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"What MaGuire has proved here is that the songs we listen to every single day are not the exact master copy that the artist recorded and wanted for us to hear.

"What MaGuire has proved here is that the songs we listen to every single day are not the exact master copy that the artist recorded and wanted for us to hear. Instead, they are slightly stripped versions of their art run through a set of standards created by a bunch of engineers in 1993. For many people, that won’t matter. The songs sound almost the same, but the compression of music into an MP3 format is an important question to weigh when considering artistic intent and analyzing songs that aren’t exactly the original." I feel like this analysis isn't well grounded in what artists and sound engineers actually do, or how they think.

chasil 2y ago
When I've used lame --preset extreme, it uses variable bit rate which was developed some time later.
Optimal_Persona 2y ago
I honestly didn't know that was a matter of contention at this point...it's very common for pro (or smart amateur) audio engineers to actually listen to the effect of different digital compression algorithms and adapt accordingly. Things like Sonnox Fraunhofer plugin let you do this. https://sonnox.com/products/oxford-fraunhofer-pro-codec https://sonnox.com/products/oxford-fraunhofer-pro-codec - In this month's TapeOp magazine, Jeff Jones mentions he always monitors through such a codec so he can adjust accordingly for the best sound regardless of final format https://tapeop.com/interviews/163/jeff-jones/ https://tapeop.com/interviews/163/jeff-jones/ - IMO Rush's Moving Pictures is one of the best (and best-sounding) albums from the '80s despite the fact that it was mastered to a Sony digital device that's renowned as terrible sounding, with only 14 bits of usable resolution. How/Why? The production team monitored through the Sony system while mastering and made tweaks as they went to account for its limitations. - I've had my own music professionally mastered at high resolution, and discovered that converting hi-res to MP3 (even at highest bitrate) caused digital peaks over 0.0 dB, I fixed by normalizing to -0.3 dB. TBH if the resulting file is going to be transmitted over BlueTooth it's going to be further degraded. And yet people can still make a strong emotional connection to the underlying music and artist...

chasil 2y ago

When I've used lame --preset extreme, it uses variable bit rate which was developed some time later.

Optimal_Persona 2y ago

I honestly didn't know that was a matter of contention at this point...it's very common for pro (or smart amateur) audio engineers to actually listen to the effect of different digital compression algorithms and adapt accordingly. Things like Sonnox Fraunhofer plugin let you do this. https://sonnox.com/products/oxford-fraunhofer-pro-codec https://sonnox.com/products/oxford-fraunhofer-pro-codec - In this month's TapeOp magazine, Jeff Jones mentions he always monitors through such a codec so he can adjust accordingly for the best sound regardless of final format https://tapeop.com/interviews/163/jeff-jones/ https://tapeop.com/interviews/163/jeff-jones/ - IMO Rush's Moving Pictures is one of the best (and best-sounding) albums from the '80s despite the fact that it was mastered to a Sony digital device that's renowned as terrible sounding, with only 14 bits of usable resolution. How/Why? The production team monitored through the Sony system while mastering and made tweaks as they went to account for its limitations. - I've had my own music professionally mastered at high resolution, and discovered that converting hi-res to MP3 (even at highest bitrate) caused digital peaks over 0.0 dB, I fixed by normalizing to -0.3 dB. TBH if the resulting file is going to be transmitted over BlueTooth it's going to be further degraded. And yet people can still make a strong emotional connection to the underlying music and artist...