Comment by mruts
7 years ago
Problem with music sounding bad doesn’t really have much to do with the distributed format: V0, V1, or 320 mp3s should sound pretty much the same compared to 16-bit flac. You can only the difference between mp3 and flac at shitty bitrates no one uses anymore (like 120).
The reason why a lot of recent digital music sounds bad is because of the intentionally terrible mastering. Since everyone is listening of crappy earbuds, they compress the hell out of it and destroy all dynamic range. This is why when downloading music you should avoid remasters (there are some exceptions, like the Beatles mono and stereo boxed sets that came out awhile ago) and go for the first edition presses.
This is also why modern vinyl releases sound a lot better than digital: they are mastered differently since its assumed everyone is going to be listening on good equipment.
That being said, I think flac is generally a good choice for a music collection. You can’t transcode mp3s without killing the quality so if you ever want to convert formats (like for a mp3 player), you should stick with flac (16-bit, 48hz).
The original idea of 24-bit 192hz flac was for vinyl rips, where hypothetically you might be getting more information.
Since everyone is listening of crappy earbuds, they compress the hell out of it and destroy all dynamic range.
More compression and less dynamic range is beneficial for certain environments. Noisy subways. Watching TV in a noisy downtown apartment. Basically, crappy, noisy environments. In those, compression will help you actually hear the music and speech. However, the fact that this should be done in the master is an artifact of an earlier time. Now that signal processing is small and cheap enough to be ubiquitous, music should be mastered for the best equipment, then appropriate signal processing should be done by playback.
The problem is, that there is a lot of older equipment out there that wouldn't be able to do this. So the signal gets compressed before distribution, as a compromise for the least common denominator of equipment out there. Otherwise, a big chunk of the population would think the master sounds like crap. To them, in their particular situation, it would.
EDIT: Come to think of it, the current system, where most music is more compressed, but where the people who care can still get a high dynamic range version, is a very good compromise. The problem is that the latter group's selection isn't quite filled out by the market.
> More compression and less dynamic range is beneficial for certain environments. Noisy subways. Watching TV in a noisy downtown apartment. Basically, crappy, noisy environments.
Good point, I think particularly for movies or such this makes sense. I want to be able to watch a movie such that I hear what the characters are speaking, without blowing my windows out of their frames during some action scene. Yes, I realize in real life explosions, guns etc. are really loud, and this makes the movie less realistic.
Yes, I realize in real life explosions, guns etc. are really loud, and this makes the movie less realistic.
Really loud? Ear-damaging loud! When the realism becomes actually endangering to your health, your escapist media has gone a bit too far.
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But there are easy ways to kill dynamic range with an algorithm. On windows this is called "loudness equalization." On the otherhand, there is no way to go back from little dynamic range to more dynamic range.
So I think it makes sense that records are mastered with a lot of dynamic range, so the people who actually enjoy music can enjoy it, and the people who don't can just equalize it themselves.
But there are easy ways to kill dynamic range with an algorithm. On windows this is called "loudness equalization." On the otherhand, there is no way to go back from little dynamic range to more dynamic range.
So I think it makes sense that records are mastered with a lot of dynamic range, so the people who actually enjoy music can enjoy it, and the people who don't can just equalize it themselves.
You do realize that you just restated my comment, but left out the analysis of the current day situation? BTW, equalization doesn't directly change dynamic range. Equalization is meant to change frequency response. It can change dynamic range by causing clipping.
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This reminds me of how accessible the equalizer was in Winamp. I spent a lot of time creating custom configurations for my music. I had no expertise and the results were questionable but it was fun. I wish Spotify was more fun.
Dynamic range is a solved problem if people cared.
You attach some metadata to the audio file that says certain parts should be level boosted in a noisy environment and there you go.
Just give everbody the full range and use dsp compression on decices with well defined sensible defaults.
Similar to the thing we did witb vinyl back in the day where we wanted to fit more music onto the thing and applyed the standardized RIA filter when cutting the template — every phono preamp reverses this effect.
The tbing is people need to have specs they can mix and master for. Making something up makes mixinf unpredictable and that is bad.
Or, just turn on software compression on a modern device with such a feature implemented, and there you go.
And this is not a theoretical solution, this is literally just ReplayGain operating in track-level mode.
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In the 1990s, car stereos sometimes had a "loudness" button which did exactly as you suggest.
The loudness buttons were more to equalize than to affect the dynamic range.
At lower volumes, we perceive mid-range frequencies to be more prominent than at higher volumes. The loudness buttons would add lows and highs and/or lower mids so that the music would "sound better" at lower volumes.
https://ehomerecordingstudio.com/fletcher-munson-curve/
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Going back, seemingly forever, home stereos also had a "loudness" button. Many still do. Usually, there's just some equalization involved, so it's not exactly what I'm suggesting.
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Isn’t radio a big factor in this? Broadcast radio is noisy and has pretty limited dynamic range. This may be a cause.
Radio is actually compressed in real-time by use of broadcast compressors, so they solve the problem rather directly.
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For those interestes, if you produce anything for radio in Europe you need to keep the EBU R128 guidelines which are actually quite well thought out https://www.iconnectivity.com/blog/2017/6/10/ebu-r128-the-im...
> then appropriate signal processing should be done by playback.
Microchips for leveling audio gain existed in the 1980's and were found in consumer equpiment like TV's.
> This is also why modern vinyl releases sound a lot better than digital: they are mastered differently since its assumed everyone is going to be listening on good equipment.
I'm going to disagree here. They are mastered differently because the physical limitations of the media require them to be mastered differently _and_ it just so happens that the physical limitations help limit mastering tricks in a way that produces less fatigue-inducing, brick-wall-limited mastering output.
A heavily compressed master creates huge peak-to-trough cuts in the vinyl which can cause the needle to literally jump out of the groove, even with RIAA limiting applied.
The assumption of the gear is definitely not true in any mixing or mastering experience I've had. Mastering tries to balance the final product across a range of listening devices, not some unobtainable ideal system. NS10s are kicking around because they sound like arse and make for mastering results that work well on car stereos and other "inferior" systems.
You can put brickwalled audio on a vinyl record and have it play just fine if you cut it at a lower volume. This negates the reason for mastering it that way in the first place, but it's cheaper than redoing the mastering, and many people buying vinyl only do so for the image. See:
https://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=Myths_(Vinyl)#My...
That's a fair point. And I totally agree on that second statement. :D
NS10s are kicking around because they're unusually good at time domain performance. For instance, they have miserable bass not only because they're small boxes and smallish drivers, but because they're an infinite baffle design, which is significantly better for time domain performance than bass reflex. The enclosures also dissipate energy quite well, and it's well established that this contributes to being able to 'translate' mixes: you get a better sense of what's actually in the track using NS10s than you might with many 'better sounding' speakers.
They spotlight midrange with a presence peak right where the ear's most sensitive, and this is in part because the woofer is actually designed more like a midrange: thin paper, conical rather than curved cross-section, both of which also contribute to 'sounding bad' tonally while delivering energy more unforgivingly.
They're not really about mastering, though, they're about mixing because if you have elements out of balance it will be screamingly, annoyingly obvious on NS10s. That's not down to their bad-soundingness, it's down to their ability to be incredibly unforgiving.
That may be true, but I've seen some vinyl mastering jobs that looked as bad as digital. I won't claim to be a mastering engineer or anything, but after comparing many vinyl releases and digital releases, it seems like there is something going on besides the physical limitations of the medium.
> modern vinyl releases sound a lot better than digital
Look, I actually grew up with vinyl and 4-track tape, and audio cassettes. Unlike most folks being all trendy and hip nowadays, I've years of using that stuff.
Analog is shit. It's noisy, has a ton of distortion, and it gets shittier every time you copy it. Oh, and if you just keep it in storage, guess what, it decays just by sitting there (vinyl collects dust and scratches when used, slightly different).
In 2002 I built my DAW (digital audio workstation) and recorded my first tracks in 24 bit digital. Zero noise, zero distortion, no generation loss. It was like alien technology.
Digital is better in every way, by a wide margin. Period.
https://www.reddit.com/r/headphones/comments/awyy1q/this_pre...
Current mastering practices prevailing in the industry make no difference on this matter. Analog is still garbage. Find digital copies that are mastered properly and you'll be fine.
Couldn’t agree more. I grew up with cassette and LP. First time I heard a CD, specifically Pink Floyd’s Money with the cash register, it was jaw dropping. LPs are cool for the artwork, but that’s it.
That being said, I still only buy music in CD, due to all the hassle of DRM and playback. I just want to drop in a CD and listen to the entire album, not futz with computers, encoders, and software.
I have a simple CD player, kit built tube amp, and homemade single driver speakers.
> I still only buy music in CD
That's what I do. I tend to favor old master copies.
I rip them to both FLAC and MP3. The former is for listening at home, the latter for mobile scenarios. I store everything on the Linux server at home, and share via UPnP. VPN into the home network gives me access from anywhere.
Foobar2000 is my preferred player on Windows, BubbleUPNP on Android.
> kit built tube amp
What's the distortion on that thing?
The vast majority of tube kit schematics are very old tech, stuff that engineers from the 1930s would recognize. Their THD (coefficient of total harmonic distortion) is very high. What is known as "tube sound" is basically just huge THD, along with a specific distribution of energy across the harmonic orders.
It's fun as a hobby, and for the satisfaction of building stuff on your own, but even the simplest schematics built on modern principles vastly outperform these things by essentially all metrics.
Some tube amps are built specifically for low THD, but unfortunately they are rare. When in doubt, use solid state.
> homemade single driver speakers
I used to build everything myself back in the day. Speakers and amps was just part of it. Also did automation, radio frequency (I'm a licensed HAM radio operator), digital circuits from logic gates to DAC/ADC to systems with microprocessors to small computers. It's a small miracle I didn't actually go into electrical engineering.
You really need multiple drivers and likely a subwoofer also, to cover the whole audible spectrum.
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"Since everyone is listening of crappy earbuds, they compress the hell out of it and destroy all dynamic range."
For readers of your comment and your child comments, it is important to note that the compression you are talking about in that sentence is not the same as the compression that most people are thinking of when discussing digital file formats (mp3, etc.).
This might be helpful:
https://forums.stevehoffman.tv/threads/the-common-audiophile...
Here is a link[0] to CD dynamic range database from where you can check how a particular mastering fares.
[0] http://dr.loudness-war.info
There are of course multitude of other factors impacting mastering quality, but as far as DR goes, this DB is a pretty good source.
This website is a useful resource, but it has some limitations. The algorithm used does not take into account the frequency response of the human ear. If a track contains a lot of very deep bass, it's possible for it to have a low DR score but still sound like it has a high dynamic range. The measurement can also be fooled by surface noise and filtering when measuring vinyl:
https://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=Myths_(Vinyl)#Ef...
MP3s at any bitrate cannot properly reproduce certain sounds, as preecho can happen and it is fairly easy to train yourself to notice it. Pretty much any modern lossy format can be made transparent at high enough bitrates though.
Example?
pre-echo will appear on very fast attacks; clapping, some types of drums and castanets are usually cited as the worst. Some styles of electronic music have fast attacks as well.
With older encoders, cymbals were terrible, but lame's psychoacoustic model is pretty good at masking those artifacts these days (at least at high bitrates).
For examples, some quick searching on hydrogen audio found a couple songs reported to be ABX distinguishable with lame and after previewing the songs, they do in fact have a lot of quick attacks:
Human Disease by Slayer (Some very fast and cleanly played drum parts; also it's mostly not snares; snares sound terrible at low bitrates, but I personally can't distinguish high-bitrate snares from uncompressed snares)
Show Me your Spine by PTP (The "instrument" used for the base rhythm has an unnaturally short attack).
Any sound that starts or end very suddenly. Drums of any kind will sound kind of weird in MP3. Applause used to be the bane of MP3. Encoders got better at it, but it's apparently impossible to get rid of completely. As far as I understand it it's the accoustic equivalent of ringing artifacts that you can see in low quality JPEG's or old MPEG videos.
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Playing a set of high-frequency pure sine waves is the failure point for MP3, AAC, Vorbis, and Opus. Dial-up noises are close to this, which you can try encoding/decoding. And this is no surprise, since the point of the V.90/92 protocols is to cram as much information as possible into analog frequencies, and the point of psychoacoustic lossy codecs is to remove the least efficient frequency information of our log-frequency scaled ears.
But this is kind of a pedagogical example. Not the point of who you're responding to.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MtiRBFWkRKs beginning at 54 seconds.
I don't really hear the pre-echo.
Actually I love that I don't hear compression artifacts in music or see them in JPEGs. Makes my gear so much cheaper. :-)
My anecdotal experience is that music sounds the best to me currently via my good headphones connected to either my phone's good DAC, or to my PC's separate sound card.
Phone = LG V20 which has an [ES9218](https://www.androidauthority.com/lg-v20-quad-dac-explained-7...) chip for its DAC.
Headphones = Sennheiser HD380 pro, pretty good for under $200.
Soundcard = "ASUS Xonar DGX PCI-E GX2.5".
Sound source = FLAC, Google Play Music subscription)
I'd like to upgrade to a really nice DAC and headphone amp to connect to the PC via USB, but that's way down the list of spending priorities.
I know that I'd probably have trouble distinguishing between audio components and sources in a blind listening test, and of course I have tinnitus, but I think my current "setup" if you can call it that is good enough for most stuff.
I am absolutely with you on the loudness wars though. It's a joy to listen to stuff that has real dynamic range, but it's not something I obsess over when I'm listening to music in the car for instance.
Vinyl releases are mastered to be less loud than digital releases because vinyl cannot reproduce mixes that digital systems can. The side effect is that lots of times they sound better. I think in a perfect world an artist would offer you vinyl if you want it, along with a digital version of the vinyl master. You could skip the whole ripping vinyl process entirely.
One of the "nice" things about being hard of hearing is that I can't hear any difference between flac and mp3s down to around 96 or lower for most music, so hypothetically I don't have to worry about this stuff.
Of course in practice I do still keep flac rips around because I'm a data hoarder and what if I decide I want to reencode all my music to opus or something? But at least I have the option to stop caring.
So vinyl has only about the equivalent of 10-14 bits of resolution (I don't remember the exact number I heard and it has been a while) and waveforms within our hearing range are far larger than what 192khz can potentially accomodate. The only use I've found for such high-resolution is audio is using it as base material for further effects processing... certain distortion units and whatnot that operate on a sample level can sometimes give nicer output when fed super hi-res audio
No, not at all. Vinyl has a wildly inconsistent noise level where rumble predominates, and people conflate this with bits of resolution. Vinyl's behavior is not easily pinned down relative to 'bits of resolution', because the noise floor is skewed so intensely towards low frequencies.
To say nothing of how generally available vinyl records (especially old ones) have wildly different rms/peak measurements than generally available CDs and digital recordings have. This is partly 'Loudness War' and partly vinyl's inability to even do the loudness war thing and cope with blocks of heavily limited audio in the first place.
So you'll end up with a record where you can play it, and the peaks are 30 freaking dB over the RMS and it sounds amazingly open and uncompressed… while there's also groove noise that is every bit as loud as the music is (admittedly annoying).
A person arguing the vinyl/CD dynamic range thing would make the claim that the record was equivalent to maybe TWO bit digital audio, or four bit. The most cursory listen to such a comparison will show how inadequate it is.
2-bit digital audio? Like only four total values of dynamic range total? 4-bit meaning only 16 total possible amplitudes? Is that even physically possible? ;)
I agree that the quality of the record -- AND its playback equipment -- among other physical factors will dramatically effect the numbers. My "10-14" quote only applies for ideal conditions: a newly-minted, unplayed disc on a high-quality preamp which together with the turntable and clean needles can produce a very low noise floor. Obviously I'm never going to get this with my dad's old Dead vinyl that he played to death, or with cheap needles, or with those crappy Crowley turntables at target....
Anecdotally, on my home system with clean records, I can make nearly-CD-quality recordings, with the differences only really apparent on flat studio monitors or a good Hi-Fi.
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Plus, the groove on the outside is moving past the needle faster than the inside. The best sounding track on an album is going to be the first one.
Yes, but we are not talking about the mixing/mastering sample rate, but the distribution sample rate/resolution.
High resolution is absolutely important in some mixing scenarios to prevent pre-ringing and aliasing in the effects chain (distortion effects or otherwise). But once you have your hi-res master, there is zero advantage to distribute it that way. At that point, a 48Khz/16-bit FLAC is as good as it gets.
> This is also why modern vinyl releases sound a lot better than digital: they are mastered differently since its assumed everyone is going to be listening on good equipment.
I had always assumed they were taking the same master and just carving it into vinyl. I wonder what percentage of "modern vinyl releases" are actually remastering before pressing...
At minimum they have to move all the bass to the center and apply RIAA EQ.
You're certainly right, many aren't (I always check). A lot are though. I'd give it maybe like 50/50.
The problem is that they aren't being mastered differently - there's a website that lists vinyl releases (can't find the link) and compares it to the CD masters and they're often the same thing. Older CD masters from the 80's or 90's are re-released compressed to drive sales. The latest vinyl fad has just become a new means for record companies to to exploit a "new" medium and race for the bottom - they know many new listeners on cheap players actually just want to hear what they get out of the earbud.
Releated: https://thevinylfactory.com/features/analogue-digital-vinyl-...
There are, of course, those brands that care about remasters, but I don't think they're a majority of the market unless you're looking at classical and older jazz.
Some time ago, I stumbled across a YT channel of some guy, a self-professed studio expert, who "remasters" some 80's metal albums to give them a big, "modern" sound. The uploads are heavily commented with positive reviews.
Basically, to my ears, it just sounds like a bunch of early reflection reverbs were added (an effect that was mature in the 1980's in its high-end implementations and used in studios to get "bigger" guitar sounds and whatnot.)
Of course, it sounds great for all the viewers who are using cheap (or even not-so-cheap) earbuds, or computer speakers.
What these nincompoops don't get is that these albums were made to be cranked up on a powerful stereo, with full sized speakers, in some kind of room. That guy is basically just ruining great albums who were actually recorded and mastered by people who did know what they were doing. Like, oh, Detonator by RATT and whatnot.
Back up for a second with the last paragraph there: if the record was mastered for a room sized stereo, it assumes that the room adds its reverb to the sound. With loudspeakers, the room is a distorting filter in the signal path. This and the HRTF distortion are skipped over when listening to headphones/earbuds. So it does make a lot of sense to add these effects to the audio signal in the headphones case. Done right, the headphone playback is indistinguishable from a stereo in a room - mounted to your head, because the spatialized speakers are relative to your head, no matter where you look.
So, there is a case to be made for this kind of processing. But I won't trust a random mastering "guru" with unknown credentials to get that right.
Right. Only, the accompanying obnoxious rhetoric was along the lines that those studio engineers didn't have the techniques and equipment for this modern sound, and that these old albums need a face lift.
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Exactly if it’s mastered wrong the nitrate has nothing to do with the issue this music would sound just as awful cut to vinyl from a bad master. Now you just can’t hear beyond 22050 so 192 is insanely wasteful. But poor mastering is absolutely the core issue not encoding algorithms
Actually, no, it might sound better cut to vinyl. Remember, vinyl doesn't have the frequency range or dynamic range that digital audio does, and it has to be mastered using the RIAA Curve because of the properties of the medium. One factor here is that the stereo separation on vinyl can't be too large, or else the needle will literally jump out of the groove! In short, you can't just take CD music (no matter how well or poorly mastered) and cut it to vinyl as-is.
> it might sound better cut to vinyl
There's nothing extra in a 192kHz signal that would help with the vinyl mastering process. You could make a technical argument for the benefits of a 24-bit source, but in practice even those benefits would be utterly swamped by the SNR of vinyl.
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> This is also why modern vinyl releases sound a lot better than digital: they are mastered differently since its assumed everyone is going to be listening on good equipment.
In my opinion that‘s a myth and certainly not a given. There are plenty of subpar vinyl masters and terrible pressings out there. And it‘s not that difficult to find good digital masters these days. More important than the medium is the genre, label and target audience - I have a pretty obscure and diverse taste, including rarities from past decades which are finally being re-issued for the first time and while mixdowns certainly vary in quality it‘s mostly fine and the result of a careful process these days.
However things might be worse when it comes to mainstream music.
But who is using MP3 players these days any more?
I found myself to buy an iPod in... like... 2011 or so. Converted all the CDs I had to FLAC because losless was the way to go.
Two or three years (let it be 5, doesn't matter) pass by, I got a better Smartphone, Spotify Premium and don't touch my 1xx GB of FLAC music anymore, because I don't want to carry around another device etc.
I'm not sure but I think "owning" music like in "I got some files here on my drive" seems dead to me. That obviously has downsides but I feel lucky to use Spotify these days and being able to discover new music every day and listen to all of it on the go without buying something, converting it and more.
I hike a lot and hate using my phone's battery power for music. On top of needing that power for other things, it just feels wasteful. I bought a cheap MP3 player to try out in 2016 and have been hooked ever since. These devices are smaller and lighter than spare phone batteries or power banks.
In addition, I find that I use the MP3 player when I'm out running normal errands precisely because I've organized my music by hand and even edited tracks by hand in some cases. Examples would be things like rare covers that can only be found on YouTube, or favorite songs from niche internet music communities which were poorly mastered.
It's also a bit of a gear hobby now since there are so many MP3 players on the market. Prices are low and performance is great.
I have to agree about the iPod though, as I found the need for proprietary software, and really annoying software at that, made me use it less and less until my 32GB iTouch was mostly used as an ebook reader. I also prefer physical buttons for my mp3-listening while on the go.
But aren't you worried you'll lose access to your music? I have to own it! I can't have it at the whim of multiple third parties to take down as they see fit. It's too important.
Nothing in my Spotify is rare, I can hunt it all down again. If Spotify pulls the plug then the biggest hassle will be recovering the track names of all the music in my sprawling playlists (which I should probably start backing up now). The benefit of Spotify to me is spending $10/mo on the >$10 of new music I listen to each month.
So where do you store these files that you'll never lose access?
CDs? People with a room full of 8 tracks or cassettes would like to have a word.
HDDs? Those fail all the time, plus any sort of natural disaster could wipe out your collection.
Online backup? This seems like the only real option, but for me the risk/reward just doesn't fit.
At least for now, the record companies and the service providers are both incentivized to have as much of their catalogs as possible on streaming services. Until that changes, streaming works for many.
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Do you feel the same about cable TV or Netflix?
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> I'm not sure but I think "owning" music like in "I got some files here on my drive" seems dead to me.
I really don't think that's true. I think the "listening market" looks a lot like it did before; a large number of casual listeners and a smaller number of people who are in to their music enough to care about details. The second category does things like talk about differences in mastering between different releases, for instance, and Spotify or Apple are not going to offer you that 1973 Berlin recording or whatever. Tidal tries to cater to this market, but they don't have a massive amount of stuff. And then you get to bootleg collecting and people who record performances, old music that didn't make the digital jump and all sorts other recordings that will never make it commercial services.
I'm not a "real audiophile" or obsessive about collecting things, but I do have a lot of music (last I looked, about 60k distinct artifacts - mostly individual songs, but some of those are albums or nonmusical, also some dupes and garbage). And a lot of that is not on commercial services.
> But who is using MP3 players these days any more?
I use my iPod Shuffle exclusively for portable music listening. Cannot beat the form factor, only have to charge it once a week or two (and sometime far longer between charges), and helps me relegate my mobile surveillance/communications device to phone-duties-only as much as possible.
I rip my CDs in a two-step process: first to FLAC, then convert to mp3. The mp3s go in my phone, I have 33GB so far and my collection isn't even half ripped. I haven't checked how big the FLACs are lately but I'm sure they'd be a much bigger burden.
If you are concerned about space, consider vorbis, AAC, or opus. They all will achieve a higher quality at a given bitrate (or equivalently a lower bitrate for a given quality).
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Slightly off topic, but do you use something other than iTunes for this process? I'm looking for a good way to manage a FLAC library.
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I've been ripping to FLAC, and then convert to ALAC via avconv. The ALAC files go into iTunes, FLAC files stay on my server as an "archive". I then let iTunes convert the files it syncs to my phone / ipad to which ever size I need for that device, and I can still listen to uncompressed songs when I'm at my desk.
I keep the Flac around in case sometime in the future I want to change formats for whatever reason.
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This is pretty reasonable. 16/44.1 FLACs aren't that large, especially considering that 4TB HDDs are available for $70 these days.
I do the same. MP3s of yy entire CD collection sit on an SD card in my car and a Sandisk Ultra Fit USB drive in my wife's car. The FLAC files live on an external USB drive in my home.
I still have Spotify for the times I want to listen to something I don't own or want to listen to one specific song without drilling down multiple menus to find it.
Do you manually convert to mp3? iTunes has an option to convert lossless audio to a lossy, space saving AAC at a bitrate of your choice on the fly when syncing to an Apple device. I‘m sure there are similar solutions in Android land.
Well I never used CDs. Unfortunately what.cd got taken down, but a couple years ago, it was probably the biggest and most complete collection of music in the world.
Nowadays, I also just use spotify since I don’t have a quality source for music. But if what.cd was still around, I would dump spotify in a second.
what.cd was continued by redacted.ch, and the community is currently quite strong.
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I use my phone as an MP3 (Opus, actually) player, with a selection of music from my ~20K track collection. This works better for me than unlimited access to all music, because it makes me have to listen to a smaller selection of content, so I give each album more attention.
While I do also have a Spotify Premium subscription, I am using it a lot less now than I used to. At least 10% of the album's I have simply aren't available on Spotify, and possibly never will be. Underground self-released artists very often don't bother with streaming services, or are outright against the entire concept in the first place, claiming that it devalues the music. It certainly doesn't pay very well. There's also the issue of music disappearing because of rightsholder disputes, such as most of the Motörhead discography being unavailable for an extended period of time. That sort of thing just isn't acceptable.
Honestly I've come to realize that I prefer a smaller nicely curated collection over a massive unwieldy semi-unlimited library, with questionable curation. I have reported hundreds of curation errors to Spotify, but they keep popping up, especially errors involving two identically-named artists being mixed together.
I will admit that I am very particular about tagging, labeling and sorting by genre. Spotify is woefully inadequate in this regard. For my own collection, I am in full control, which makes it much easier to sort and handle.
Your smartphone or laptop is like an MP3 player with respect to mastering, not like an expensive amplifier and speakers. Your smaryphone/laptop has an amplifier that's optimised for low energy usage, not fidelity, and loudspeakers optimised for size. Music which has been mixed and mastered without regard for how it sounds on your smartphone is sold as "24/192" or "vinyl" or such. The 192 does not matter technically, it's just an identifying mark, and some sort of identifying mark is necessary.
I don't think this advice is aimed at your typical Spotify user (i.e. the majority of people).
Spotify is fine for casual listening, but if you're picky about quality, you're going to diy it, and if you're diying, 24/192 is pointless.
> This is also why modern vinyl releases sound a lot better than digital: they are mastered differently since its assumed everyone is going to be listening on good equipment.
I have just downloaded "Radiohead - The bends" and "Smashing Pumpkins - Mellon_collie_and_the_infinite_sadness", both apparently from vinyl and in highest quality but I don't hear any difference from the CDs I bought and ripped years ago (using headphones "Beyerdynamic DT 770 pro" directly connected to a Lenovo P71 notebook).
Maybe you meant some more modern music or something else...? Thx
Oh another cool thing about vinyl is the needle can couple to the environment too, try driving its case with another speaker or putting it in front of it's own big amp for feedback.
Also, I'm a little bit surprised that nobody focuses on more "out of the box" perception of sound. One can absolutely sense hgh frequencies, personally feel kind of like pressure where you can't pop your ears to equalize. Playing around with this feeling adds emotional tension and color to tracks.
Also, interference patterns are perceptible, and they sound kind of... Different from pure tones, idk.
> This is also why modern vinyl releases sound a lot better than digital: they are mastered differently since its assumed everyone is going to be listening on good equipment.
Sorry, I don't know much about sound so here comes probably the most stupid question of the day (but hope never dies):
does this mean that I might get better sound if I would buy a vinyl & one of those turntables which can directly digitize to USB, then if I would buy & download the digital song directly (or maybe even the CD)? Thx
(Assuming you're okay with piracy…) You're better off searching for vinyl rips where people with good equipment have done the heavy lifting for you.
Actually you're right (what shall I say, for some mysterious reason I didn't think about it) => I'll first do a comparison with whatever I find and then if it does sound better I'll try to achieve the same results on my own (I'm obsessed with owning originals). Thx :)
> That being said, I think flac is generally a good choice for a music collection.
One other consideration for a music collection from CDs is getting a good rip in the first place. I've had some horrible rips in iTunes, even with error correction enabled. I have much more confidence using a tool like XLD that supports AccurateRip, which probably doesn't work with a lossy format.
If you want to transcode after the rip, fine, but you may as well hang on to the FLAC.
IIRC, XLD rips to WAV first anyway, then compresses it to FLAC (I know EAC does).
The reason why a lot of recent digital music sounds bad is because of the intentionally terrible mastering.
I guess that's why the vinyl versions of my wife's albums always sound better than the downloaded versions. Even to my really quite bad ears.
Most LPs these days are made from the same masters as the CDs (or downloads/streaming), with only the bare minimum of processing done to make them viable to pressing to vinyl, ie. mono bass and RIAA equalization. Only releases marketed specifically to audiophiles tend to get any extra effort put into them, and that is a vanishingly small segment of customers.
The loudness war isn't happening because of "crappy earbuds", the earbuds included with smartphones have been rather good for a long time now. The ones that came with my Samsung S8 were designed partially by AKG (Samsung owns the Harman Group, including AKG) and are really damn good. Apple's included earbuds are also very good now, a far cry from the original iPod earbuds, which were decidedly mediocre.
The real issue is radio and Youtube/streaming services from before they implemented loudness targets, and it's been going on since the 50s at least, just listen to some old singles from back then, they're mastered as loud as they possibly could, with the technology of the day. The objective has always been to make your song sound louder than the next song, because louder music sounds more impressive to a casual listener, it's simply more attention-grabbing.
In the beginning of the digital era, there was actually some hope that better dynamics would happen. In the guidelines for Sony's earliest digital recording equipment, the recommendation was to target an average level of -20dBFS, to use very little or no compression, and "let peaks fall where they may". Just imagine that, 20dB headroom!
In the worst days of the loudness war (~early 2000s) lot of music was mastered with barely 3-4dB of dynamic range, with peaks banging hard against 0dBFS. I have some CDs from that era, and they clip and distort like crazy, because everything was just pushed to 11, to be as loud as possible. "Californication" by Red Hot Chili Peppers is an excellent example, it's absolutely horrid.
Since then, two major things have happened to improve sound quality somewhat. Firstly the compression devices and plugins have improved massively, modern sidechain compression is really impressive, entire genres like EDM/dubstep simply wouldn't exist if not for the improvements in compression tech. Secondly, all of the streaming services use volume normalization now, with a set average sound level. Songs can peak over this average value, but the average must be in line with the target. This also results in brickwalled "turn everything to 11" tracks sound a lot quieter, because they have no peaks to use the additional dynamic range available.
> (there are some exceptions, like the Beatles mono and stereo boxed sets that came out awhile ago)
Didn't the beatles famously create their music to be listenable on the terrible radios of the time?
So this is why streaming Google Music on my fairly nice sound system ends up sounding like total crap?
In 2019 music streaming should be more like video streaming, in that different bitrates should be user selectable, and processing ("cinema" vs. "night mode") is done by the playback equipment.
> mp3s should sound pretty much the same compared to 16-bit flac
I did a blind test between 128-mp3, 320-mp3 and flac hearing classical music. While it's true that the 128-mp3 is obvious to find, it also isn't too difficult to find the 320-mp3. Flac just sounds better. Described as a feeling, flac is more voluminous and doesn't feel cut short. For fun, I also let my parents take this test and they could tell, too.
That's why I converted all our CDs to FLAC. Storage is cheap anyway.
There is some definite perceptible loss in accuracy in the treble even at V0 or 320. There's a song with a synthesized treble effect that sounds quite different on MP3 vs. FLAC by Planet Funk, I think it was "Who Said? (Stuck in the UK)".
Other than that MP3 (or Vorbis or Opus, which would probably do better on that song) is great for portability, but I'd still use FLAC for storage.
Interesting. Are you sure you were using the right settings and a recent version of LAME for this?
The only artifact I can reliably hear in 320 kbps MP3s is pre-echo, for instance with castanets, and only in a few very specific situations. Apart from this, V2 and above sounds completely indistinguishable from the original to me.
Which is great ...for you...
but what if in the future you could hear the differences? And now your entire collection is in MP3 V2 - now what?
No reason to not rip everything in uncompressed FLAC these days.
But if your happy with your audio now, great!
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You also lose some of the fullness on the extreme low end, it's noticeable even with a fairly low end subwoofer.
Something also ends up missing in the midranges. I was working on a track once where all I had was 320 mp3 version of the vocals. At some point I replaced it with a flac copy of the same vocal recording, from the same original wav source and the difference was noticeable right away without changing any of my equalizer settings or anything. It just punched through more and the clarity improved.
The low end thing just isn't true at all, and I don't know where that myth comes from.
I have a room-corrected setup with two properly adjusted subs, and MP3 does just fine on deep bass content.
Regarding solo vocals, the history of the MP3 format says: "The song "Tom's Diner" by Suzanne Vega was the first song used by Karlheinz Brandenburg to develop the MP3. Brandenburg adopted the song for testing purposes, listening to it again and again each time refining the scheme, making sure it did not adversely affect the subtlety of Vega's voice".
That's not to say that they did a perfect job, but human voice was a very high priority.
And the encoders have continued to improve. So an earlier encoders may have messed with the voices, but a reasonably recent version of LAME would do so much better.
MP3's real weakness is fast sharp transients, such as castanets and harpsichord in sparse recordings, where no other sounds can mask them. It's a fundamental weakness in the format, and cannot be completely solved.
Newer formats such as Ogg Vorbis, Opus and AAC do not suffer from this weakness.
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