Dolby Digital (AC3) is a pretty ancient lossy codec, so that’s not surprising. But it’s also what you would have heard in any well-equipped movie theaters between the mid 90s and the end of distribution on 35mm film in the mid teens (and was generally considered a big step up from analog stereo tracks). And the version used on film was even lower bitrate than DVDs!
1 Like
That was horrible. Thanks for the object lesson.
And Mr. Young is feeling helpless (helpless, helpless, helpless) about the whole situation. 
1 Like
If that’s your take on Neil Young, it’s obvious you haven’t listened to Neil Young (apart from the stuff that gets played in bar jukeboxes).
Per the original topic: one of the better takes I read about streaming/mp3 music was from Brian Eno, and sadly I’ve been unable to find it, but he essentially said that from a producer’s standpoint, this was simply another new technology to adapt to; he wrote about how mixers and producers have eventually adapted their mix for whatever medium is being used (vinyl, cassettes, CDs) and that once people got past the ‘loudness war’, they could optimize music to sound as good as possible when streaming or on lower-bitrate mp3s. Not sure if that’s been accomplished yet.
2 Likes
“The quality of the music is poor, which few would argue in comparison to vinyl.”
I’d certainly not argue that the nonsensuality of this statement is supreme in comparison to paper. If it was meant to say what I am afraid it is, then it is wrong in so many ways that I don’t even know where to start.
I therefore claim that:
MUSIC IS BETTER THAN VINYL!
which only a complete ignorant, hipster or “audiphile” would want to argue.
As a sidenote: there’s poly vinyl chloride (PVC) which one might assume consists from many chained vinyl molecules and some Cl-- Ions, as resonable polymers use to do - but there actually is no compound named Vinyl. Just a trade name for non-polymerized chlorides of vinyl groups, which doesn’t sound as funky as “Vinyl” and which is a different thing anyway.
Even the fairy dust that magically makes music better than itself, Vinyl, is basically just a legend based on marketing gibberish trying to avoid the nasty word “PVC” which is generally and mostly wrongfully associated with “plastic” and “shabby”.
1 Like
No, the quality of music has degraded. Maybe my ear is too sharp or my listening is better developed.
No. There isn’t. That’s what lossless means. No loss. You can grab a CD-audio file (pcm16) directly off the disc (bitwise, no recoding, no loss), take its’ MD5 or SHA hash sum, transcode the file to FLAC and back to pcm16 AKA “.wav”, hash it up again and compare the checksums. They will match.
Identical copy, bit by bit. No information lost. Mathematically identical. Short: lossless compression. Same as ZIP or 7zip.
2 Likes
SDDS and DTS were also used.
(The version of DTS used in theaters differs from the version available at home).
2 Likes
I like Harvest but so far I couldn’t get into his other stuff. That probably makes me a filthy Neil Young casual. Heart of Gold is the weakest song on the album i.m.o.
Did anything that wasn’t from Sony Pictures actually come with SDDS tracks though?
I forgot about DTS, I suppose the better theaters probably would’ve had DTS disc readers. But even so, the low-bitrate film version of AC3 can still sound damn good in a theater with good acoustics and massive speakers. Digital compression definitely can have an audible effect but it’s pretty small compared to the effects of the speakers and the room.
dolby digital wasn’t good enough for Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park;.
The advantage of SDDS seemed to be limited to support for 5 independent front speakers, for truly massive screens.
To some degree, I’ve experienced this myself over time with some games - I have an ultrawide monitor, and some games just…don’t handle it at all, and stretch elements of the HUD or game. Over about 30 minutes or so it stops bothering me and just starts looking like ‘what it is’ - No Man’s Sky still does this, for example. There isn’t (as far as I’m aware) an option to fix this with this particular game so I just shrug and deal with it.
That’s interesting, because that’s not the point of the video you linked, after I watched it. He’s talking about trends in music where complex melodies have fallen out of fashion, and he discusses it as a trend, not as some apocalyptic quality death.
More interesting, nothing he’s talking about has to do with the sharpness of your ears, or the development of your listening. It’s a totally different setup, and it doesn’t even really touch the topic of this thread, which is audio quality in terms of engineering and recording.
It is, however, a pretty interesting video, so thanks for linking it, even if it doesn’t seem to make the point you think it does.
This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
