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There is a clear advancement. You used to need an amp and large speakers with long cables to have any kind of fidelity. Now you have decent sound with really sm

by ta988 3y ago

There is a clear advancement. You used to need an amp and large speakers with long cables to have any kind of fidelity. Now you have decent sound with really small speakers. You can even listen to music on a laptop and it doesn't suck too much. We have tiny earbuds with no cable that isolate us from the outside sounds and also have a pretty incredible sound quality compared to what we had even 20 years ago in the same form factor.

ShadowBanThis01 3y ago
Even if we accept your claims about tiny earbuds and speakers (which I don't), the abysmally depressing fact is that we have nothing to listen to on them. All popular music has been systematically destroyed with dynamic compression since the late '90s.
- mrob 3y ago
  You occasionally see remasters going against the trend and increasing dynamic range. Earache Records has several high dynamic range versions of classic metal albums on Bandcamp.
  - ShadowBanThis01 3y ago
    That's nice to hear!
- smoldesu 3y ago
  You might just want to stop listening to pop music. The way people engineer and mix pop music has traditionally been different from detail-oriented recordings and audiophile trappings. Before overcompression, pop music would trapeze between quiet acoustic sections and "wall of sound" crescendos that sounded awful on radio. Even further before that, fully soundstaged recordings got mixed down to mono to sound good on commodity listening hardware. There's a tenured history of making music worse to make it more widely enjoyable. The fact that the world's most popular headphones are lower-quality versions of the Earpods should tell you everything about the modern music landscape.
  - ta988 3y ago
    I would be super interested in an artist that would do a multi mastering approach where you could pick the version depending on whether you listen in a car, a single bluetooth speaker, earbuds, high quality headphones and surround install for the same album.
    - ShadowBanThis01 3y ago
      That's not even necessary. Selectable compression was available at least 30 years ago on stock car radios. Mid-'90s Ford CD players had a button on them labeled "Compress," and I'm sure they weren't the only ones. Today, a selectable compression level would be trivial to offer on every playback device. There was never a reason to destroy the music, which makes the crime of doing so even more despicable. You can't get dynamic range back once the master is destroyed, but you can always get rid of it on demand during playback. Apple and Spotify should have used their market power to demand properly-mastered recordings (a la the early '90s, which is when many believe mastering quality peaked). Instead we get asinine Atmos bastardizations and "lossless" delivery of ruined songs.
  - ShadowBanThis01 3y ago
    Disagree with that. I'm talking strictly about pop music, which I've been listening to avidly for decades. You could tell the difference between 45s of pop songs and radio playback easily in the '80s. At first I wanted that "fat" radio sound, and even got an equalizer thinking that this was the key. But of course it wasn't; radio stations compressed music to sound "stronger" on the dial. So I don't know why your assertion about "trapezing" would hold true at all. Over time I realized that the 45s, with their greater dynamic range, sounded better than the radio and were more enjoyable to play loud. I have 45s from the '70s into the 2000s, most of which will sound better than their shitty "remastered" versions streaming right now. Yes, polystyrene 45s. That's pathetic. The shittiest part of all is that nobody is served by the destruction of pop music; and everyone is hindered. Otherwise catchy songs are quickly tiresome to listen to. Recent songs can't be mixed well with others; there's no room in the wall of noise. Hence the popularity of "mashups" that almost always feature an older song. It's not even pleasant to have recently-mastered music on during parties because you can't talk over the noise; so it's either too soft or too loud.
- ta988 3y ago
  Are you saying tiny earbuds from the 2000 are equivalent to those we have today? Also there is plenty of high quality music around, including music with high dynamic range... The one that existed didn't disappear, and there is still some produced today, probably much more in a year than I could listen in a lifetime.
mrob 3y ago
You can only have decent sound with small speakers if you don't care about bass. Intentionally adding bass distortion to trick unsophisticated listeners into thinking there's more bass than there really is won't fool anybody who's familiar with the real thing. As Hofmann's Iron Law of speaker design says: deep bass, small size, high efficiency -- pick at most two. And there's only so much you can compromise efficiency before you melt the voice coils.
- ta988 3y ago
  Don't you agree that at equal size speakers from the 2000 are worse than those from now? I don't say that they are equivalent to a good quality HiFi system, but things have gotten much better for cheap systems.
  - mrob 3y ago
    True, but I don't really see the point. They're better than before, but the laws of physics dictate they'll never be good. If I can't use good speakers I'd rather use headphones. Sacrificing efficiency doesn't matter when the driver is so close to your ear it doesn't need to be loud.
    - ta988 3y ago
      Which laws of physics are you refering to? To my knowledge, there is no law that says that a tiny driver of arbitrary geometry (could be multiple tiny drivers) couldn't reproduce arbitrary pressure patterns in the audio frequency and intensity range.
      - mrob 3y ago
        KLH audio hosts an article explaining Hofmann's Iron Law: https://klhaudio.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/loudspeaker-design-hofmans-iron-law-by-henry-kloss.pdf https://klhaudio.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/loudspeaker-... Also, even if efficiency was not a concern (maybe you don't pay for your own electricity and you somehow managed to build superconducting voice coils and speaker cables), getting arbitrarily high pressure from an arbitrarily small driver requires arbitrarily large excursion. If you somehow overcame all the mechanical complexities of this, you'll still run into the problem of finite speed of sound. The higher the excursion the faster the cone moves for the same frequency, and at some point it's going to go supersonic, which is certainly not good for distortion.

by ta988 3y ago

ShadowBanThis01 3y ago

Even if we accept your claims about tiny earbuds and speakers (which I don't), the abysmally depressing fact is that we have nothing to listen to on them. All popular music has been systematically destroyed with dynamic compression since the late '90s.

mrob 3y ago
You occasionally see remasters going against the trend and increasing dynamic range. Earache Records has several high dynamic range versions of classic metal albums on Bandcamp.
- ShadowBanThis01 3y ago
  That's nice to hear!
smoldesu 3y ago
You might just want to stop listening to pop music. The way people engineer and mix pop music has traditionally been different from detail-oriented recordings and audiophile trappings. Before overcompression, pop music would trapeze between quiet acoustic sections and "wall of sound" crescendos that sounded awful on radio. Even further before that, fully soundstaged recordings got mixed down to mono to sound good on commodity listening hardware. There's a tenured history of making music worse to make it more widely enjoyable. The fact that the world's most popular headphones are lower-quality versions of the Earpods should tell you everything about the modern music landscape.
- ta988 3y ago
  I would be super interested in an artist that would do a multi mastering approach where you could pick the version depending on whether you listen in a car, a single bluetooth speaker, earbuds, high quality headphones and surround install for the same album.
  - ShadowBanThis01 3y ago
    That's not even necessary. Selectable compression was available at least 30 years ago on stock car radios. Mid-'90s Ford CD players had a button on them labeled "Compress," and I'm sure they weren't the only ones. Today, a selectable compression level would be trivial to offer on every playback device. There was never a reason to destroy the music, which makes the crime of doing so even more despicable. You can't get dynamic range back once the master is destroyed, but you can always get rid of it on demand during playback. Apple and Spotify should have used their market power to demand properly-mastered recordings (a la the early '90s, which is when many believe mastering quality peaked). Instead we get asinine Atmos bastardizations and "lossless" delivery of ruined songs.
- ShadowBanThis01 3y ago
  Disagree with that. I'm talking strictly about pop music, which I've been listening to avidly for decades. You could tell the difference between 45s of pop songs and radio playback easily in the '80s. At first I wanted that "fat" radio sound, and even got an equalizer thinking that this was the key. But of course it wasn't; radio stations compressed music to sound "stronger" on the dial. So I don't know why your assertion about "trapezing" would hold true at all. Over time I realized that the 45s, with their greater dynamic range, sounded better than the radio and were more enjoyable to play loud. I have 45s from the '70s into the 2000s, most of which will sound better than their shitty "remastered" versions streaming right now. Yes, polystyrene 45s. That's pathetic. The shittiest part of all is that nobody is served by the destruction of pop music; and everyone is hindered. Otherwise catchy songs are quickly tiresome to listen to. Recent songs can't be mixed well with others; there's no room in the wall of noise. Hence the popularity of "mashups" that almost always feature an older song. It's not even pleasant to have recently-mastered music on during parties because you can't talk over the noise; so it's either too soft or too loud.
ta988 3y ago
Are you saying tiny earbuds from the 2000 are equivalent to those we have today? Also there is plenty of high quality music around, including music with high dynamic range... The one that existed didn't disappear, and there is still some produced today, probably much more in a year than I could listen in a lifetime.

mrob 3y ago

You can only have decent sound with small speakers if you don't care about bass. Intentionally adding bass distortion to trick unsophisticated listeners into thinking there's more bass than there really is won't fool anybody who's familiar with the real thing. As Hofmann's Iron Law of speaker design says: deep bass, small size, high efficiency -- pick at most two. And there's only so much you can compromise efficiency before you melt the voice coils.

ta988 3y ago
Don't you agree that at equal size speakers from the 2000 are worse than those from now? I don't say that they are equivalent to a good quality HiFi system, but things have gotten much better for cheap systems.
- mrob 3y ago
  True, but I don't really see the point. They're better than before, but the laws of physics dictate they'll never be good. If I can't use good speakers I'd rather use headphones. Sacrificing efficiency doesn't matter when the driver is so close to your ear it doesn't need to be loud.
  - ta988 3y ago
    Which laws of physics are you refering to? To my knowledge, there is no law that says that a tiny driver of arbitrary geometry (could be multiple tiny drivers) couldn't reproduce arbitrary pressure patterns in the audio frequency and intensity range.
    - mrob 3y ago
      KLH audio hosts an article explaining Hofmann's Iron Law: https://klhaudio.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/loudspeaker-design-hofmans-iron-law-by-henry-kloss.pdf https://klhaudio.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/loudspeaker-... Also, even if efficiency was not a concern (maybe you don't pay for your own electricity and you somehow managed to build superconducting voice coils and speaker cables), getting arbitrarily high pressure from an arbitrarily small driver requires arbitrarily large excursion. If you somehow overcame all the mechanical complexities of this, you'll still run into the problem of finite speed of sound. The higher the excursion the faster the cone moves for the same frequency, and at some point it's going to go supersonic, which is certainly not good for distortion.