Errm … isn’t that young Neil Young?!
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I wholly agree. I remember listening to a $5 AM radio in bed to Detroit electro-funk constantly being bombarded by static and distortion. I remember listening to 8-tracks and later cassettes sounding no better than the AM radio due to dirty heads, or damaged media. You just ignored it. Now, if there is even a slight distortion I immediately check to see if something is wrong (as generally there is).
I will be honest, who cares what Neil Young has to say at this point? He’s been off the deep end for decades. Liking his music, fine, some people can go ahead and do it, but this is a joker who is part of the entertainment industry (possessing one of the biggest carbon footprints), but will sit around whining about oilfields and the environment. Does he have a point we’re ruining the environment? Sure! Is he contributing to the environmental decline faster than I, and probably most people are? Sure! He’s upset he can’t get enough views and likes on youtube or social media. This is a great PR stunt for him and he thinks it will garner him some attention. Hey, I just gave him more attention than I gave him in decades, so I guess he is right. Unfortunately for him, I’m just going to head on back to listening to Slayer on Spotify and youtube, pretending his music doesn’t exist, like I have for the other 40+ years of my life while I read boingboing.
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Well, let’s see… you made the statement:
And I replied that I read the article you linked to on xiph and it didn’t actually seem to address anything Neil was talking about in the main article. The xiph article was interesting, and I learned from it, but nowhere in the Times article did I read Young talking about common bit rate or frequencies in any manner addressed by it. Maybe he does elsewhere, but your bald statement that he doesn’t know what he’s talking to that is basically just a giant link to that xiph article doesn’t support that particular assertion.
Is that simple enough for you to understand?I applaud you that you speak for the royal “us.” That must be an awesome responsibility that keeps you up nights.
Yes it’s terrible how much worse than Vinyl CDs and Mp3s sound. Music sucks now that it is possible to include bass panning, loud tracks half way thru your album, or the letter ‘S’.
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You just ignored it.
When I hear Tricky or Portishead albums now they sound completely wrong to me, I grew up listening to tape versions dubbed from CD with some crazy heavy auto-levels/compression which my old tape deck added to them as a kid 
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What am I missing here? The article I linked to talks about how humans perceive sound, yes? It talks about how Young was wrong in asserting things about sound recording and reproduction, right? That establishes that Young is mistaken in his understanding of how humans perceive sound.
In the NYT article, he makes several other statements about how humans perceive sound.
My asserting is that he’s hade mistakes in the past and, therefore, doesn’t carry much weight in making statements in the present on the same subject.
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few would argue? vinyl is shitty quality compared to digital. noisy, low dynamic range.
Young is a peddler of audiophile woo, not really someone to be listened to on this subject.
not that there aren’t plenty of reasons to complain about modern streaming, but that’s mostly to do with the economic model. don’t give spotify your money.
lots of failures in modern mixing/mastering processes too, over compression, frequency maximalism, etc. (why some modern music can be very tiring to listen to for long periods), but none of that has anything to do with the medium or the delivery channels, it’s ultimately an artistic choice of the musicians/producers.
Sorry, but this is complete nonsense as others have already pointed out. mp3 above 128 kbps is transparent to uncompressed audio (320 kbps or V0 if you want to play it safe), and for most things/people even 128 would be enough to pass a blind listening test.
It’s also pretty lol you mention Aphex Twin, who recorded most of his early releases to low quality cassette tape (the amount of noise on SAW 85-92 is ridiculous), and later releases to DAT on long-play mode (which is 32 khz/12 bit, not 44/16). Sure, his newer releases are very high quality in terms of audio fidelity (especially Drukqs, though his post-drukqs output has dipped back down into the noisy territory again, as he’s back to using mostly analogue gear), but it doesn’t matter either way, if the music is good it’s good, worrying about illusory minutiae is a complete waste of time.
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It’s FLAC. If you rip a CD into FLAC they will be bit identical unless the encoder fucked up. It is impossible for it do better than that.
I never heard anything bought from the Pono store, but from what I know about human hearing hardly anyone will be able to hear the difference. They might have better production which will sound better, but there a a lot of wasted bits in there beyond the human hearing range. It wouldn’t be noticeably worse if it was from a CD.
If the FLAC files weren’t bit identical then something went wrong. It’s that or you used the FLOSSY encoder which isn’t easy to come across by accident.
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I can’t stand listening to remastered/cleaned-up recordings of Billie Holiday or Robert Johnson. It just sounds wrong without the crackle and hiss.
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What you are clearly missing is that the xiph article references Young in the first paragraph, talking about articles from months past and 192/24 discussions. It then goes on to explore the 192/24 issue without ever referencing anything Young apparently asserted in those prior discussions. At all. Which is fine if you just want to find out about the 192/24 question in general
But the Times article that is being discussed here is not about the 192/24 question. So your statement in response to Young’s comments in this Times article isn’t actually buttressed by the lone link that you include to supposedly make your “argument”.
If you wanted to say, “Neil Young has a history of making comments about sound that aren’t supported by science,” well, ok. But you said “he knows nothing about how humans perceive sound,” which even if that wasn’t a patently ridiculous and incorrect statement on its face (and it is that, because the musician Neil Young clearly does have certain understandings about how humans perceive sounds which is why he has been such a successful musician) it would not be supported by the particular link you added.
Then you went and made a snide and dismissive remark when I pointed this out, speaking for others as well.
Nothing can actually reproduce the sound of the music in the studio because it was a series of compressions and rarefactions in the air - a physical thing that has since ceased to be. That’s why my new music service ships you a bottle of air from the studio the music was recorded in, so you can experience it as it was intended.
Jokes aside my knowledge that I don’t directly experience reality but rather experience an internal theatre made by my brain’s best guesses at to what the important information around me is really makes the question of whether these different formats matter seem weird to me. If I’m listening to a song in some awful compression on the subway and I think it sounds great that’s probably only partly what I’m hearing and the other part is my memory of what it’s supposed to sound like.
I can’t find the video now, but have you watched the video where they play exactly the same sound but it sounds like “fa” or “ba” depending on what the lips on the screen are doing? The idea of perfect reproduction is nonsense. The people who work on reproduction do a great job of working out what will work for most people. That’s what they are trying to do and that’s what’s important.
But not everyone is the same. Tetrachromacy exists, and they probably sound like weirdos when they talk about visual art. People have various degrees of synesthesia and so maybe things sound different to them depending on the colour of the speaker and they just can’t put their finger on it. It can simultaneously be true that lossless compression maintains a perfect mathematical reproduction of the recording and that it sounds different to somebody (though obviously blind tests have, on several occasions, shown that people who thought they could tell the difference were mistaken).
But finally, a short defense of Young. I’m glad Neil Young is an angry, negative person looking at how we are ruining everything. That anger and negativity is the same thing that wrote Ohio and Rockin’ in the Free World. Us negative people have got to stick together. Haters gonna make some good points.
ETA: I forgot my other hot take on this - the brain development stuff is nonsense. I can believe music is important to brain development, but you know, your guardian’s badly sung lullabies when you are three months old. Not the noise you choose to listen to when you are a hipster in college.
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If you count RIAA equalization as a type of range compression, then it goes back well before that.
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People can’t listen to some types of music live, without using external amplification. A piano it’s loud (in italian is pianoforte literally softloud) and listen to a concert grand live it’s completely different than listen a recording. There is a reference, so it’s clear that a shellac recording of a piano concert it’s tottally different and limitative. With the advent of tapes and records was possible to create music aimed to mechanical reproduction. With concrete music the reference with live instrument got lost: the Pierre Henry, Kid Baltan, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Delia Derbishire made this kind of music, but we can’t know where the imperfections are or if the glitches were due to the technical limitations or were artistic decisions.
The unique sound of the Hammond organ is due to technical imperfections or bugs, but prefer the older tube version rather than the technically better transistor version with improved tonewheels.
Yeah, the world would be a better place if the Internet’s Glob Rate was increased.
I’m listening to “Rare Funk (70’s) - Compilation” via youtube on my really crappy work computer speakers right now. 42k people have enjoyed this experience and 976 people haven’t. I’m with the majority in this case.
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Typical Vinyls* discussion
Vinyl sounds better
DISCUSSION ABOUT THE SCIENCE
Ok, what about the crackles the minute you start playing a plastic disc with a diamond It sounds like everything is recorded by a campfire?
I like the crackles!
Discussion about sound quality concluded.
*Honestly, in the UK the phrase ‘I have a lot of Vinyls’ doesn’t result in howls of laugter like it should.
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A few years ago he released a 26 minute long song (Drifting Back), much of which is him cribbing about MP3 sound quality. The song is great (though your opinion may be dictated by your tolerance for long rambling guitar solos) but he’s dead wrong on this topic. 99% of people don’t give a damn about sound quality as evidenced by the amount of people I see still using the crappy headphones bundled with their phones.
A possible solution to the Spotify problem that gives you the best of both worlds: streaming actual radio instead of a Spotify playlist. I’ve got the WFMU app on my phone, so I can listen anywhere on the planet – real freeform radio, no algorithms. For stations that don’t have apps there’s usually a web link that will give you similar functionality – it’s how I also listen to WMBR. One thing I love about the digital age is that having shitty local radio is no longer an issue, when I can stream stations from around the world.
ETA: Oops, I see you mention streaming. Still, gonna leave this post up.
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