7 ms·

> Of course, it's not only the compression that's at stake-- it's also the mastering quality. HN threads on lossless music so often descend into "well, you cou

> Of course, it's not only the compression that's at stake-- it's also the mastering quality. HN threads on lossless music so often descend into "well, you couldn’t hear the difference". But historically a key reason for people to prefer e.g. SACD releases of recordings is not because one can hear the extra frequencies of this format, but because the SACD release – being targeted at people with a good stereo and silent listening environment – is mastered with more dynamic range. The mainstream release of the same music, on the other hand, often features a different mastering with levels pushed up, because they assume that ordinary people will be listening to music in noisy environments, like through earbuds in the metro. This is often a problem for re-releases of 1960s recordings of jazz where the producer and engineer really exploited dynamic range, but that is lost in the most recent of the digital-era re-releases. (Another reason to prefer SACDs and Blu-ray releases of recordings is for the possibility of 5.0 surround sound, because of course CD and mainstream downloads or streaming are limited to mono or stereo only.)

StrictDabbler 5y ago
Absolutely agreed. People spend so much time arguing about whether we're "past the limits of human perception" on sound or video. They want to quote Nyquist and check frequencies. Spend a million dollars on audio equipment. Turn on your speakers, play some chamber music in insane multi-channel high-res audio, and invite a friend over. Your friend does not think you hired a string quartet. Your friend thinks you have nice speakers. If your friend is naive and easily fooled, do an A/B test by actually hiring a quartet and alternating with the speakers. There are a thousand compromises between the source of music and your ear. What is worth paying for is a recording where those compromises were made well. The compression level is a very small part of the picture.
- Retric 5y ago
  I have been surprised in both directions where what I thought was live music was prerecorded and what I thought was prerecorded turned out to be live music. Which shouldn’t be that surprising, audio equipment has gotten really good and audio standards are based around what people notice.
- nicoburns 5y ago
  The more realistic scenario where it might actually make a difference is DJs playing on huge high-end club soundsystems where compression artefacts might not only effect what you can hear, but the reverberations you can physically feel, and where there might be post-processing effects applied to the source material that show up the compression artifacts.
  - karmakaze 5y ago
    Yep, it was a sad day when they switched from vinyl 45 singles to digital.
- numpad0 5y ago
  > A/B test by actually hiring a quartet That's easy. The one with room echos, washed out highs, and missing bass is the live.
  - coliveira 5y ago
    This may be true about popular music, because this is how we came to know this style of music - live performances (without proper sound engineering) sound worse. It is completely the opposite for classical music. There's still no way to replicate the sound quality of being close to an orchestra.
    - simias 5y ago
      >There's still no way to replicate the sound quality of being close to an orchestra. That's why I always tend to bail out of audiophile discussion but I'll bite: why? What's so special about the soundwaves going into your ears when you sit close to an orchestra that couldn't be reproduced with good audio equipment? If you're talking about the experience itself of siting next to performers then I wholeheartedly agree, but that's the problem, it's no longer something that can be measured and objectivized. And that's entirely fine, but I think there's a trend among some people (and especially the type of people who frequent this forum) that deem that if a feeling or emotion can't be objectivized then it's effectively worthless or irrational or something like that, so you see people grasping at straws to justify their emotions with a pseudo-scientific explanation. I find that frankly sad and quite toxic in a way. Music is art, the enjoyment we derive from it can't be measured in kilobits per second. That doesn't mean that we need to make up pseudo-facts about acoustics to justify our preferences.
      - mixmastamyk 5y ago
        If you've never heard an orchestra in an auditorium with proper sound design you're in for a treat. Two or four speakers are simply a poor alternative to dozens of live performers around you.
      - qart 5y ago
        > That's why I always tend to bail out of audiophile discussion but I'll bite: why? Disclaimer: I am definitely not an audiophile. The low frequencies that we feel with/through our bodies feel entirely different at a non-electric live concert as compared to what we feel through speakers. No headphones can reproduce such effects. For sure, there are speakers that can reproduce such sounds faithfully, but how often do the audio production guys use such speakers, and how often do they try to control for the feeling in their bodies? Not often, I imagine.
- taylodl 5y ago
  Meanwhile I'm listening the output of an amplifier playing a distorted guitar. I might listen to an acoustic guitar, and there might be a small horn section. Of course there's going to be drums. So it's super-simple to tell if it's live or a recording - the volume levels are going to be insanely different!
- com2kid 5y ago
  > Your friend does not think you hired a string quartet. Your friend thinks you have nice speakers. When I first got nice high end speakers (TY Craigslist) I did this with an acoustic guitar CD. The amount of detail I could hear, and by detail I mean "close my eyes and hear every details of the musican's fingers moving across the strings" detail, was incredible. That is also the day that I learned MP3 encoders of the time (~8 years ago) still had bad encoding artifacts even at 256kbps. After hearing enough clicks and pops, I ended up having to re-rip my CDs as FLAC, or in some cases buy the CDs so I could rip them. Now days encoders are a LOT better. You don't get clicks and hisses except at 128kbps. Also 90% of my listening is done through a wireless headset (...) through spotify (...) so quality has taken a serious nose dive anyway. That said if I want to listen to music as an all immersive activity, yeah, lossless through high end speakers. But I do that maybe once every other month for half an hour.
- VT_Dude 5y ago
  Theoretica Applied Physics and BACCH Labs audition this exact demo -- A/B test by actually hiring a quartet and alternating the musicians playing with the speakers silent and the musicians silently air-playing and with the speakers playing. With a perfect image you literally cannot hear the difference. https://www.theoretica.us/ https://www.theoretica.us/ https://bacch.com/ https://bacch.com/
  - Dah00n 5y ago
    Unless you have bad hearing everyone would be able to hear the difference on speakers and live unless live is defined as someone playing far away on a scene or something, no matter how expensive equipment you have. It is impossible to have it sound like musicians playing in the same room. To even come close you would need several speakers per instrument playing in multiple directions and some playing sounds of the people moving, breathing and talking too. Not even a simple snare drum being hit at intervals can be reproduced by a normal stereo setup to sound as if it were in the same room unless it's at distance. Remember, we play music at home so the definition should be an orchestra two to three meters away, not an orchestra ten to twenty meters away up at a scene. Someone with something to sell is a very unreliable source btw.
  - dmix 5y ago
    I found a video in one of those links from Princeton. It's a narrative of this guy developing 3D sound that works in normal 2 channel laptop speakers. It's quite impressive when they demo it. There is a moment around 1:20 that plays flies circling around and my cat next to me didnt care about the normal recording but he stood up with his ears out when the 3d version played. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SQmQD27uCt0&t=3s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SQmQD27uCt0&t=3s I know it's probably old hat by now (the video is ~10yrs old, yes 2010 was over a decade ago) but it still blows my mind.
    - Mediterraneo10 5y ago
      This is pretty old hat now. IRCAM was experimenting with spatialized sound on a stereo medium already back in the 1990s. The software they came up with was used e.g. for the Deutsche Grammophon recording of Pierre Boulez’s piece Répons where sound is moved around the hall.
- simondotau 5y ago
  > Your friend does not think you hired a string quartet. To be fair to the audio system, a significant reason why they'd sound different is because of room acoustics—and we rarely listen to string quartets playing in residential living rooms.
DenverCode 5y ago
For anyone bored and looking to explore: https://dr.loudness-war.info/ https://dr.loudness-war.info/
- DavidVoid 5y ago
  Note that all entries that have the format Vinyl on that site can be ignored, as the dynamic range calculations don't work well on audio recorded from vinyl records.
  - DenverCode 5y ago
    Well, I'm glad I've been using it to pick out which pressings to target haha.
thrdbndndn 5y ago
What you said is totally true but it's not relevant here. Apple already have all the lossless files on their server. Just that before they converted them to lossy format before sending to the user, and now they serve the original. There is no new master / new re-release involved in all these.
- CharlesW 5y ago
  > Apple already have all the lossless files on their server. Just that before they converted them to lossy format before sending to the user, and now they serve the original. Do you happen to have a citation for when this changed? According to the "Apple Digital Masters" Technology Brief[1], the masters delivered to Apple have historically been AAC files. [1] https://www.apple.com/itunes/docs/apple-digital-masters.pdf https://www.apple.com/itunes/docs/apple-digital-masters.pdf
  - nucleardog 5y ago
    I might be misunderstanding, but I think that PDF is about how to master your music such that it will sound good after they convert it to AAC. It doesn't actually speak to the audio that's sent to them. Can't source anything except our own deliveries to Apple, but we've been delivering PCM since ~2018. Likely earlier, that's just when the code got moved into source control. That actually predates the copyright on that PDF. In general, of the maybe 150-odd DSPs we deliver to, as far as I know all but a handful have us deliver PCM. The remainder have us delivering flac.
    - CharlesW 5y ago
      > Can't source anything except our own deliveries to Apple, but we've been delivering PCM since ~2018. Cool, I take your word for it. Thanks! The referenced document only talks about AAC masters, and the tools at https://www.apple.com/itunes/mastered-for-itunes/ https://www.apple.com/itunes/mastered-for-itunes/ only create AAC masters. The simplest explanation is that the public materials and tools are just sadly out of date.
PostThisTooFast 5y ago
Yep. Dynamic compression has ruined all popular music mastered (or "remastered") since the late '90s. It's incredible how many people don't understand that the problem isn't data compression, but rather dynamic compression. You have guys like Neil Young and Bob Dylan railing against how shitty music sounds now, but then promoting super-high-bitrate or high-resolution formats. NO! That's not the problem. We need "HDR" music. It's sad that we have to say this in an era where everyone has the technical means to hear great-sounding music.... and there's none being made.
kohlerm 5y ago
I agree. For me the limiting factor is not necessarily whether it is poodles high quality encoded or lossless. For "normal" music the bottleneck is often the recording. With good headphones it is easy to differantiate good from not so good recordings. I For me a lot of recordings on Tidal/qobuz did not sound better than HQ on Spotify

StrictDabbler 5y ago

Absolutely agreed. People spend so much time arguing about whether we're "past the limits of human perception" on sound or video. They want to quote Nyquist and check frequencies. Spend a million dollars on audio equipment. Turn on your speakers, play some chamber music in insane multi-channel high-res audio, and invite a friend over. Your friend does not think you hired a string quartet. Your friend thinks you have nice speakers. If your friend is naive and easily fooled, do an A/B test by actually hiring a quartet and alternating with the speakers. There are a thousand compromises between the source of music and your ear. What is worth paying for is a recording where those compromises were made well. The compression level is a very small part of the picture.

Retric 5y ago
I have been surprised in both directions where what I thought was live music was prerecorded and what I thought was prerecorded turned out to be live music. Which shouldn’t be that surprising, audio equipment has gotten really good and audio standards are based around what people notice.
nicoburns 5y ago
The more realistic scenario where it might actually make a difference is DJs playing on huge high-end club soundsystems where compression artefacts might not only effect what you can hear, but the reverberations you can physically feel, and where there might be post-processing effects applied to the source material that show up the compression artifacts.
- karmakaze 5y ago
  Yep, it was a sad day when they switched from vinyl 45 singles to digital.
numpad0 5y ago
> A/B test by actually hiring a quartet That's easy. The one with room echos, washed out highs, and missing bass is the live.
- coliveira 5y ago
  This may be true about popular music, because this is how we came to know this style of music - live performances (without proper sound engineering) sound worse. It is completely the opposite for classical music. There's still no way to replicate the sound quality of being close to an orchestra.
  - simias 5y ago
    >There's still no way to replicate the sound quality of being close to an orchestra. That's why I always tend to bail out of audiophile discussion but I'll bite: why? What's so special about the soundwaves going into your ears when you sit close to an orchestra that couldn't be reproduced with good audio equipment? If you're talking about the experience itself of siting next to performers then I wholeheartedly agree, but that's the problem, it's no longer something that can be measured and objectivized. And that's entirely fine, but I think there's a trend among some people (and especially the type of people who frequent this forum) that deem that if a feeling or emotion can't be objectivized then it's effectively worthless or irrational or something like that, so you see people grasping at straws to justify their emotions with a pseudo-scientific explanation. I find that frankly sad and quite toxic in a way. Music is art, the enjoyment we derive from it can't be measured in kilobits per second. That doesn't mean that we need to make up pseudo-facts about acoustics to justify our preferences.
    - mixmastamyk 5y ago
      If you've never heard an orchestra in an auditorium with proper sound design you're in for a treat. Two or four speakers are simply a poor alternative to dozens of live performers around you.
    - qart 5y ago
      > That's why I always tend to bail out of audiophile discussion but I'll bite: why? Disclaimer: I am definitely not an audiophile. The low frequencies that we feel with/through our bodies feel entirely different at a non-electric live concert as compared to what we feel through speakers. No headphones can reproduce such effects. For sure, there are speakers that can reproduce such sounds faithfully, but how often do the audio production guys use such speakers, and how often do they try to control for the feeling in their bodies? Not often, I imagine.
taylodl 5y ago
Meanwhile I'm listening the output of an amplifier playing a distorted guitar. I might listen to an acoustic guitar, and there might be a small horn section. Of course there's going to be drums. So it's super-simple to tell if it's live or a recording - the volume levels are going to be insanely different!
com2kid 5y ago
> Your friend does not think you hired a string quartet. Your friend thinks you have nice speakers. When I first got nice high end speakers (TY Craigslist) I did this with an acoustic guitar CD. The amount of detail I could hear, and by detail I mean "close my eyes and hear every details of the musican's fingers moving across the strings" detail, was incredible. That is also the day that I learned MP3 encoders of the time (~8 years ago) still had bad encoding artifacts even at 256kbps. After hearing enough clicks and pops, I ended up having to re-rip my CDs as FLAC, or in some cases buy the CDs so I could rip them. Now days encoders are a LOT better. You don't get clicks and hisses except at 128kbps. Also 90% of my listening is done through a wireless headset (...) through spotify (...) so quality has taken a serious nose dive anyway. That said if I want to listen to music as an all immersive activity, yeah, lossless through high end speakers. But I do that maybe once every other month for half an hour.
VT_Dude 5y ago
Theoretica Applied Physics and BACCH Labs audition this exact demo -- A/B test by actually hiring a quartet and alternating the musicians playing with the speakers silent and the musicians silently air-playing and with the speakers playing. With a perfect image you literally cannot hear the difference. https://www.theoretica.us/ https://www.theoretica.us/ https://bacch.com/ https://bacch.com/
- Dah00n 5y ago
  Unless you have bad hearing everyone would be able to hear the difference on speakers and live unless live is defined as someone playing far away on a scene or something, no matter how expensive equipment you have. It is impossible to have it sound like musicians playing in the same room. To even come close you would need several speakers per instrument playing in multiple directions and some playing sounds of the people moving, breathing and talking too. Not even a simple snare drum being hit at intervals can be reproduced by a normal stereo setup to sound as if it were in the same room unless it's at distance. Remember, we play music at home so the definition should be an orchestra two to three meters away, not an orchestra ten to twenty meters away up at a scene. Someone with something to sell is a very unreliable source btw.
- dmix 5y ago
  I found a video in one of those links from Princeton. It's a narrative of this guy developing 3D sound that works in normal 2 channel laptop speakers. It's quite impressive when they demo it. There is a moment around 1:20 that plays flies circling around and my cat next to me didnt care about the normal recording but he stood up with his ears out when the 3d version played. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SQmQD27uCt0&t=3s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SQmQD27uCt0&t=3s I know it's probably old hat by now (the video is ~10yrs old, yes 2010 was over a decade ago) but it still blows my mind.
  - Mediterraneo10 5y ago
    This is pretty old hat now. IRCAM was experimenting with spatialized sound on a stereo medium already back in the 1990s. The software they came up with was used e.g. for the Deutsche Grammophon recording of Pierre Boulez’s piece Répons where sound is moved around the hall.
simondotau 5y ago
> Your friend does not think you hired a string quartet. To be fair to the audio system, a significant reason why they'd sound different is because of room acoustics—and we rarely listen to string quartets playing in residential living rooms.

DenverCode 5y ago

For anyone bored and looking to explore: https://dr.loudness-war.info/ https://dr.loudness-war.info/

DavidVoid 5y ago
Note that all entries that have the format Vinyl on that site can be ignored, as the dynamic range calculations don't work well on audio recorded from vinyl records.
- DenverCode 5y ago
  Well, I'm glad I've been using it to pick out which pressings to target haha.

thrdbndndn 5y ago

What you said is totally true but it's not relevant here. Apple already have all the lossless files on their server. Just that before they converted them to lossy format before sending to the user, and now they serve the original. There is no new master / new re-release involved in all these.

CharlesW 5y ago
> Apple already have all the lossless files on their server. Just that before they converted them to lossy format before sending to the user, and now they serve the original. Do you happen to have a citation for when this changed? According to the "Apple Digital Masters" Technology Brief[1], the masters delivered to Apple have historically been AAC files. [1] https://www.apple.com/itunes/docs/apple-digital-masters.pdf https://www.apple.com/itunes/docs/apple-digital-masters.pdf
- nucleardog 5y ago
  I might be misunderstanding, but I think that PDF is about how to master your music such that it will sound good after they convert it to AAC. It doesn't actually speak to the audio that's sent to them. Can't source anything except our own deliveries to Apple, but we've been delivering PCM since ~2018. Likely earlier, that's just when the code got moved into source control. That actually predates the copyright on that PDF. In general, of the maybe 150-odd DSPs we deliver to, as far as I know all but a handful have us deliver PCM. The remainder have us delivering flac.
  - CharlesW 5y ago
    > Can't source anything except our own deliveries to Apple, but we've been delivering PCM since ~2018. Cool, I take your word for it. Thanks! The referenced document only talks about AAC masters, and the tools at https://www.apple.com/itunes/mastered-for-itunes/ https://www.apple.com/itunes/mastered-for-itunes/ only create AAC masters. The simplest explanation is that the public materials and tools are just sadly out of date.

PostThisTooFast 5y ago

Yep. Dynamic compression has ruined all popular music mastered (or "remastered") since the late '90s. It's incredible how many people don't understand that the problem isn't data compression, but rather dynamic compression. You have guys like Neil Young and Bob Dylan railing against how shitty music sounds now, but then promoting super-high-bitrate or high-resolution formats. NO! That's not the problem. We need "HDR" music. It's sad that we have to say this in an era where everyone has the technical means to hear great-sounding music.... and there's none being made.

kohlerm 5y ago

I agree. For me the limiting factor is not necessarily whether it is poodles high quality encoded or lossless. For "normal" music the bottleneck is often the recording. With good headphones it is easy to differantiate good from not so good recordings. I For me a lot of recordings on Tidal/qobuz did not sound better than HQ on Spotify