iPod: the beginning of the end?

[Steve Conner]

So as not to hijack Steve A's thread on ripping and burning techniques, I thought this merited a thread of its own. Is digital compression killing music? Are portable devices that spew out cheezy compressed pop tunes cheapening the value of music? Should we all go back to tubes and vinyl, and try to reinstate music listening as an enjoyable ritual that involved sipping single malt whisky, and getting out of your armchair every 20 minutes to change sides and stoke up the steam engine that drove the turntable? Discuss

[steve]

IMHO, the music industry killed music long before the iPod ever be came available. The music industry quickly became out record companies wringing every last red cent out of the buying public while simultaneously keeping as much of the profits from the artists as possible.

I've always hated the way record companies would put two good songs on an album with filler making up the rest. But now, they don't even put the two good songs on an album anymore, it is all filler. So I don't see how crappy, lossy compression even plays into it.

I hate records. I like digital music players much better. For me it is a matter of convenience. I always hated the noise and that I couldn't order the tracks the way I wanted to hear them. Records may sound better, but are a PITA to take care of. I'll take digital music any day.

steve

So as not to hijack Steve A's thread on ripping and burning techniques, I thought this merited a thread of its own. Is digital compression killing music? Are portable devices that spew out cheezy compressed pop tunes cheapening the value of music? Should we all go back to tubes and vinyl, and try to reinstate music listening as an enjoyable ritual that involved sipping single malt whisky, and getting out of your armchair every 20 minutes to change sides and stoke up the steam engine that drove the turntable? Discuss

[Enzo]

Used to be the wonderful hifi recordings came to us in cheezy compressed AM via table radio. If you liked the tune, you wnet out and bought it - one tube with B side thrown in - on a 45. You took that home and stacked it and ten other faves on the record player. This player might have had two tubes or even five, and all the tone of.. well... a table radio. If you had a bigger record player, you might buy a 33 album. 12 whole songs. SOngs were all under three minutes then.

Nobody sipped single malts and carefully turned a discerning ear to the sparkling highs and snorting lows. Unless you mean a single malt - with two straws - at the soda counter. There were "hi fidelity enthusiasts" at the time who listened to classical music only, or if they were serious, they listened to various recordings of insect noises, birds, train locomotives, or God know what else. I think if they had only just LISTENED to a couple Phil SPector recordings they would have heard enough ambient reverberation for a dozen symphony orchestras.

In the early days of TV, they did consumer preference tests, with an eye towards setting broadcast standards. Consumers actually prefered the sound of the small table radio type speaker on a TV to a more Hifi sound. And stereo? WHy do I want to have to buy TWO speakers? SO while the TV sound channel is nothing more than FM radio and has always had the capability for hifi stereo, it never was pursued by broadcasters because consumers never cared.

SOmewhere in the 1960s stereo came along. A few geeks had it earlier, but by the mid 60s you had your choices. I remember the Beatles Sgt Pepper LP (Hip people started calling them "LPs" at some point) in the record stores - mono and stereo versions side by side. Of course the stereo cost a dollar more.

Then stereos happened - and FM radio. The whole deal sounded pretty good. But most people did a lot of their listening in their cars still. There were always a few geeks with the special listening chair at the "sweet spot" in the den. They might have might debates about whether the irradiated pure silver speaker wire sounded better than the non-irradiated pure silver. But really, that was a very small portion of the listening public.

WHoa!!! Walkman. Portable radio was fine, but now you could make your own tapes and walk around listening to them. Or pre-recorded commercial tapes if you were lazy. Cars all came with cassette decks too now. Never mind that cassettes sounded like crap, so did car radios. We were not listening to production values, we were listening to the artist. Wayne Newton, the ROlling Stones, Bon Jovi, Ratt, whatever floats your boat.

VCRs, cable TV, MTV. We started listening to movie sound tracks along with the movie. Someone eventually though of "home theater," but most people watched their big movie picture with sound coming from a 4" junk speaker on the side of the TV. ANd liked it.

Now we have 5.1 or whatever the latest decimal number sound system is hip. People like their home theater, which means an artificially created ambient back channel and a boomy subwoofer. And I have to admit, King of Queens is SOOO much better now that every subtle nuance of creaking furniture is available to the ear.

Ipod? COmpressed? They don't care, they never did.


But those are the consumers. I like music, and I even like music that sounds good. But I enjoy the sound just as well if I hear it while shopping. I am not critically listening to the production values. I like records. I like hearing the other stuff the artist put out. SOme B sides became large hits. No more B sides - no more sleeper hits.

I was a broadcast radio DJ for a few years, and of course my years in rock and roll which involved touring, recording studio, and whatever. WHen you are trying to squeeze a career out of Ashlee SImpson or someone, I don't doubt they came up with a CD full of fluff trash filler. That pretty much describes her A sides as well. But I have to think that when Stevie Ray Vaughan made an LP, he actually thought ALL those songs were worth putting on a record. SOme songs are on an album because the artist just likes the song, even knowing the commercial power is lacking.

I am not sure how the record company money policies relate. Ask 50 teenagers how they feel about it and expect 49 blanks stares and one cliched read it in a magazine response from an interview with Korn or Metallica. The vast majority of music consumers don't care, they just want to hear the music.


I am still wondering exactly what means it "killed" a thriving multibillion dollar industry.

[Brad1]

People were complaining about $12-15 CDs. Now, they download crappy MP3's for a buck a tune to play through their crappy earbuds. I have CDs with up to 20 songs on them. I don't get it. Except maybe they just thought it was worth buying just the one "good" tune off an album...you know...the one that is STILL crap, but the record companies have convinced the sheep that it is good because it has a sexy bimbo lip-syncing, or it's more profane than what has come before....and over-hyping the crap out of the crap.

Consumer: "Hmmm....I didn't like that when I first heard it, but everyone else seems to think it's da'bomb, so it MUST be good". tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap...enter. "OK..downloading myself the latest 50 Cent song in glorius MP3 quality...my friends will be ENVIOUS!"

Whatever.

I have a friend with a nice Thorens (I think that's it) turntable. I had an SAE 5000 Impulse Noise Reduction box that I bought for $5 at the local thrift store. I let him have it. I taught him how to use Adobe Audition, which he bought by my suggestion.
The dude has thousands of LPs, and I gave him all mine. People constantly bring him more. I taught him how to run the turntable through the SAE and use it to gently remove some of the noise on the LPs. That runs into his computer into Audition, where I taught him how to set a good recording level for each LP, and record them in. Then I taught him how to use the various noise reduction tools in that. He was getting fairly aggressive at first, but I got him to be less aggressive, and maybe do a couple of passes. I had him recording in a higher sample and bit rate, and then converting to 16/44.1 after he did all the tweaking.

The CDs he now churns out from albums now consistently sound rounder, fuller, and overall better than all but the best commercial CDs on everything I play them through.

He also has a weird old turntable record cleaner that he puts everything through first. It has a heavy turntable, you put solution on the record, and an arm with a cleaning brush and vacuum cleans the record.

When he puts on a particularly noise-free LP, it's amazing. He has done some good work on worse LPs. I taught him how to zoom in and take care of particularly nasty pops, individually, and he gets good results.

Some of the old LPs don't sound as good as others, bandwidth and fidelity-wise. I taught him how to use various plug-ins, like EQ's and multi-band compressors, even sub-harmonic synths, to try to get them to sound better.

We had a three-way debate, (with another friend present), about the ethical issues of tweaking the original recordings. One friend argued that it was sacriledge to re-eq and compress and futz with old recordings. I suggested that, hey, you still have the original, you can record the original in exactly like it is, with all the noise and limited range, and you can keep them for historical purposes...not that we are archivists!
Why not try to make them sound fuller and more pleasureable, if we can?
You're going through all this trouble to put them into a high-fidelity format...why not clean them up? He digressed.

OK...so what does this have to do with the subject? Here's a guy who's not even a musician, but loves music and has a discriminating ear. For his home listening, he prefers things to SOUND good. As I do. To take to work and put on his computer for background music, he converts the stuff into MP3, so he can load them on his jump drive. He realizes that there is so much background noise that he's not going to notice the inferior quality in that setting, anyway.

Used to be that people sat around stoned and listened intently to music. Now, the majority of people just want some kind of noise in the background at all times. Multi-tasking...surfing the web with music playing, working with music playing, jogging with skip-free music playing..whatever...people just don't have time to nothing else but sit and listen. It's convenience.

I think that's probably what happened.

Brad1

[David Schwab]

If done properly, it's hard to hear the difference in most compressed files. I've heard some really bad ones, that sound like you are listening under water, but I rip my CDs all the time, and I have $150 Sennheiser headphones I use with my iPod, and 99% of the time, I can't hear the difference.

Here's what's nice about iPods. Besides having all the music I might want to listen to at my fingertips (and I have an elderly 10GB iPod... but that's still 2230 tracks (some of which are podcasts), I can download music I am working on to listen to on my daily commute. I used to have to burn a CD-R with rough mixes. I can also take my iPod and listen to my mixes on various sound systems, from our car (we listen to all our music on iPods through the car sound system) to boom boxes.

We now use my Mac as our home sound system...

[Steve Conner]

Well, I hate to sound like a cloth-eared lump, but I really struggle to tell the difference between 256k MP3 and uncompressed audio, even playing back on my good gear. With 128 and 192, the difference is audible but not bothersome at all.

I also tried Ogg Vorbis compression, and about 180k is where I stop hearing a difference. I somewhat prefer Ogg because the compression artifacts don't have the tinny, watery quality of MP3.

Of course that assumes you're compressing music that someone else wrote. On stuff I've worked on myself, I'm sure I've heard the MP3 codec strip out subtle synth effects and stuff that I put in, because it calculated that I couldn't hear it. (MP3 actually does use a perceptual model, developed using blind testing with panels of listeners, to estimate what information in the sound file the listener won't miss, and throw it away.) Of course it didn't realise I was expecting it to be there :P When I thought about that some more, I realised it was a fairly sound statistical proof that nobody else would notice that subtle stuff except me, whether it was compressed or not, so I just gave up putting it in...

I do notice that the DAC on my portable MP3 player gives a pretty dull and lifeless sound compared to the Delta 1010, which seems to have a much brighter and clearer high end. When I compared the two through the same speakers, I had to turn the treble up a bit on the MP3 player to get it sounding similar. I don't think this is audiophoolery: different models of DACs all have different treble response depending on how the anti-alias filtering is done.

So when are you guys going to make a walnut iPod dock with built-in tube amplification? ;-)

[David Schwab]

I also tried Ogg Vorbis compression, and about 180k is where I stop hearing a difference. I somewhat prefer Ogg because the compression artifacts don't have the tinny, watery quality of MP3.

I use AAC most of the time. I think it handles the high end better than MP3. Also you can encode them at 24 bits... right up to 69 bits!

(MP3 actually does use a perceptual model, developed using blind testing with panels of listeners, to estimate what information in the sound file the listener won't miss, and throw it away.)

Did you know the song that MP3 was tested on? it was the original a capella version of Suzanne Vega's song "Tom's Diner".

I do notice that the DAC on my portable MP3 player gives a pretty dull and lifeless sound compared to the Delta 1010, which seems to have a much brighter and clearer high end.

I use a Delta Audiophile 2496. I have to say that the iPod has very good audio quality. I actually hear things on it that I hadn't heard listening to the CD! Of course my new headphones help too, but it has a nice crisp, clean sound, and from what I have read the jitter is very low.

[Enzo]

Gee, the music doesn't sound dead to me, sounds like you guys are pretty involved. The teeny boppers who like Brittney records are not different than the teeny boppers we had decades ago. They never cared what it sounded like.

So in my humble view, did compression kill the music industry? No. The unwashed masses buy more of it than ever, and those of us who care still can find plenty ways to make better sounds.

[bob p]

Wow, Enzo, what a well thought out post. the only thing that I think you forgot to mention was the 8-track tape!

Well, I hate to sound like a cloth-eared lump, but I really struggle to tell the difference between 256k MP3 and uncompressed audio, even playing back on my good gear. With 128 and 192, the difference is audible but not bothersome at all.

I also tried Ogg Vorbis compression, and about 180k is where I stop hearing a difference. I somewhat prefer Ogg because the compression artifacts don't have the tinny, watery quality of MP3.

I have to agree with you on that Steve -- as a lossy/compression format Ogg does sound better than MP3 when it comes to reproduction of transients. I can definitely hear what you're describing. I also prefer Ogg over MP3, but good luck finding an MP3 player or other portable music device that supports it. Everything is based on MP3 because that's the "standard" that all of the big companies decided to get behind.

Its funny that they used Tom's Diner as a test track for MP3 encoding. I used that song quite a bit for auditioning CD players back in the day. The female voice is good for exposing some of the nuances in music. Listening to that record, I remember deciding that a Nakamichi CD player that cost $1000 clearly sounded better than the Denon CD player that cost $700, but that I had to draw the line at diminishing returns somewhere. I went home with the Denon, and I'm still using it many, many years later.

One of the downsides to Tom's Diner though, its that the recording really doesn't have any transients in it. In some respects, its an exceptionally poor choice for auditioning the MP3 compression algorithm because it doesn't contain the kind of data that a listener would find most objectionable as a result of MP3 conversion. Oh well, I guess that explains some things.

I guess I would have to count myself among the people who grew up as HiFi hobbyists and have a "sweet spot" for listening in their den. Going even further, I have to admit that 20 years before the advent of home theatre, I built a "listening room" in my house that was specifically designed for audio reproduction.

Yeah, I grew up as an audio nut. As a 16-year old kid the high point was a roadtrip to a HiFi shop where I bought my first turntable -- a Thorens that I still have today. I'm going to come out of the closet for a minute, and sheepishly admit that I own multiple turntables, multiple amplifiers, multiple stereo systems. I guess its kind of like having multiple guitar amps because they all sound different in some interesting way.

With that background information exposed, I can honestly hear a difference in sound quality between my mono and stereo copies of the Sgt. Peppers album and the CD that I bought on the first day of its release. To me there's no doubt about it -- vinyl sounds better. I can do a direct comparison of a brand-new Mobile Fidelity recording that I've bought on CD and on vinyl, and the vinyl always sounds better. But none of this should really surprise anyone. We all own tube amps, don't we?

[David Schwab]

IOne of the downsides to Tom's Diner though, its that the recording really doesn't have any transients in it. In some respects, its an exceptionally poor choice for auditioning the MP3 compression algorithm because it doesn't contain the kind of data that a listener would find most objectionable as a result of MP3 conversion. Oh well, I guess that explains some things.

I agree with you here. There were more test apparently... this is from the WikiPedia article on MP3 format

Karlheinz Brandenburg used a CD recording of Suzanne Vega's song "Tom's Diner" to assess the MP3 compression algorithm. This song was chosen because of its softness and simplicity, making it easier to hear imperfections in the compression format during playbacks. Some have taken to jokingly refer to Suzanne Vega as "The mother of MP3". Some more serious and critical audio excerpts (glockenspiel, triangle, accordion, ...) were taken from the EBU V3/SQAM reference compact disc and have been used by professional sound engineers to assess the subjective quality of the MPEG Audio formats.

I don't use the MP3 format personally. I generally use AAC (MPEG-4 Part 3) ... AAC was designed to have better performance than MP3.

With that background information exposed, I can honestly hear a difference in sound quality between my mono and stereo copies of the Sgt. Peppers album and the CD that I bought on the first day of its release.

Keep in mind that the mono copy is a totally different mix. It was actually mixed in mono, to avoid phase cancelation problems... I had the mono pressing of the White Album many years ago, and they do indeed sound different. (as a side note, some of those stereo Beatle mixes are just plain annoying!)

Some early CDs do not sound that great... they have a harsh top end. And some of the old analog stuff that wasn't remastered for CD didn't sound good either.

When I heard my very first CD I felt the top was too brittle, and the bottom was a bit shy. This was a Beatle CD. A few years later and I had my own CD player, and one day I decided to A/B the same album, on vinyl and compact disk. I think the one I used was Big Express, by XTC. I cued them up at the same spot, and switched back and forth between the two.

Well that test changed my perception of compact disks... The CD had much better transients and a wider more open sound. The vinyl sound dull and mushy in comparison. The drums and bass really stood out on the CD.

I no longer own a turntable.

To me there's no doubt about it -- vinyl sounds better. I can do a direct comparison of a brand-new Mobile Fidelity recording that I've bought on CD and on vinyl, and the vinyl always sounds better. But none of this should really surprise anyone. We all own tube amps, don't we?

I think they sound different, but I have to say in my listening tests, CDs are more accurate sounding. The same can be said for tube amps. They color the sound in a pleasing way, but they aren't exactly what you would call accurate.

I'm a bass player... I do own a tube amp (Mesa Boogie 400+), and it's a fine sounding amp, but it's not accurate at all, and it's not my main amp. When I plug my bass into a recording console, that's what my bass sounds like. In my case I don't want to hear the amp, just the bass.

But like anything else, it's all subjective.

[bob p]

well, i thought it would be obvious that that there would be some differences in the sound of the mono vs. stereo mixes and that we wouldn't be talking about that.

its funny that you mention the Beatles CD as being your first one. i remember suffering for years when the Beatles library wasn't available on CD. it was a big event when each of the records was sequentially released on the new media. with the releases, every record was remixed, and badly so. rubber soul was particularly badly chopped up with parts added and subtracted from the music, intros and the like. but the mix isn't what i was referring to. i was referring to sound quality. like Steve said, even some DACs sound different. it bothers some people but not others.

[David Schwab]

well, i thought it would be obvious that that there would be some differences in the sound of the mono vs. stereo mixes and that we wouldn't be talking about that.

Well if you are talking about two vinyl albums, and the only difference that one's mono, why would they sound different? It's the same medium, but two different mixes.

its funny that you mention the Beatles CD as being your first one. i remember suffering for years when the Beatles library wasn't available on CD. it was a big event when each of the records was sequentially released on the new media. with the releases, every record was remixed, and badly so. rubber soul was particularly badly chopped up with parts added and subtracted from the music, intros and the like. but the mix isn't what i was referring to. i was referring to sound quality. like Steve said, even some DACs sound different. it bothers some people but not others.

I waited to buy a CD player for the Beatle's stuff to come out on CD. But those weren't my first CD's either. I bought a few on sale even before I had a CD player! My first two CD's were Cheap Trick's Heaven Tonight, and Split Enz' True Colours.

The Beatles CD I heard was a Japanese release before you could buy them here. I forget which album it was.

The thing about the Beatles' CDs is they are from the Parlophone masters, and not the Capital masters... which is a good thing really, at least if you grew up in the States. The Capital masters sound like crap. They added reverb to try and cover up the bad quality.

Funny thing is I still haven't gotten all the Beatles stuff on CD... I started at Revolver and up. One of these days I'll pick up the older stuff...

[Enzo]

Sgt Pepper mono mix had at least parts of other takes, for example moving into the reprise, which is more than just mix. I preferred the mono mix mostly. Maybe it was familiarity. I liked the mono first Hendrix too. The mono Stones Satanic Magesties was a rossup with the stereo.

We also had a period when lot of mono stuff was reissued "processed for stereo" which as far as I could tell was simple comb filtering the mono and reverbing it serparately into splits.

Well if you are talking about two vinyl albums, and the only difference that one's mono, why would they sound different? It's the same medium, but two different mixes.

If two elements are panned in stereo, and are also out of phase, they will sound spacy in stereo, but will disappear in mono if you just mix L and R together. That issue alone can be cured by a polarity switch, but if those elements were helping fill a certain part of the audio spectrum, they might not do it anymore, so the mix needs adjustment.

[Steve A.]

Pre-emphasis

...
Some early CDs do not sound that great... they have a harsh top end. And some of the old analog stuff that wasn't remastered for CD didn't sound good either.

When I heard my very first CD I felt the top was too brittle, and the bottom was a bit shy. This was a Beatle CD.
...

But like anything else, it's all subjective.

David:

Some of the early CD's had what is called "pre-emphasis", which boosted the high frequencies. Some of the players recognized the pre-emphasis bit and would compensate it for it automatically, thus reducing the overall noise a bit. As time went on, pre-emphasis was dropped and all but the high-end pro machines stopped recognizing the tag.

There was a freeware program from a guy in Germany which would "de-emphasize" but it crashes on my computer... :-(

I bet that someone knowledgable about the subject could post equalizer settings which would do the same, and you could use a program you already have to accomplish this.

Steve Ahola

P.S. "But like anything else, it's all subjective." Yeah, exactly... the way I put it is "I'm right, you're wrong- deal with it!"

[Steve A.]

Well if you are talking about two vinyl albums, and the only difference that one's mono, why would they sound different? It's the same medium, but two different mixes...

Up through maybe 1967 or 1968, many of the studios would record songs at least twice, once for mono and once for stereo, so you would get entirely different performances on the mono and stereo editions of the albums. One album that has survived in both mono and stereo versions was "Roger the Engineer" from the Yardbirds (in America we got "Over Under Sideways Down" with not as many songs).

For the first Beatles records, the stereo versions were essentially just panned mono, since they only had two or three tracks to record with. For their last studio albums, the mono versions were the same as the stereo versions, but "folded down" into a single track.

Steve Ahola