5 ms·

How can a lossy compressed minidisc be "cleaner" than a lossless CD or similarly lossy but higher bitrate and more efficiently compressed digital file?

jandrese 6y ago
It was mastered from a higher quality source? There could also be errors in the CD mastering, like setting the gain too high and chopping off the top of the song just to make the whole thing "louder". The digital files may have been taken from the CD since nobody can be bothered to go back and find the masters anymore.
- TacticalCoder 6y ago
  > The digital files may have been taken from the CD since nobody can be bothered to go back and find the masters anymore. All my music collection is FLAC files, bit-perfectly ripped from my CD collection. So, sure, they're digital files, compressed, but lossless. It is, for all practical purposes, just as good as a CD (as long as my external DAC is as good as the CD players' built-in DAC). The original CD may have been badly engineered but that's another topic. 3 000 CDs fits in more or less 1 TB in lossless (but compressed) CD quality (just to give an idea of how tiny it is using modern storage standards). Some people only use FLAC as archives but these files are so tiny in this day and age that I don't bother converting the FLAC to mp3s: I sent directly the bitperfectly ripped FLAC files to my DAC / stereo setup.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
    FLACs are better than CD quality. CDs in a player always have errors. The errors are covered up by a couple of stages of error correction. One is a transparent CRC, the other drops the effective bit depth down to 12 or so bits. The Block Error Rate (BLER) on CDs can be surprisingly high. So a CD in a player is always slightly compromised. When you rip a CD with a good ripper the drive does multiple passes over problem areas until the results are consistent. The final file is bit perfect, except on very damaged CDs.
    - dehrmann 6y ago
      > One is a transparent CRC You must mean CIRC. CRC in the context of errors is something completely different. CIRC offers pretty good error recovery, so except for bad scratches, CDs and FLAC (assuming it's also 16 bit, 44000 Hz) are identical.
- cosmotic 6y ago
  The two issues you referenced are also applicable to minidisc.
  - bayindirh 6y ago
    MiniDisc doesn't brick-wall-compress the sound. Instead, it uses automatic gain to prevent clipping while recording from line-in. ATRAC encoding is also devoid of any compression. MD players generally have VU meters, and you can observe your music, since they generally have recording functionality and used in studio and/or interviews, getting sound as transparent as possible is the aim. Fun fact: Portable MD players are generally called "Portable MD Deck" by Sony to signal it's not a mere player but an audio equipment. Most MD decks contain indexing and primary tools for chopping a record to tracks and tagging them.
    - TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
      ATRAC is not devoid of compression. It's a lossy format which uses a crude form of spectral encoding - a bit like an MP3, but the model is less sophisticated. There is a rare variant called ATRAC Advanced Lossless but it was never available on many devices.
      - bayindirh 6y ago
        Oh, I think I failed to tell what I'm trying to tell. ATRAC is of course lossy and compresses the audio. The compression I mentioned was loudness maximizing/homogenizing compression which is used in mastering process, or in audio pipelines in general. So we can say that, ATRAC is devoid of any compressor stage which makes the resulting audio more loud by default. That loudness maximizer/equalizer also called compressor so it's easy to misrepresent or write misinforming things when talking about both at the same time. Sorry, my bad.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
bayindirh 6y ago
MiniDisc user here. It's for a couple of reasons. First of al, ATRAC is a strange format. It's optimized for perception as far as I understood it. It doesn't color sound but can reproduce the dynamics and details very well. It's important to understand ATRAC has quality levels: SP, LP2, LP4. SP fits 80 minutes to a 80 minute MD. LP2 fits ~160 minutes, LP4 fits ~320. SP is extremely detailed and transparent. LP2 is really pretty good. LP4 is not good. Is not bad, but for listening on the move. It's not suitable for joy-listening on higher resolution systems. The deficiencies will be definitely heard. This sound quality has another reason. The DSP/DAC combo on MD players itself. Earlier versions were called Type-R, improved versions are called Type-S. Latter one can reconstruct sound very impressively. It can make SP and LP2 sound really good. It also has a digital amplification section. So, It's only converted to analog at the latest stage. Result is a very dynamic and clean sound. Especially if you convert to ATRAC from CD or any lossless source. My Hi-Fi (Sony CMT-HX3) also has a 35W version of that DSP/Amplifier combo. It really sounds fantastic* with CD, MP3 and AC3. Didn't try ATRAC, but it won't disappoint I presume. Sony's higher end systems and DSPs are a work of art. They sound clean, crisp and detailed. They can sing through a pair of good headphones or through 2x85W behemoths. This is why they're timeless and regarded highly. With just Bass & Treble settings, it beats a lot of presumably higher end portable players. A similar sound quality was present in Creative's Muvo^2. It was plain enjoyable to listen. Apple's iPods famously use Burr Brown DACs but, the sound was too flat and dull in the earlier versions, lacking punch and energy. They fixed it after iPhone 5. TL;DR: Sony's DSP/DAC/Amp stuff makes any well designed audio codec shine. ATRAC can store dynamics very well. This is why being a Hi-Fi company pays in the portable space. *: I have a more conventional, but vastly higher powered system. This small guy is not a match for it, but for a small hi-fi it really hits above its league. If you scale this design up (to 80+ watts) with proper speakers, I'm sure that it'll make a lot of more expensive systems sweat.
- cosmotic 6y ago
  The DAC isn't part of the format; although I respect the desire for a good DAC. I believe all lossy compression codecs from the past 20 or 30 years are perception based; ATRAC may have been one of the first ones, but it sure doesn't beat a CD which has no loss at all, unless ATRAC/minidisc regularly used higher bit depths than are supported by CDs. The sample rate is already "perfect" (in that humans could never hear a difference)
genewitch 6y ago
I used to record, in stereo, everyday life. i started with a 32MB smartmedia recorder, then to a cheap-ish compact flash recorder, to a minidisc "net" recorder - the audio i recorded with that netMD is still impressive to me, it feels like you're actually in the recording that i haven't ever replicated, even with the same microphone on other, more advanced devices like tascam dr-05 and the tascam quad channel, or even line in / mic on a computer, regardless of the sound card. I can go put a pair of headphones and a single AA battery into my MD device and be transported back to my college campus, a few of the industrial companies i worked at, the concerts/performances i was asked to record for friends, or even a small gathering/party/game night. the only stuff i've heard that was recorded by amateurs that comes close (and possibly surpasses, depending on who's running the conversion / editing) is DAT recordings using the microphones shaped like a human head, for "perfect" stereo separation. anecdotal, for sure, but the "compression" - ATRAC - was extremely good, especially at that time. I am aware that CDs have "no compression" on the data, so obviously DAT -> CD would sound better than MD -> CD, but this is my opinion.
dehrmann 6y ago
Hipsters.

jandrese 6y ago

It was mastered from a higher quality source? There could also be errors in the CD mastering, like setting the gain too high and chopping off the top of the song just to make the whole thing "louder". The digital files may have been taken from the CD since nobody can be bothered to go back and find the masters anymore.

TacticalCoder 6y ago
> The digital files may have been taken from the CD since nobody can be bothered to go back and find the masters anymore. All my music collection is FLAC files, bit-perfectly ripped from my CD collection. So, sure, they're digital files, compressed, but lossless. It is, for all practical purposes, just as good as a CD (as long as my external DAC is as good as the CD players' built-in DAC). The original CD may have been badly engineered but that's another topic. 3 000 CDs fits in more or less 1 TB in lossless (but compressed) CD quality (just to give an idea of how tiny it is using modern storage standards). Some people only use FLAC as archives but these files are so tiny in this day and age that I don't bother converting the FLAC to mp3s: I sent directly the bitperfectly ripped FLAC files to my DAC / stereo setup.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
  FLACs are better than CD quality. CDs in a player always have errors. The errors are covered up by a couple of stages of error correction. One is a transparent CRC, the other drops the effective bit depth down to 12 or so bits. The Block Error Rate (BLER) on CDs can be surprisingly high. So a CD in a player is always slightly compromised. When you rip a CD with a good ripper the drive does multiple passes over problem areas until the results are consistent. The final file is bit perfect, except on very damaged CDs.
  - dehrmann 6y ago
    > One is a transparent CRC You must mean CIRC. CRC in the context of errors is something completely different. CIRC offers pretty good error recovery, so except for bad scratches, CDs and FLAC (assuming it's also 16 bit, 44000 Hz) are identical.
cosmotic 6y ago
The two issues you referenced are also applicable to minidisc.
- bayindirh 6y ago
  MiniDisc doesn't brick-wall-compress the sound. Instead, it uses automatic gain to prevent clipping while recording from line-in. ATRAC encoding is also devoid of any compression. MD players generally have VU meters, and you can observe your music, since they generally have recording functionality and used in studio and/or interviews, getting sound as transparent as possible is the aim. Fun fact: Portable MD players are generally called "Portable MD Deck" by Sony to signal it's not a mere player but an audio equipment. Most MD decks contain indexing and primary tools for chopping a record to tracks and tagging them.
  - TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
    ATRAC is not devoid of compression. It's a lossy format which uses a crude form of spectral encoding - a bit like an MP3, but the model is less sophisticated. There is a rare variant called ATRAC Advanced Lossless but it was never available on many devices.
    - bayindirh 6y ago
      Oh, I think I failed to tell what I'm trying to tell. ATRAC is of course lossy and compresses the audio. The compression I mentioned was loudness maximizing/homogenizing compression which is used in mastering process, or in audio pipelines in general. So we can say that, ATRAC is devoid of any compressor stage which makes the resulting audio more loud by default. That loudness maximizer/equalizer also called compressor so it's easy to misrepresent or write misinforming things when talking about both at the same time. Sorry, my bad.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]

bayindirh 6y ago

MiniDisc user here. It's for a couple of reasons. First of al, ATRAC is a strange format. It's optimized for perception as far as I understood it. It doesn't color sound but can reproduce the dynamics and details very well. It's important to understand ATRAC has quality levels: SP, LP2, LP4. SP fits 80 minutes to a 80 minute MD. LP2 fits ~160 minutes, LP4 fits ~320. SP is extremely detailed and transparent. LP2 is really pretty good. LP4 is not good. Is not bad, but for listening on the move. It's not suitable for joy-listening on higher resolution systems. The deficiencies will be definitely heard. This sound quality has another reason. The DSP/DAC combo on MD players itself. Earlier versions were called Type-R, improved versions are called Type-S. Latter one can reconstruct sound very impressively. It can make SP and LP2 sound really good. It also has a digital amplification section. So, It's only converted to analog at the latest stage. Result is a very dynamic and clean sound. Especially if you convert to ATRAC from CD or any lossless source. My Hi-Fi (Sony CMT-HX3) also has a 35W version of that DSP/Amplifier combo. It really sounds fantastic* with CD, MP3 and AC3. Didn't try ATRAC, but it won't disappoint I presume. Sony's higher end systems and DSPs are a work of art. They sound clean, crisp and detailed. They can sing through a pair of good headphones or through 2x85W behemoths. This is why they're timeless and regarded highly. With just Bass & Treble settings, it beats a lot of presumably higher end portable players. A similar sound quality was present in Creative's Muvo^2. It was plain enjoyable to listen. Apple's iPods famously use Burr Brown DACs but, the sound was too flat and dull in the earlier versions, lacking punch and energy. They fixed it after iPhone 5. TL;DR: Sony's DSP/DAC/Amp stuff makes any well designed audio codec shine. ATRAC can store dynamics very well. This is why being a Hi-Fi company pays in the portable space. *: I have a more conventional, but vastly higher powered system. This small guy is not a match for it, but for a small hi-fi it really hits above its league. If you scale this design up (to 80+ watts) with proper speakers, I'm sure that it'll make a lot of more expensive systems sweat.

cosmotic 6y ago
The DAC isn't part of the format; although I respect the desire for a good DAC. I believe all lossy compression codecs from the past 20 or 30 years are perception based; ATRAC may have been one of the first ones, but it sure doesn't beat a CD which has no loss at all, unless ATRAC/minidisc regularly used higher bit depths than are supported by CDs. The sample rate is already "perfect" (in that humans could never hear a difference)

genewitch 6y ago

I used to record, in stereo, everyday life. i started with a 32MB smartmedia recorder, then to a cheap-ish compact flash recorder, to a minidisc "net" recorder - the audio i recorded with that netMD is still impressive to me, it feels like you're actually in the recording that i haven't ever replicated, even with the same microphone on other, more advanced devices like tascam dr-05 and the tascam quad channel, or even line in / mic on a computer, regardless of the sound card. I can go put a pair of headphones and a single AA battery into my MD device and be transported back to my college campus, a few of the industrial companies i worked at, the concerts/performances i was asked to record for friends, or even a small gathering/party/game night. the only stuff i've heard that was recorded by amateurs that comes close (and possibly surpasses, depending on who's running the conversion / editing) is DAT recordings using the microphones shaped like a human head, for "perfect" stereo separation. anecdotal, for sure, but the "compression" - ATRAC - was extremely good, especially at that time. I am aware that CDs have "no compression" on the data, so obviously DAT -> CD would sound better than MD -> CD, but this is my opinion.

dehrmann 6y ago

Hipsters.