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Neil Young speaks out against excessive compression

#63
swspiers said:
Dude- on a lot of recordings the difference really is night and day. A 256k AAC file is fine on my computer, but anything less than Redbook CD on my main system is all but unlistenable.

Then, going from 16bit/44.1 to 24bit/96k is amazing. You're right that it depends on the source material, but in most cases, the difference can be pretty clear.

Neil has been at the forefront advocating for higher quality music, along with Steven Wilson from Porcupine Tree and Peter Gabriel.

Golden Ears really don't exist anyway. Hearing the difference between interconnects and all sorts of snake-oil stuff IS laughable. But the difference between compressed music and higher bitrate stuff is identifiable- mostly in the extremes of the frequencies.
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Man, I gotta challenge you on this one. Have you ever performed a true blind test on yourself comparing 24/96 to the SAME RECORDING downsampled to 16/44? Think of a number in your head. Then add a dollar sign to the beginning of it. That's what I would bet you you couldn't tell the difference on any kind of consistent basis.

You know what - same for 256kbps AAC, but I'd cap it to $5,000. Some people can tell the difference on some recordings, but nobody can consistently tell the difference on all recordings.

Placebo effect and expectation bias are powerful.
 
#64
I'm sort of with Neil on this, but not to the absolutist extreme that he is.

I think high quality, high bit rate MP3s sound fine, I cannot tell the difference between them and CD audio. Once it's past 192 it sounds like CD to me (and I assume almost all of this is at 44.1 kHz), or at least close enough for me not to notice. It's the low-quality MP3s that we're all subjected too that are really annoying. Yeah, I'm looking at you Pandora! Lame, lame, lame low-quality artifact-ridden junk on there, I can't take it. And on iTunes I can't always find a high bit-rate version of every song I want to purchase. Often it's hard to find bit-rate info on something you want to buy. Also very lame.

The consumers are driving the quality down. Most don't care. I've heard of studies that show people who listen to a lot of digital music actually prefer poor quality MP3's to higher quality ones- they're used to the high frequency warble!

I do like the ideal of lossless compression, but the reality is lossless will never get better than about a 4:1 compression ratio, and that makes for bandwidth intensive recordings. However, since storage is in reality cheap, we should all have .5 TB iPods and be able to listen to our music in FLAC, etc, but they use storage capacity to differentiate price points on units- which is an artificial inflation of the price of higher storage units. Like everything, it's a racket.
 
#65
GoesThump said:
Perhaps I'm misunderstanding you here, but as written, the above doesn't make much sense. If you're recording at 48 kHz, that implies that you are recording digitally. Did you mean the old DASH recorders?

I know of no analog recorder that plays back to 48kHz. That's almost in bias land.

GT
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You do realize that a 48 kHz sample rate can only resolve audio frequencies up to 24 kHz, right? So nowhere near bias frequency. Google "Nyquist frequency".
 
#67
HolmeBass said:
The consumers are driving the quality down. Most don't care.
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Yeah, it's the consumers who drove quality down during the digital download explosion of the 90s. But it wasn't because they just don't care about audio quality. It was because they cared more about something else: being able to use the power of the internet to discover and acquire music. The state of the art at the time in terms of broadband connectivity, computer bus speeds and hard drive cost-per-unit ratios were such that compromises in quality had to be made in order to get what they wanted. So I guess what I'm saying is that it's not just that people "don't care." It's that they were given a choice with tradeoffs. They chose internet convenience over quality. But now those tradeoffs are less inevitable. That's why some of the quality has been brought back. Technology has largely caught up. Today you can have your cake and eat it, too.

At least some of it. 256k ain't bad. And I expect things to get even better as time goes on.

What I find ridiculous is that in Neil-land, we all buy iPods that can hold a whopping 30 albums! And download songs off the internet in a mere 30 minutes!

Never. Happen.
 
#68
danroche said:
Man, I gotta challenge you on this one. Have you ever performed a true blind test on yourself comparing 24/96 to the SAME RECORDING downsampled to 16/44? Think of a number in your head. Then add a dollar sign to the beginning of it. That's what I would bet you you couldn't tell the difference on any kind of consistent basis.

You know what - same for 256kbps MP3, but I'd cap it to $500. Some people can tell the difference on some recordings, but nobody can consistently tell the difference on all recordings.

Placebo effect and expectation bias are powerful.
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Big fan of placebo and expectation phenomena here! And you make a good point.

In fact, I haven't done a blind test, but the recent release of King Crimsons' 'Discipline' has both a 24/96 and 16/44 version and I totally agree that I probably could not tell a difference.

But the mp3 vs. 44 or 96 I would take you up on. But then- it really depends on the master, doesn't it?. An mp3 of the same Crimson disc would be on par or better than the origianal Redbook release in the 80's.
 
#69
like most of today's armchair-expert culture, we all seem to be cavalierly second-guessing neil's actual hearing... sure, he's been exposed to loud amps for decades, pretty much while he was creating striking, internationally-recognized music, but does that make him a "get off my lawn" guy? he's been eloquently stating his case on this issue for several years. all of a sudden, he's a cranky dinoasur?

someone with neil's illustrious background might have actually a nuanced argument, which doesn't discount the TB musings of bedroom-studio mavens, pro sound guys and working musicians- yet, it's "to the pillory with the hard-of-hearing relic", here.

say, has anyone here spoken to neil or his audiologist about which particular frequencies might be affected? i'd be curious to hear your detailed findings.
 
#70
swspiers said:
Big fan of placebo and expectation phenomena here! And you make a good point.

In fact, I haven't done a blind test, but the recent release of King Crimsons' 'Discipline' has both a 24/96 and 16/44 version and I totally agree that I probably could not tell a difference.

But the mp3 vs. 44 or 96 I would take you up on. But then- it really depends on the master, doesn't it?. An mp3 of the same Crimson disc would be on par or better than the origianal Redbook release in the 80's.
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Totally. One thing which I think Neil is getting wrong is confusing the effects of mastering decisions made behind a desk (to include dynamic range compression) with the effect of lossy audio compression. When you're comparing one master vs. another master, there can be DRAMATIC differences that are merely the result of a different choice made by a mastering engineer. A lot of new music is dynamically compressed to crap, and because it ALSO comes in mp3 form, we blame the MP3 compression for the lack of punch or depth in the final recording.

Any MP3 or AAC test would NEED to operate off the same uncompressed recording, meaning you'd need to take a 24/96 and then downsample or compress it to get the test variable. On a lot of these dual layer 24/96 and 16/44 discs, the label gives you different masters, one "audiophile-minded" and one "consumerized" - it's not a fair means to compare the two sample rates or bit depths.
 
#71
joe vegas said:
like most of today's armchair-expert culture, we all seem to be cavalierly second-guessing neil's actual hearing... sure, he's been exposed to loud amps for decades, pretty much while he was creating striking, internationally-recognized music, but does that make him a "get off my lawn" guy? he's been eloquently stating his case on this issue for several years. all of a sudden, he's a cranky dinoasur?

someone with neil's illustrious background might have actually a nuanced argument, which doesn't discount the TB musings of bedroom-studio mavens, pro sound guys and working musicians- yet, it's "to the pillory with the hard-of-hearing relic", here.

say, has anyone here spoken to neil or his audiologist about which particular frequencies might be affected? i'd be curious to hear your detailed findings.
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Any man of Neil's age is going to have impaired hearing as a function of time-in-service on this planet. Someone who spends time in front of guitar amps for a living is more likely by far to have impaired hearing. It's totally in bounds to ask that Neil prove what he can hear through double blind tests, just as we'd ask the rest of us. His stature and authority don't exempt him from the normal biases the rest of us would deal with. Proof is on the person making the positive claim of correlation.
 
#76
What I like about Neil Young is that he uses his high profile to prod us about what we've already grown complacent about.

He could be completely wrong about everything in this issue, and I'm happy not having literally any of his work in my collection, but he nearly single handedly saved the model train industry and for that he's my hero, and I don't even like model trains either.
 
#78
joe vegas said:
"Any man of Neil's age is going to have impaired hearing as a function of time-in-service on this planet."
Yeah dan, i agree. proof- it's your statement above, so you're surely holding back those detailed results from Neil's hearing test. kindly pass 'em on when you get a quiet minute.
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hearingloss.jpg
 
#79
rashrader said:
The first time I listened to Moving Pictures in 24/96, it was almost like hearing it anew. So much detail. It's pretty incredible.
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I felt that way pretty recently myself. I'd spent a decade away from music, focused on other things. I didn't own a proper stereo. Not even good headphones. For a long, long time. Then, getting back into music and needing a silent practice setup, I bought some good studio monitor over-the-ear headphones.

Whoa.

But anyway. What troubles me most about this whole discussion is that it isn't really a matter of opinion. Either you can hear the difference or you can't. And that's a question that someone can answer scientifically.

Why hasn't anyone done this?

I've seen studies where pretentious sommaliers can't tell the difference between red and white when blindfolded.

I've seen the Pepsi challenge, for goodness sake.

Why has nobody tested people's ability to discern high bitrate lossy compressed audio from pristine masters?

Or maybe they have and I just don't know where to find it.
 
#80
hi Scott- is that Karen Carpenter? or Scott Carpenter, the astronaut? who? generic hearing loss chart pulled from a google search about some guy named carpenter?
I thought we were talking specifically about Neil Young, since his statements have met with such vehemence.
Neil states that mp3s are a sonically inferior, yet understandable market-friendly info delivery-system. He's piled on for that. yet, there's ample discussion and analysis covering this issue all over the 'nets. It's a valid point.
I'm not sure i get the real reasons for the reaction(ary). that's all. Neil-haters, working on principle? High-end hearing specialists debunking an imagined nerual-auditory phenomenon?
 

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