When I was in high school I put together a pretty high end stereo system, and on that I listened to a pretty limited selection of music (mix of LPs, CDs and yes, cassettes – sometimes price was the factor). My kids in high school have Spotify, and they have build wonderfully deep collections of music from all kids of eras. They can effortlessly explore an artists entire catalog, or sample a genre widely without needing a radio DJ to do it for them. Yes, the primarily listen on average headphones, or on average wireless speakers.
What they have is a huge improvement over what I had.
Not quite sure what you’re trying to say. Lossless litereally means that. There is no loss in quality when transcoding. You get out all the exact samples you put in. You can do it millions of times and nothing will change. If you’re hearing differences, then they’re in your head and not reflected in reality. If that’s not what you were meaning to imply, then please correct my misunderstanding.
Back in the early MP3 days, the encoders were crap. Even at max 320Kbps, they were bad. Things have improved a great deal since then. With modern encoders, MP3 at 196Kbps is imperceptable from the original signal. Better codecs like Vorbis or Opus can acheive that at 128Kbps. There will always be some songs that don’t fare well, but that’s the nature of lossy compression.
I won’t assume that the quote originates with John Hodgman, but… “Nostalgia is a toxic impulse”.
To my mind, Neil Young seems to be on the same “the old ways were better” train that Trent Reznor found himself on. I’m a huge fan of both, and can even (in a light) appreciate their position. But at some point you have to accept that you may have a preferred medium or experience associated with your art, and that’s your right. But complaining about the modern world and (potentially) alienating consumers is bad business.
If it matters so much to you that we consume your art in prescribed way, discontinue your distribution and insist on curated listening parties in your living room.
And THAT’S the trade off for me. As a former record store manager, I used to look at TONS of obscure stuff way beyond my meager salary (Neil Young Archives box set comes to mind), that I can now listen to any time on Spotify for free. If I spend a month with it and still like it, I’ll spring for a physical copy just in case Spotify disappears. And, I guess, buy it for the higher fidelity, but I don’t own any hi-fi gear, so…
In the early 2000s, the respected German computer magazine, c’t, ran blind tests where they asked musicians and audio professionals to try to distinguish MP3-encoded music from the CD originals, on high-end playback hardware. It turned out that even at moderate bit rates like 192 kbit/s, the listeners were unable to distinguish the two with any consistency.
Now almost 20 years down the road the MP3 encoders have only become better, and since (even though I own a pretty good amplifier and set of speakers) I can’t afford the sort of stereo system that would bring out whatever differences may remain I’m not really worried about the playback quality of my MP3 files.
Young may have a point in that many music producers today try to produce recordings that sound good on low-end earbud-type headphones on a subway train, rather than top-of-the-line speakers in a custom listening room. That, however, is not something that moving to higher bitrates or sample sizes will fix, and especially not Young’s overpriced music player.
Yeah, if you want to talk about trends in music production, that’s completely valid and I’d join you. Ever since Phil Spector, music production has been taking a path that I don’t care for. And that’s ‘before my time’, but I’m not saying it was better in my youth–it was already well into crap.
That said, know your market. If your market is listening on crappy ‘came with the phone’ earbuds with a porrly designed phone DAC, then that’s what you produce for. Anything else is asking to lose. It does make listening to a lot of it on even a decent car audio system unplesant. And it gets progressively worse with better hardware.
But, I listen mostly to EDM and heavy metal, so I don’t really have a dog in that fight. My music comes pre-distored by design–and that’s how we like it.
This is also from a CD. It sounds dynamic. (To really hear the soft violin passages, you have to turn up your stereo. And this in turn makes those church bells at the end sound realistically loud.)
If you use verified copy to rip from cd to flac, ape, frog alac wma lossless, or any other lossless format, you will get a bit for bit reproduction of that cd. There is no loss. It’s like using a specialized version of zip.
He’s not completely wrong. Live music sounds better than recorded.
Any method of recording and than representing anything doesn’t capture the phenomenon fully. And every method will reproduce them differently- the lens, the medium, projection or plasma screen.
Absolutely, but the context here is that Neil is still pushing the audio codec he’s been hawking for about ten years, which he claims will “rescue music” and makes music sound exactly like it does when it was originally recorded. Having heard it, honestly, it sounds about as good as a high-quality CD rip. It’s better than a streaming mp3, but it ain’t gonna transform your brain or revolutionize the industry.
There’s no question that compressed sounds worse than uncompressed. When listening to blu-rays with DTS master or Dolby TrueHD 192k uncompressed sound, on my ~$5k total home theater system, I am always excited by that little bit better it sounds than the compressed DTS or Dolby Digital streams.
But today you can get pretty darn good compressed audio.
Most people aren’t aware that spotify has settings that allow you to increase the bandwidth (less compression), and I posit that a campaign to get people to use those settings would get way more people listening to better sound than any niche market for uncompressed streams.
Neil Young: streaming music sucks!
Also Neil Young: buy streaming music from my store instead!
He actually has a pretty long and weird history with streaming. Anybody remember Pono?
Of course not and that’s why it went under.
I fully agree that streaming music sucks for quality but most people just don’t care. You can blame the loudness wars of the 1980s and fallout from that.
I just read the the xiph.org article you linked to, and I don’t see anything in it that has to do with what Neil Young was speaking about in the article this thread is about. It’s like two separate conversations.
