Neil Young speaks out against excessive compression

[scottfeldstein]

So the current state of the art is good enough?

I'm not sure. Is it? And however you answer: how do you know?

 

[Rockman]

You are misrepresenting my argument. I am not questioning that you can hear a difference because I cannot. I question it because:

1. There are no published tests indicating people can tell the difference we have proposed (256kbps AAC vs. Lossless or high res)
2. Proving one could is so trivially easy that your reluctance to even try is suspicious.

I owe your claims no more automatic respect than if you claimed to have seen a UFO land in your backyard.

I gaurentee they are, you probably just have to look in neurobiology journals.

Hear the difference in what exactly? What Neil is proposing is a new format that is superior to what is already available. What people are questioning is whether the human auditory system can even perceive a difference between lossless sources and the higher quality lossy formats that are currently readily available and have been for some time. I have not seen significant evidence that there are many people that can repeatably hear a difference in these sources, let alone enough that would warrant an entire new probably proprietary(if apple has anything to do with it) format.

What Neils is proposing is irrelevant, its the same as anyone who knows nothing about nuclear chemistry proposing we switch over to fusion. Sure it'd be great but if you don't know what you are talking about you simply don't know what you are talking about.

 

[Spencer!]

Speakers make the biggest difference BY FAR in audio quality. If you really want to increase fidelity in a noticeable way, get yourself a nice set of speakers to listen with.

 

[scottfeldstein]

I'm sayin'. My Sony studio monitor headphones (MDR-V6) are the best thing I ever did for my music listening. In the words of my people: good headphones are a blessing on your head.

 

[seamonkey]

I have no doubt that

A. A string quartet behind a curtain
B. A raw recording of the same quartet with good amp and speakers behind a curtain

There would not be a statistical difference in what people hear in a blind test.

 

[eqvolvorama]

Speakers make the biggest difference BY FAR in audio quality. If you really want to increase fidelity in a noticeable way, get yourself a nice set of speakers to listen with.

This. Speakers and room treatment. Amps, cables, DACs, transports, file formats, etc. are now very, very far from being the weak links in the modern audio listening experience.

 

[Rockman]

I have no doubt that

A. A string quartet behind a curtain
B. A raw recording of the same quartet with good amp and speakers behind a curtain

There would not be a statistical difference in what people hear in a blind test.

A raw recording would probably sound noticeably different, unless you are assuming that the quartet was mic'd from the same position you are sitting and has the same sensitivities are your ear. As far as i know this is exceedingly unlikely.

 

[moles]

This whole thread is getting absurd.
Let's forget for a minute all the dumb-ass $300 power cables, arguments about whether audio cable is "directional", sticking straws in the ports of your speakers to improve bass response, or any of the other goofier varieties of audio nonsense that has popped up either here or any of the other hi-fi or pro audio circles (on and offline) that I participate in.

The clear truth is that discerning ears - including my own - can tell the difference between even a 320kbps mp3 and a 16bit/44.1kHz redbook CD. We really don't need triple blind, scientifically accurate tests to PROVE this beyond a doubt, the same way we don't need the same tests to tell that red is definitely a different green. Some people in that test, btw, would NOT be able to tell the difference...but we move on with our lives anyway, and understand that humans perception of colour is not absolute.

The goal of audio engineering up until the last decade, was to produce the best sound possible in a recording. Let the music be played on cheap car 8-tracks, broadcast into transistor radios (in mono!) played on so-so hifi systems...if the record actually sounds great, it'll be heard on great stereo systems and be worth it to those that have the opportunity to hear it that way.
Nowadays, record labels and mastering engineers (one is probably more at fault then the other, IMO, but that's another convo) just plain don't care. Or have deluded themselves that ALL the consumers don't care. As someone else in this thread said - it shouldn't matter if the engineer is doing their job and making a great sounding record.
The fallout from this, it's now okay to make iPods with bad sounding DA converters, sell overpriced consumer headphones that are sonically terrible, and broadcast radio programming that's compressed to %*** so bad you can hear the DISTORTION all over it.
Think about this for a second! It is now perfectly okay to broadcast an audibly distorted signal in a commercial setting!
In a weird way, all of this is made okay by the lowered sound quality of commercial, big-label released records. But it's also compounded by it.

 

[scottfeldstein]

I thought the discussion was about whether we should, as Neil Young suggests, be working toward a future where we have far larger, uncompressed music downloads or whether we are already at (or close to) the point where the compressed file is so good that nobody can really tell the difference between them.

I notice a lot of people in this thread say "obviously some people can hear the difference." It's not obvious to me. And faced with a world where people so often delude themselves about these kinds of things, I don't think it's unreasonable to ask whether "what everybody knows" is actually true; whether people who think they can hear the difference truly can.

I don't care how it was recorded. I don't care how it was mastered. All of those things might be done better. And if they can be done better, I suppose they should be. This isn't about whether vinyl was mastered differently than CDs are, either.

What we're talking about here is whether today's compressed digital download is noticeably different from an uncompressed one from the same master.

 

[eqvolvorama]

This whole thread is getting absurd.
Let's forget for a minute all the dumb-ass $300 power cables, arguments about whether audio cable is "directional", sticking straws in the ports of your speakers to improve bass response, or any of the other goofier varieties of audio nonsense that has popped up either here or any of the other hi-fi or pro audio circles (on and offline) that I participate in.

The clear truth is that discerning ears - including my own - can tell the difference between even a 320kbps mp3 and a 16bit/44.1kHz redbook CD. We really don't need triple blind, scientifically accurate tests to PROVE this beyond a doubt, the same way we don't need the same tests to tell that red is definitely a different green. Some people in that test, btw, would NOT be able to tell the difference...but we move on with our lives anyway, and understand that humans perception of colour is not absolute.

The goal of audio engineering up until the last decade, was to produce the best sound possible in a recording. Let the music be played on cheap car 8-tracks, broadcast into transistor radios (in mono!) played on so-so hifi systems...if the record actually sounds great, it'll be heard on great stereo systems and be worth it to those that have the opportunity to hear it that way.
Nowadays, record labels and mastering engineers (one is probably more at fault then the other, IMO, but that's another convo) just plain don't care. Or have deluded themselves that ALL the consumers don't care. As someone else in this thread said - it shouldn't matter if the engineer is doing their job and making a great sounding record.
The fallout from this, it's now okay to make iPods with bad sounding DA converters, sell overpriced consumer headphones that are sonically terrible, and broadcast radio programming that's compressed to %*** so bad you can hear the DISTORTION all over it.
Think about this for a second! It is now perfectly okay to broadcast an audibly distorted signal in a commercial setting!
In a weird way, all of this is made okay by the lowered sound quality of commercial, big-label released records. But it's also compounded by it.

You guys are so invested in this plea - for others to believe you can discern the differences between modern high bitrate lossy and lossless with anything approaching consistency. You go on and on with misapplied metaphors or "the history of digital audio according to me" in a way that somehow, I suppose, seeks to support this plea.

But you won't take five minutes to double blind test yourselves.

Why is this so hard? What are you afraid of?

 

[sevdog]

FWIW I just downloaded Foobar2000 and the ABX component. I can't get it to work so I'm done. I put out as much effort to "prove" to some people I don't even know that there's a difference.

instead, now I'm listening to "On the Beach" on vinyl, It sounds sooooo good and much better even than the cd of the same album that I own, whle I drink a Lone Star beer, a beer that by the way, I can tell the difference between other American beers.

Walk on...

 

[seamonkey]

A raw recording would probably sound noticeably different, unless you are assuming that the quartet was mic'd from the same position you are sitting and has the same sensitivities are your ear. As far as i know this is exceedingly unlikely.

The discussion is about formats not rooms.

Take the room out of the experiment

Maybe put each musician in a baffled 3 sided cube area where they can be close mic'd, then replace them with a speaker on the chair in the same cube.

I can't afford to hire musicians, or a room to do this, so we'll never know. Some people will not even try simple free tests.

 

[moles]

You guys are so invested in this plea - for others to believe you can discern the differences between modern high bitrate lossy and lossless with anything approaching consistency. You go on and on with misapplied metaphors or "the history of digital audio according to me" in a way that somehow, I suppose, seeks to support this plea.

But you won't take five minutes to double blind test yourselves.

Why is this so hard? What are you afraid of?

Who says I didn't?? Have you? I did. I could. End of story, for me anyway...

 

[eqvolvorama]

Who says I didn't?? Have you? I did. I could. End of story, for me anyway...

Awesome. What was the success rate? P value?

 

[scottfeldstein]

Me, I'm not asking anyone here to test anything. That's not the way to get an unbiased result. It needs proper experimental design.

You'd need some quality headphones and two files from the same master. One in an uncompressed, lossless format; the other a (post 2007) download from iTunes. Then you need a way to play them both, one after the other--but in a random order that's unknown to the listener. Then have the listener indicate which one was the compressed file and which the uncompressed. Repeat the procedure for the other 50 subjects. Calculate a basic statistical hypothesis test and voila. If they guessed correctly more times that incorrectly, you'd be able to tell within, say, 95% certainty that the result was not due to chance. If the result was 50/50 or worse, well... you don't need statistical analysis to tell you what that means.

I suppose you could change things. A good hi-fi system instead of headphones. Introduce different styles of music. Have each subject do more the one comparison set. You could use audio engineers instead of general music listeners. But the rest would be pretty much the same.

 

[Febs]

Man, this thread had a short stint of reasonable and technical discussions but has gone right back to "I can't hear a difference so no one can. Prove it or I'm right."

I can hear a difference. There are others who can too.

Let me make something very clear: I know with absolute certainty that there are people who can hear these differences that I can't, and I never claimed otherwise.

However, for every one of those people who really can hear that difference, there are probably a thousand who only *think* they can. Are you one of the former, or the latter? I don't know, but I do know which category you are *likely* to be in.

 

[MonkeyBass]

Prove it. I think you are exaggerating your credentials, past experience, and hearing perception. Prove me wrong.

I'm not. And why should I.

 

[MonkeyBass]

Ok you know what? I will prove that I'm not exaggerating my credentials.

I was part of a research team led by Dolby labs back in 2006. I was a graduate student at the Univ of Colorado Denver at the time. We were hired to set up a set of test protocol that tested Dolby Digital 5.1 encoders with some of their competitors to test the annoyance level of the result of the compression codecs at various bit depths. We took original source material and ran it through the encoders, then rated each one how annoying the resulting artifacts were. AAC was one of the better codecs, but still had many many artifacts.

The results were published in the Journal of the Audio Engineering Society.

So, no, I'm not exaggerating my credentials. And I, and many other people, can indeed hear the difference.

 

[MonkeyBass]

Here's the info on the Journal article.

Gaston, Sanders. Evaluation of HE-AAC, AC-3, and E-AC-3 Codecs. Audio Engineering Society Journal. Vol. 56. No. 3. March 2008

 

[scottfeldstein]

Before I bow out of this discussion I want to say a couple of things.

1. This discussion has been fascinating and has help me think more clearly about the issue. So thanks!

2. Although the discussion has been passionate--even downright heated, sometimes-- I sincerely hope that there's no hard feelings. I have tremendous respect for TB and the people who make it what it is. I come here to learn, to share and for the camaraderie. I hope nothing I have said got in the way of those things for anyone else.

3. I think I've said everything I can say on the subject right now, so I'm bowing out before I start repeating myself too much.

4. I'm right, you're wrong, the end, ha!

5. Kidding. Love you guys.