Example?
- vortico 8y ago
  Playing a set of high-frequency pure sine waves is the failure point for MP3, AAC, Vorbis, and Opus. Dial-up noises are close to this, which you can try encoding/decoding. And this is no surprise, since the point of the V.90/92 protocols is to cram as much information as possible into analog frequencies, and the point of psychoacoustic lossy codecs is to remove the least efficient frequency information of our log-frequency scaled ears. But this is kind of a pedagogical example. Not the point of who you're responding to.
  - bch 8y ago
    So, a high frequency DTMF[0] construction should render a pre-echo? What’s the lowest definition of “high” pairs that would satisfy showing this encoding breakage but be hearable by a majority of people[1]? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual-tone_multi-frequency_signaling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual-tone_multi-frequency_sign... [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presbycusis https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presbycusis
    - vortico 8y ago
      No, pre-echos are unrelated to high-frequency sine waves. And DTMF aren't what I'd consider high-frequency. I'm talking about 4-20kHz.
      - bch 8y ago

jscheel 8y ago

So this is why streaming Google Music on my fairly nice sound system ends up sounding like total crap?

stcredzero 8y ago
In 2019 music streaming should be more like video streaming, in that different bitrates should be user selectable, and processing ("cinema" vs. "night mode") is done by the playback equipment.

stcredzero 8y ago

Since everyone is listening of crappy earbuds, they compress the hell out of it and destroy all dynamic range. More compression and less dynamic range is beneficial for certain environments. Noisy subways. Watching TV in a noisy downtown apartment. Basically, crappy, noisy environments. In those, compression will help you actually hear the music and speech. However, the fact that this should be done in the master is an artifact of an earlier time. Now that signal processing is small and cheap enough to be ubiquitous, music should be mastered for the best equipment, then appropriate signal processing should be done by playback. The problem is, that there is a lot of older equipment out there that wouldn't be able to do this. So the signal gets compressed before distribution, as a compromise for the least common denominator of equipment out there. Otherwise, a big chunk of the population would think the master sounds like crap. To them, in their particular situation, it would. EDIT: Come to think of it, the current system, where most music is more compressed, but where the people who care can still get a high dynamic range version, is a very good compromise. The problem is that the latter group's selection isn't quite filled out by the market.

glitchc 8y ago
Isn’t radio a big factor in this? Broadcast radio is noisy and has pretty limited dynamic range. This may be a cause.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- ovao 8y ago
  Radio is actually compressed in real-time by use of broadcast compressors, so they solve the problem rather directly.
  - hunter2_ 8y ago
    Exactly, radio would be relatively unaffected by masters having high dynamic range.

rsync 8y ago

"Since everyone is listening of crappy earbuds, they compress the hell out of it and destroy all dynamic range." For readers of your comment and your child comments, it is important to note that the compression you are talking about in that sentence is not the same as the compression that most people are thinking of when discussing digital file formats (mp3, etc.). This might be helpful: https://forums.stevehoffman.tv/threads/the-common-audiophiles-terror-of-compression-limiting.335257/ https://forums.stevehoffman.tv/threads/the-common-audiophile...

tomc1985 8y ago

So vinyl has only about the equivalent of 10-14 bits of resolution (I don't remember the exact number I heard and it has been a while) and waveforms within our hearing range are far larger than what 192khz can potentially accomodate. The only use I've found for such high-resolution is audio is using it as base material for further effects processing... certain distortion units and whatnot that operate on a sample level can sometimes give nicer output when fed super hi-res audio

teilo 8y ago
Yes, but we are not talking about the mixing/mastering sample rate, but the distribution sample rate/resolution. High resolution is absolutely important in some mixing scenarios to prevent pre-ringing and aliasing in the effects chain (distortion effects or otherwise). But once you have your hi-res master, there is zero advantage to distribute it that way. At that point, a 48Khz/16-bit FLAC is as good as it gets.
Applejinx 8y ago
No, not at all. Vinyl has a wildly inconsistent noise level where rumble predominates, and people conflate this with bits of resolution. Vinyl's behavior is not easily pinned down relative to 'bits of resolution', because the noise floor is skewed so intensely towards low frequencies. To say nothing of how generally available vinyl records (especially old ones) have wildly different rms/peak measurements than generally available CDs and digital recordings have. This is partly 'Loudness War' and partly vinyl's inability to even do the loudness war thing and cope with blocks of heavily limited audio in the first place. So you'll end up with a record where you can play it, and the peaks are 30 freaking dB over the RMS and it sounds amazingly open and uncompressed… while there's also groove noise that is every bit as loud as the music is (admittedly annoying). A person arguing the vinyl/CD dynamic range thing would make the claim that the record was equivalent to maybe TWO bit digital audio, or four bit. The most cursory listen to such a comparison will show how inadequate it is.
- criddell 8y ago
  Plus, the groove on the outside is moving past the needle faster than the inside. The best sounding track on an album is going to be the first one.

Kaiyou 8y ago

> mp3s should sound pretty much the same compared to 16-bit flac I did a blind test between 128-mp3, 320-mp3 and flac hearing classical music. While it's true that the 128-mp3 is obvious to find, it also isn't too difficult to find the 320-mp3. Flac just sounds better. Described as a feeling, flac is more voluminous and doesn't feel cut short. For fun, I also let my parents take this test and they could tell, too. That's why I converted all our CDs to FLAC. Storage is cheap anyway.

widerporst 8y ago
Interesting. Are you sure you were using the right settings and a recent version of LAME for this? The only artifact I can reliably hear in 320 kbps MP3s is pre-echo, for instance with castanets, and only in a few very specific situations. Apart from this, V2 and above sounds completely indistinguishable from the original to me.
- jrace 8y ago
  Which is great ...for you... but what if in the future you could hear the differences? And now your entire collection is in MP3 V2 - now what? No reason to not rip everything in uncompressed FLAC these days. But if your happy with your audio now, great!
  - em500 8y ago
    The reverse is overwhelmingly more likely. For 8khz+ frequencies (where most compression takes place) your hearing declines pretty quickly once you hit 30 years. Whatever real compression differences you're hearing at 20 will be largely gone 10 years later, and almost certainly 20 years later.
    - jmulho 8y ago
      But in 20 years there will be new 20-year-olds. And one day there may be 40-year-olds that didn't damage their hearing with leaf blowers and rock concerts. And there may be a future compression algorithm so good that no one can tell, but you need a lossless original to take advantage of it.

heywire 8y ago

> This is also why modern vinyl releases sound a lot better than digital: they are mastered differently since its assumed everyone is going to be listening on good equipment. I had always assumed they were taking the same master and just carving it into vinyl. I wonder what percentage of "modern vinyl releases" are actually remastering before pressing...

nitrogen 8y ago
At minimum they have to move all the bass to the center and apply RIAA EQ.
mruts 8y ago
You're certainly right, many aren't (I always check). A lot are though. I'd give it maybe like 50/50.

bloopernova 8y ago

My anecdotal experience is that music sounds the best to me currently via my good headphones connected to either my phone's good DAC, or to my PC's separate sound card. Phone = LG V20 which has an [ES9218](https://www.androidauthority.com/lg-v20-quad-dac-explained-713587/ https://www.androidauthority.com/lg-v20-quad-dac-explained-7...) chip for its DAC. Headphones = Sennheiser HD380 pro, pretty good for under $200. Soundcard = "ASUS Xonar DGX PCI-E GX2.5". Sound source = FLAC, Google Play Music subscription) I'd like to upgrade to a really nice DAC and headphone amp to connect to the PC via USB, but that's way down the list of spending priorities. I know that I'd probably have trouble distinguishing between audio components and sources in a blind listening test, and of course I have tinnitus, but I think my current "setup" if you can call it that is good enough for most stuff. I am absolutely with you on the loudness wars though. It's a joy to listen to stuff that has real dynamic range, but it's not something I obsess over when I'm listening to music in the car for instance.

shams93 8y ago

Exactly if it’s mastered wrong the nitrate has nothing to do with the issue this music would sound just as awful cut to vinyl from a bad master. Now you just can’t hear beyond 22050 so 192 is insanely wasteful. But poor mastering is absolutely the core issue not encoding algorithms

magduf 8y ago
Actually, no, it might sound better cut to vinyl. Remember, vinyl doesn't have the frequency range or dynamic range that digital audio does, and it has to be mastered using the RIAA Curve because of the properties of the medium. One factor here is that the stereo separation on vinyl can't be too large, or else the needle will literally jump out of the groove! In short, you can't just take CD music (no matter how well or poorly mastered) and cut it to vinyl as-is.
- sjwright 8y ago
  > it might sound better cut to vinyl There's nothing extra in a 192kHz signal that would help with the vinyl mastering process. You could make a technical argument for the benefits of a 24-bit source, but in practice even those benefits would be utterly swamped by the SNR of vinyl.
  - magduf 8y ago
    You're completely misunderstanding. No, there's nothing extra in the 192kHz signal that would help, but that's not the point. Just remastering it for vinyl, which has certain limitations, might make it sound better than the digital format. As I said, you cannot just cut CD audio to vinyl; the medium won't allow it. You'll probably have the needle bouncing out of the track. So remastering for vinyl might actually make it sound better than the abomination that is the sound of modern CD-audio (because of the Loudness War and extreme compression), not because the fidelity is better (in fact, quite the opposite), but because vinyl's limitations will prevent them from making the audio sound as horrible as it does on CD.
    - 8y ago

magissima 8y ago

One of the "nice" things about being hard of hearing is that I can't hear any difference between flac and mp3s down to around 96 or lower for most music, so hypothetically I don't have to worry about this stuff. Of course in practice I do still keep flac rips around because I'm a data hoarder and what if I decide I want to reencode all my music to opus or something? But at least I have the option to stop caring.

hindsightbias 8y ago

The problem is that they aren't being mastered differently - there's a website that lists vinyl releases (can't find the link) and compares it to the CD masters and they're often the same thing. Older CD masters from the 80's or 90's are re-released compressed to drive sales. The latest vinyl fad has just become a new means for record companies to to exploit a "new" medium and race for the bottom - they know many new listeners on cheap players actually just want to hear what they get out of the earbud. Releated: https://thevinylfactory.com/features/analogue-digital-vinyl-mastering-interviews/ https://thevinylfactory.com/features/analogue-digital-vinyl-... There are, of course, those brands that care about remasters, but I don't think they're a majority of the market unless you're looking at classical and older jazz.

rixrax 8y ago

Here is a link[0] to CD dynamic range database from where you can check how a particular mastering fares. [0] http://dr.loudness-war.info http://dr.loudness-war.info There are of course multitude of other factors impacting mastering quality, but as far as DR goes, this DB is a pretty good source.

mrob 8y ago
This website is a useful resource, but it has some limitations. The algorithm used does not take into account the frequency response of the human ear. If a track contains a lot of very deep bass, it's possible for it to have a low DR score but still sound like it has a high dynamic range. The measurement can also be fooled by surface noise and filtering when measuring vinyl: https://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=Myths_(Vinyl)#Effect_of_vinyl_mastering_on_dynamic_range https://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=Myths_(Vinyl)#Ef...

iaresee 8y ago

> This is also why modern vinyl releases sound a lot better than digital: they are mastered differently since its assumed everyone is going to be listening on good equipment. I'm going to disagree here. They are mastered differently because the physical limitations of the media require them to be mastered differently _and_ it just so happens that the physical limitations help limit mastering tricks in a way that produces less fatigue-inducing, brick-wall-limited mastering output. A heavily compressed master creates huge peak-to-trough cuts in the vinyl which can cause the needle to literally jump out of the groove, even with RIAA limiting applied. The assumption of the gear is definitely not true in any mixing or mastering experience I've had. Mastering tries to balance the final product across a range of listening devices, not some unobtainable ideal system. NS10s are kicking around because they sound like arse and make for mastering results that work well on car stereos and other "inferior" systems.

mruts 8y ago
That may be true, but I've seen some vinyl mastering jobs that looked as bad as digital. I won't claim to be a mastering engineer or anything, but after comparing many vinyl releases and digital releases, it seems like there is something going on besides the physical limitations of the medium.
mrob 8y ago
You can put brickwalled audio on a vinyl record and have it play just fine if you cut it at a lower volume. This negates the reason for mastering it that way in the first place, but it's cheaper than redoing the mastering, and many people buying vinyl only do so for the image. See: https://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=Myths_(Vinyl)#Myth:_Vinyl_requires_a_better-sounding_master_because_it_is_physically_incapable_of_reproducing_the_hypercompressed_sound_mastered_to_CD https://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=Myths_(Vinyl)#My...
- iaresee 8y ago
  That's a fair point. And I totally agree on that second statement. :D
8y ago

tigeba 8y ago

Vinyl releases are mastered to be less loud than digital releases because vinyl cannot reproduce mixes that digital systems can. The side effect is that lots of times they sound better. I think in a perfect world an artist would offer you vinyl if you want it, along with a digital version of the vinyl master. You could skip the whole ripping vinyl process entirely.

SloopJon 8y ago

> That being said, I think flac is generally a good choice for a music collection. One other consideration for a music collection from CDs is getting a good rip in the first place. I've had some horrible rips in iTunes, even with error correction enabled. I have much more confidence using a tool like XLD that supports AccurateRip, which probably doesn't work with a lossy format. If you want to transcode after the rip, fine, but you may as well hang on to the FLAC.

stordoff 8y ago
IIRC, XLD rips to WAV first anyway, then compresses it to FLAC (I know EAC does).

zepearl 8y ago

> This is also why modern vinyl releases sound a lot better than digital: they are mastered differently since its assumed everyone is going to be listening on good equipment. Sorry, I don't know much about sound so here comes probably the most stupid question of the day (but hope never dies): does this mean that I might get better sound if I would buy a vinyl & one of those turntables which can directly digitize to USB, then if I would buy & download the digital song directly (or maybe even the CD)? Thx

ValentineC 8y ago
(Assuming you're okay with piracy…) You're better off searching for vinyl rips where people with good equipment have done the heavy lifting for you.
- zepearl 8y ago
  Actually you're right (what shall I say, for some mysterious reason I didn't think about it) => I'll first do a comparison with whatever I find and then if it does sound better I'll try to achieve the same results on my own (I'm obsessed with owning originals). Thx :)

wnevets 8y ago

> (there are some exceptions, like the Beatles mono and stereo boxed sets that came out awhile ago) Didn't the beatles famously create their music to be listenable on the terrible radios of the time?

Florin_Andrei 8y ago

> modern vinyl releases sound a lot better than digital Look, I actually grew up with vinyl and 4-track tape, and audio cassettes. Unlike most folks being all trendy and hip nowadays, I've years of using that stuff. Analog is shit. It's noisy, has a ton of distortion, and it gets shittier every time you copy it. Oh, and if you just keep it in storage, guess what, it decays just by sitting there (vinyl collects dust and scratches when used, slightly different). In 2002 I built my DAW (digital audio workstation) and recorded my first tracks in 24 bit digital. Zero noise, zero distortion, no generation loss. It was like alien technology. Digital is better in every way, by a wide margin. Period. https://www.reddit.com/r/headphones/comments/awyy1q/this_preamp_reveals_the_dark_side_of_the_hifi/ehr58dz/ https://www.reddit.com/r/headphones/comments/awyy1q/this_pre... Current mastering practices prevailing in the industry make no difference on this matter. Analog is still garbage. Find digital copies that are mastered properly and you'll be fine.

madengr 8y ago
Couldn’t agree more. I grew up with cassette and LP. First time I heard a CD, specifically Pink Floyd’s Money with the cash register, it was jaw dropping. LPs are cool for the artwork, but that’s it. That being said, I still only buy music in CD, due to all the hassle of DRM and playback. I just want to drop in a CD and listen to the entire album, not futz with computers, encoders, and software. I have a simple CD player, kit built tube amp, and homemade single driver speakers.
- Florin_Andrei 8y ago
  > I still only buy music in CD That's what I do. I tend to favor old master copies. I rip them to both FLAC and MP3. The former is for listening at home, the latter for mobile scenarios. I store everything on the Linux server at home, and share via UPnP. VPN into the home network gives me access from anywhere. Foobar2000 is my preferred player on Windows, BubbleUPNP on Android. > kit built tube amp What's the distortion on that thing? The vast majority of tube kit schematics are very old tech, stuff that engineers from the 1930s would recognize. Their THD (coefficient of total harmonic distortion) is very high. What is known as "tube sound" is basically just huge THD, along with a specific distribution of energy across the harmonic orders. It's fun as a hobby, and for the satisfaction of building stuff on your own, but even the simplest schematics built on modern principles vastly outperform these things by essentially all metrics. Some tube amps are built specifically for low THD, but unfortunately they are rare. When in doubt, use solid state. > homemade single driver speakers I used to build everything myself back in the day. Speakers and amps was just part of it. Also did automation, radio frequency (I'm a licensed HAM radio operator), digital circuits from logic gates to DAC/ADC to systems with microprocessors to small computers. It's a small miracle I didn't actually go into electrical engineering. You really need multiple drivers and likely a subwoofer also, to cover the whole audible spectrum.

reaperducer 8y ago

The reason why a lot of recent digital music sounds bad is because of the intentionally terrible mastering. I guess that's why the vinyl versions of my wife's albums always sound better than the downloaded versions. Even to my really quite bad ears.

kazinator 8y ago

Some time ago, I stumbled across a YT channel of some guy, a self-professed studio expert, who "remasters" some 80's metal albums to give them a big, "modern" sound. The uploads are heavily commented with positive reviews. Basically, to my ears, it just sounds like a bunch of early reflection reverbs were added (an effect that was mature in the 1980's in its high-end implementations and used in studios to get "bigger" guitar sounds and whatnot.) Of course, it sounds great for all the viewers who are using cheap (or even not-so-cheap) earbuds, or computer speakers. What these nincompoops don't get is that these albums were made to be cranked up on a powerful stereo, with full sized speakers, in some kind of room. That guy is basically just ruining great albums who were actually recorded and mastered by people who did know what they were doing. Like, oh, Detonator by RATT and whatnot.

gmueckl 8y ago
Back up for a second with the last paragraph there: if the record was mastered for a room sized stereo, it assumes that the room adds its reverb to the sound. With loudspeakers, the room is a distorting filter in the signal path. This and the HRTF distortion are skipped over when listening to headphones/earbuds. So it does make a lot of sense to add these effects to the audio signal in the headphones case. Done right, the headphone playback is indistinguishable from a stereo in a room - mounted to your head, because the spatialized speakers are relative to your head, no matter where you look. So, there is a case to be made for this kind of processing. But I won't trust a random mastering "guru" with unknown credentials to get that right.
- kazinator 8y ago
  Right. Only, the accompanying obnoxious rhetoric was along the lines that those studio engineers didn't have the techniques and equipment for this modern sound, and that these old albums need a face lift.
  - gmueckl 8y ago
    Urgh, this is just crazy talk.

xkcd-sucks 8y ago

Oh another cool thing about vinyl is the needle can couple to the environment too, try driving its case with another speaker or putting it in front of it's own big amp for feedback. Also, I'm a little bit surprised that nobody focuses on more "out of the box" perception of sound. One can absolutely sense hgh frequencies, personally feel kind of like pressure where you can't pop your ears to equalize. Playing around with this feeling adds emotional tension and color to tracks. Also, interference patterns are perceptible, and they sound kind of... Different from pure tones, idk.

KozmoNau7 8y ago

Most LPs these days are made from the same masters as the CDs (or downloads/streaming), with only the bare minimum of processing done to make them viable to pressing to vinyl, ie. mono bass and RIAA equalization. Only releases marketed specifically to audiophiles tend to get any extra effort put into them, and that is a vanishingly small segment of customers. The loudness war isn't happening because of "crappy earbuds", the earbuds included with smartphones have been rather good for a long time now. The ones that came with my Samsung S8 were designed partially by AKG (Samsung owns the Harman Group, including AKG) and are really damn good. Apple's included earbuds are also very good now, a far cry from the original iPod earbuds, which were decidedly mediocre. The real issue is radio and Youtube/streaming services from before they implemented loudness targets, and it's been going on since the 50s at least, just listen to some old singles from back then, they're mastered as loud as they possibly could, with the technology of the day. The objective has always been to make your song sound louder than the next song, because louder music sounds more impressive to a casual listener, it's simply more attention-grabbing. In the beginning of the digital era, there was actually some hope that better dynamics would happen. In the guidelines for Sony's earliest digital recording equipment, the recommendation was to target an average level of -20dBFS, to use very little or no compression, and "let peaks fall where they may". Just imagine that, 20dB headroom! In the worst days of the loudness war (~early 2000s) lot of music was mastered with barely 3-4dB of dynamic range, with peaks banging hard against 0dBFS. I have some CDs from that era, and they clip and distort like crazy, because everything was just pushed to 11, to be as loud as possible. "Californication" by Red Hot Chili Peppers is an excellent example, it's absolutely horrid. Since then, two major things have happened to improve sound quality somewhat. Firstly the compression devices and plugins have improved massively, modern sidechain compression is really impressive, entire genres like EDM/dubstep simply wouldn't exist if not for the improvements in compression tech. Secondly, all of the streaming services use volume normalization now, with a set average sound level. Songs can peak over this average value, but the average must be in line with the target. This also results in brickwalled "turn everything to 11" tracks sound a lot quieter, because they have no peaks to use the additional dynamic range available.

thirdsun 8y ago

> This is also why modern vinyl releases sound a lot better than digital: they are mastered differently since its assumed everyone is going to be listening on good equipment. In my opinion that‘s a myth and certainly not a given. There are plenty of subpar vinyl masters and terrible pressings out there. And it‘s not that difficult to find good digital masters these days. More important than the medium is the genre, label and target audience - I have a pretty obscure and diverse taste, including rarities from past decades which are finally being re-issued for the first time and while mixdowns certainly vary in quality it‘s mostly fine and the result of a careful process these days. However things might be worse when it comes to mainstream music.

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zepearl 8y ago

> This is also why modern vinyl releases sound a lot better than digital: they are mastered differently since its assumed everyone is going to be listening on good equipment. I have just downloaded "Radiohead - The bends" and "Smashing Pumpkins - Mellon_collie_and_the_infinite_sadness", both apparently from vinyl and in highest quality but I don't hear any difference from the CDs I bought and ripped years ago (using headphones "Beyerdynamic DT 770 pro" directly connected to a Lenovo P71 notebook). Maybe you meant some more modern music or something else...? Thx