Whatever the technical truths here, we can all get behind having less Neil Young music in the world.
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It’s not relevant to this discussion really, but Neil Young has been dead to me since August 31, 1988 when I unhappily sat through two hours of his Sponsored By Nobody tour. Two hours of mosquitoes and shitty weed (not his fault, I know) and Brother Neil wangling that one fucking note up and down until I thought he must have broken a string and fired a high-velocity shard of music wire straight into my eyeball. And inexplicably through all of that, there were these plastic geese perched on top of his amp stacks, blowing bubbles out over the crowd… you’re dead to me Neil, dead.
Edit:spelling
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He’s not wrong about the quality. There’s a fair argument to make that engineers gear sound towards sounding better on tinny headphones since 2000. This definitely sucks compared to recordings made before 2000 ish, which had much larger dynamic ranges.
But the pay per month and consume any of 15+ million tunes means we can discover more music than ever. We stop collecting, but listen more. Pretty groovy.
It’s a trade off. Lower quality in much much larger amounts is fun.
Neil Young rocks though.
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I routinely take FLAC files and crush them down to 320kps .MP3 files so they’ll load on my iPod.
Pleased to meet you, hope you guess my name…
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I love the below little detail from Ars’ review:
Considering Pono’s firm sales pitch about us needing the highest-res audio available, we were surprised to not find any “highest resolution only” filter in its internal storefront. This is where Pono’s snake oil really begins, because when you play any 192/24 songs on the player, it rewards you by—we’re not kidding—turning on a little blue neon light. This doesn’t happen if your 192/24 songs didn’t come from Pono’s storefront, however, as those are apparently not 192 enough.
The player had a little LED that lit up when playing 24 bit 192KHz music purchased from the service; but not unblessed 24bit 192KHz music from other sources.
That sort of nudge probably helps the imagination make unblinded testing work its magic; but it’s not a classy touch.
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Apple has its own lossless format: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Lossless
Iphones also support FLAC natively, though since iTunes refuses to recognize it, there’s little use in that native support.
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Firstly, the idea that vinyl is the “gold standard” is questionable to say the least. Maybe if you buy the absolute best quality vinyl, store them perfectly and properly so they never get a grain of dust or a fingerprint on them, buy a very expensive turntable and stylus, suitable amp etc. - it will sound damn good. But most people don’t have that. Most people never had that. They had the turntable built into some modest department-store stereo and some plastic speakers. Nevermind that if you insist vinyl can never be beaten - well, you’re never listening to your music in a car, in the garden, while walking the dog, are you? There is more than one way to enjoy music, and for most people, sitting in a silent room with several grand worth of stereo equipment is not the primary way.
Frankly I’m quite amazed at how good music sounds these days. I listen to streaming songs, on a phone, through $30 ear buds, and I can hear detail and dynamics in songs that I never heard on a CD playing through my stereo 20 years ago, or on my record player 30 years ago. It’s really, really not that bad. There is so much to enjoy in music, and it is so accessible now (from the point of view of both listeners and artists), that bitching about things not sounding like vinyl just starts getting really, really old. I can pay an artist on the other side of the world instantly to hear the song they recorded yesterday, through Bandcamp, using a device in my pocket, downloaded and playing without missing a beat while I walk on the beach. It’s fantastic. Fuck vinyl.
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I don’t think he’s wrong about the sound quality of the music, but I don’t think it’s the internet’s fault. It’s the service providers. If we could improve the overall infrastructure so that large gobs (technical term) of data can be transmitted at high speeds to everyone, we could deliver higher quality music content – as well as other content. The lower quality is a means of compensating for the networks we seem to be stuck with indefinitely. Neil Young, with that fortune of yours, I’m sure you could invest in an internet service provide that provides true high speed internet at an affordable price. Let’s see you do it.
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I did my test probably about 9 years ago or so.
Yes of course lossless formats should mean literally that but I always figured they were designed for as little compression as possible rather than true absolute losslessness.
From my memory OGG vorbis sounded much indistinguishable from the original CD source, .flac almost exactly the same but at that level it could very well have been my head.
So to answer your question, I’m not sure anymore?
I am not familiar with Opus so I don’t know how far the technology has progressed in just the last couple years. I’d be happy to run my own tests again once I’m more up-to-date on current technologies. Do you have a good source of comprehensive knowledge to point me towards if you feel I am out of date?
Being wrong never bothers me, so long as I have a chance to learn where I am, if I am.
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Quoting someone and then linking to a Wikipedia article
generally implies the person you are quoting is an idiot.
If this is not what you are trying to imply and you are trying to be helpful I would ask that you do so with a little more thought. Perhaps I misread your intent?
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This is what a helpful comment looks like thanks
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I meant to just try and settle any debate about it. And I realize now wiki isn’t a particularly good way to do that. Sorry about the insolence.
In any case, I’ve spent a lot of time dealing with codecs, and every single lossless codec I’ve ever come across really does give you the ability to recover a bit-for-bit copy of whatever the source is, as long as things like storage corruption don’t happen. There is no difference in sound between lossless and source because lossless is just a zipped up version of the source. Any difference you might possibly hear is from whatever audio software you use treating the output from a lossless codec as something other than regular PCM audio and applying post-processing.
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I on the other hand hate what Neil Young has done to music
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This is what another helpful comment looks like.
Makes sense it’s cool dude thanks.
I am definitely not a sound engineer and there’s a lot of things I don’t understand and some things I probably do think I understand and don’t actually, which is why I say I have no problem finding out I don’t know what the fuck I’m talking about if that is the case, I just remember intensely testing for at least a day or two trying to hear the differences so I am somewhat familiar with the issues at hand but not perhaps some of the details.
For the record (ha), I listen to a lot of black metal which is recorded on potato setting, so fidelity there isn’t as big a deal.
Most of the rest is a mix of dub reggae, trance, house, and chillout, with classical here and there, and occasional Japanese hip hop
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I don’t buy Young’s suggestion that poor quality audio is damaging brains, but I do have a similar opinion when it comes to the transition to HDTV. During that transition, people were buying their new wide-screen 16:9 HDTVs while the majority of TV content was still 4:3 aspect ratio. Many of those people were angry that their fancy, new, expensive TVs weren’t using the whole screen, so they turned on the video stretching “feature” that made 4:3 video content fill the full 16:9 screen. This had the effect of distorting the picture and making the images unnaturally wide, but people were willing to have that distortion instead of black bars on the sides of the screen.
I’ve witnessed numerous instances when people can no longer tell when a video image is distorted. It’s really a fascinating phenomena to me. If there was, say, a basketball in a video that had been stretched, they could not tell you if it was not actually round. Their brains had been trained to compensate or ignore the distortion and they were completely unable to discern whether a shape was actually round or not. I think that the only way you could convince them that it wasn’t actually round would be to hold a circle directly next to the distorted video.
Does this phenomena sound familiar? To me, it sounds extremely similar to Trump followers. They have completely lost the ability to identify lies, falsehoods, distortions, and exaggerations. In other words, they can no longer recognize reality.
No, I don’t believe that the HDTV transition brought about the election of Donald Trump, but I do believe that similar brain changes have occurred in both groups. Distorted video watched over a long period of time caused the changes for one group, distorted information from biased sources (Fox News, GOP radio talk shows, Facebook, Twitter, and social media in general) caused the changes for the other.
I would be interested to know how much overlap there is between those two groups. Perhaps some day I’ll conduct a sociological study and publish a book on the subject.
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Love me some Neil, but…
I have vinyl, I have cassettes (artisanal mix tape from AT LEAST 1975) I have CDs, I have mp-thingys. There was a time when my life allowed for me to sit down and listen and HEAR everything he’s talking about. But, that time has passed. I think the ‘it’s killing us!!!’ is more than a bit hyperbolic, but I think there’s a kernel of truth…
All that said though, I’m much more concerned about your Pandora/Spotify and AI-curated playlists. Sure, it’s fun to be lazy and just hear that music, but unless you want to engage with the tech on an entirely different level, it tends to fall into an odd rut, where a ‘channel’ just sounds like a playlist, and not an entirely awesome one IMHO. I get it, that a ‘decent’ terrestrial radio station (even with intertoobz streaming capabilities is rare, but I’ll say that I live in the northern SF Bay area and have krsh for pop/rock/country and kcsm for jazz and, frankly, if I can’t tune them in (home/car/other) or spin my own tunes, I’ll listen to the breeze…
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Have always appreciated him as a musician and songwriter (especially the Devo collaboration era wtf!), and can sympathize. I strongly suspect he’s not wrong about the brain stuff, but his manner of delivery is probably hurting the prospects for widespread agreement.
My guess is it’s like the concept of forest bathing or the recognized human need for wilderness/exposure to natural patterns. Our neuro-physiology developed in a natural context with nigh infinitely deep fractal detail and low incidence of first order predictable perceptual patterns. The human manufactured environment presents a sort of poverty in terms of diversity of forms - which could be imagined be stultifying/atrophying. It’s established that perceptual sensitivity along various dimensions is an active skill or process that needs to be exercised/developed and can be distorted like @Torlygid mentioned. When everything is at the same loudness level (in the very source material, rather than at the point of transmission or reproduction for silly “loudness war” marketing reasons or), when the dynamics are all blown out because the playback system is a 4mm disc jammed in the ear canal or speakers embedded in a car door moving at 70mph over asphalt then it does seem that something has actually been lost in the translation.
(saying this as someone who totally appreciates mind-melting/chest-cavity-resonating high dB bass music as well as well recorded classical and acoustic jazz and am currently working on building an ultra low noise field recording setup - I think that there is a place for all these concerns, and that audiophile snake-oil idiocy (a very very real thing, can I sell you some magic pebbles to tune your soundstage?) aside - the concerns that Neil raises I’m afraid are pretty legit, if un-artfully portrayed.
(minor pedantic point of order - in these conversations it seems there can occasionally slip through an unacknowledged conflation of “compression” as it relates to data/bandwidth and “audio compression” relating to signal amplitude characteristics, (not that they don’t have points of intersection, they do - particularly in both telecom and information theoretic usages) - but it seems that sometimes there can be divergent parallel understandings that develop when the distinction isn’t recognized).
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