Digital Music Rising; CDs On The Way Out

[audioee]

marsax73:

There are other costs associated with CD production not just the cost pressing the media.
1. Retail profit
2. Record company profit
3. Distribution
4. Marketing and Advertising
5. Cover art - Photographers, painters, typesetters, printing, etc.
6. Production - Producers, Engineers, studio time, equipment, etc.
7. Band management, agents, lawyers.

All of the above cost get payed first before the band. So there are quite a few hands in the cookie jar, so to speak.

There is a book, that was used in my Recording Arts minor, by Donald S. Passman called "All you need to know about the music business". Read it to more about record contracts and were the money goes.

 

[cracklint]

get .flac off of p2p, it's the ultimate value and quality

 

[mitch074]

About 'sound resolution': a CD uses 16-bit integer, 44100 Hz, stereo channel sound resolution - which is the range an unaided human ear can cover.

However, we don't only hear with our ears, and not everybody is the same.

For example, in higher frequency, due to the very limited resolution a CD can offer, there is not much that can differentiate a high frequency sound from another: on a CD, they'd actually be normalized to an identical signal.

However, if you double that (96 KHz), you get much higher resolution in mid to high frequencies. That can be heard with sufficiently good hardware and a trained hear. The same, why is stereo not enough? Because each ear is able to give a sound's general direction (that's what the ear's outer pavilion is for), making a pair of channels far not enough (5.1 was a good start, 8.1 is closer to what an ear can catch).

Why are vinyls so much better? Because, in practice, the 'analogue resolution' is much higher than most digital medias allow: if you get down to it, it means a vinyl has a sound sampling approaching 2 MHz on 192 bit floating point resolution - which is mitigated by media decay, reading loss etc.

So, CD quality is the minimum an audiophile can ask for. But even that is not enough: if average sound level compression took place on a CD (like it happens more often than not these days), then CD quality is right down horrible (I don't think Metallica fans will object, when most of them bought Guitar Hero 4 instead of the actual album, only because the album was so compressed there were audible harmonics and distortions!)

Personally, the last album I bought was from 1999: Shimmer by Fuel 238; second hand, a bit scratched, the first thing I did was rip it to FLAC; the second thing I did was convert the lot to Ogg Vorbis so as to take less room on my Rockboxed iPod.

I like Vorbis because even at high compression ratios it doesn't introduce ringing nor harmonics, like WMA or MP3 do. If I really have to get MP3, I do quality-based, independent channels, full spectrum search, no cutoff frequency, unlimited variable bit rate LAME compression.

 

[marsax73]

[citation][nom]Nick_C[/nom]... and in response to the respondent regarding hi-rez audio - are there any credible studies which show that 16/44 is differentiable from, say, 24/96 at *normal* playback levels?Just because 24/96 or 24/192 are possible does not mean that they are meaningful in terms of improved end user experience.[/citation]

When it comes to what you hear, you are right. It's is hard to discern from 16/44 to 24/96. BUT I will say this, when recording from a mic into a professional soundcard, I get more headroom before peaking in 24 bit than with 16 bit. Plus my effects plug ins are in the 24 bit realm so I want to take advantage of that too. So playing back a 24 bit recording on studio monitors at a reasonable level, I can hear the difference. In the real world on an iPod with standard earphones?? Not so much.

 

[marsax73]

[citation][nom]audioee[/nom]marsax73:There are other costs associated with CD production not just the cost pressing the media.1. Retail profit2. Record company profit3. Distribution4. Marketing and Advertising5. Cover art - Photographers, painters, typesetters, printing, etc.6. Production - Producers, Engineers, studio time, equipment, etc.7. Band management, agents, lawyers.All of the above cost get payed first before the band. So there are quite a few hands in the cookie jar, so to speak.There is a book, that was used in my Recording Arts minor, by Donald S. Passman called "All you need to know about the music business". Read it to more about record contracts and were the money goes.[/citation]


You are right. My point is I'm the engineer, producer, art director, etc. I can produce my own music in my studio, put it out on Amazon or iTunes and make a profit while at the same time offering the songs for a smaller cost. The old music industry model stinks. It's outdated. Most of their marketing goes into lame pop music and not the real artists. Good riddance I say!

 

[Nick_C]

I was quite careful to state "end user experience".... 😉

I wholeheartedly agree that extra bit-depth is required in the pre-released stages of production.

To the respondent stating the unbelievable (literally, see dictionary definition) sound reproductive qualities of vinyl - you need to read (and listen to) more.

e.g. Use a good quality DAC to record the output of your wonderful vinyl solution on your PC / Mac / whatever in 16/44. Play back recording through same amplifier / pre-amp / etc as you would with your vinyl. See if you can really tell the difference.

 

[audioee]

And I can guaranty that your equipment does not match up with a professional studios equipment, SSL recording & mixing consoles, 24 bit 192k Protools, Neumann microphones, etc. Don't get me wrong, there is a lot of good home studio, pro-sumer, equipment out there. I just think it doesn't measure up to the fully professional equipment that a professional studio can have. IMO.

 

[oldscotch]

CDs aren't digital?
When did that start happening?

I don't understand purchasing music on iTunes. It's low quality and you can only listen to it on iTunes or your iPod/iPhone ... why would I pay for that?

 

[g00ey]

Nick_C : I Agree with marsax73.
When I was a little boy I got to learn about the Betacam video system and this was before the DV system was well-spread. I was curious about the fuss with the quality and the big cassettes which were at least twice as big as VHS and 5 times as heavy and yet containing only a maximum of 1 hour of footage. But I concluded that this was neccessary since it was analog and for each copy some information were lost. During editing the same information may be copied up to 100 times before it gets broadcasted and it is important that the equipment maintain the quality along the way.

Now, the digital system is lossless when it comes to copying (assuming Reed Solomon and other parity control features) but it has weaknesses. Think of the megapixels in a digital photo camera. The pictures from a 5 megapixel camera may be fine as it is but if you decide to zoom into detail the resolution will become a problem.

So for audio professionals / music producers it is a great advantage for them to work with high quality data without worrying about sound artefacts coming up when remixing and applying DSP due to lack of quality/resolution in the sound data. Once the project is finalized it can be resampled to 16/44 and the mainstream audience will be happy with it.

 

[marsax73]

[citation][nom]audioee[/nom]And I can guaranty that your equipment does not match up with a professional studios equipment, SSL recording & mixing consoles, 24 bit 192k Protools, Neumann microphones, etc. Don't get me wrong, there is a lot of good home studio, pro-sumer, equipment out there. I just think it doesn't measure up to the fully professional equipment that a professional studio can have. IMO.[/citation]

Of course I cannot afford Pro-Tools and Neumann microphones but you still cannot argue that recording at 24bit/96K gives you more headroom than at 16bit/44K. When I record vocals into my Shure KSM44 connected to my Presonus FP10 interface, I can run the signal hotter (especially when using my Nomad Blue Tubes dynamic pack). Believe me I'm not using SM48's into a portable DAW.

 

[mr_tuel]

CDs ARE digital music. This article means to refer to it as "Download music" or maybe even "online music". Digital music has existed on CD since the late 1980's.

 

[jecht]

[citation][nom]justiceguy216[/nom]I'm a casual music listener, but I do appreciate audio quality. I must say that at 192kbps my music sounds fine coming through my home theater system. I can tell the difference between 192kbps and 320kbps..but only if I really focus on listening to the high instruments. I usually listen to music while at my computer or in my car, in these situations I've never noticed the difference...some of my music is even 128kbps!I suppose if I were a musician who devoted many hours a week to purely listening to music I might be more concerned with the quality of my music. I think iTunes should offer an option to download tracks in high-quality at no extra charge, the default would be 128kbps but if you're really after quality you should be able to change your preference to 320kbps...maybe even lossless (though that may increase opperating costs due to bandwidth). This would entice more people from the audiophile demographic to use their service and therefore increase their profit as well as reputation.[/citation]

[citation][nom]mitch074[/nom]About 'sound resolution': a CD uses 16-bit integer, 44100 Hz, stereo channel sound resolution - which is the range an unaided human ear can cover.However, we don't only hear with our ears, and not everybody is the same.For example, in higher frequency, due to the very limited resolution a CD can offer, there is not much that can differentiate a high frequency sound from another: on a CD, they'd actually be normalized to an identical signal.However, if you double that (96 KHz), you get much higher resolution in mid to high frequencies. That can be heard with sufficiently good hardware and a trained hear. The same, why is stereo not enough? Because each ear is able to give a sound's general direction (that's what the ear's outer pavilion is for), making a pair of channels far not enough (5.1 was a good start, 8.1 is closer to what an ear can catch).Why are vinyls so much better? Because, in practice, the 'analogue resolution' is much higher than most digital medias allow: if you get down to it, it means a vinyl has a sound sampling approaching 2 MHz on 192 bit floating point resolution - which is mitigated by media decay, reading loss etc.So, CD quality is the minimum an audiophile can ask for. But even that is not enough: if average sound level compression took place on a CD (like it happens more often than not these days), then CD quality is right down horrible (I don't think Metallica fans will object, when most of them bought Guitar Hero 4 instead of the actual album, only because the album was so compressed there were audible harmonics and distortions!)Personally, the last album I bought was from 1999: Shimmer by Fuel 238; second hand, a bit scratched, the first thing I did was rip it to FLAC; the second thing I did was convert the lot to Ogg Vorbis so as to take less room on my Rockboxed iPod.I like Vorbis because even at high compression ratios it doesn't introduce ringing nor harmonics, like WMA or MP3 do. If I really have to get MP3, I do quality-based, independent channels, full spectrum search, no cutoff frequency, unlimited variable bit rate LAME compression.[/citation]

I'm with justiceguy. I mean, damn, I thought I was an audiophile because I preferred to have my mp3s at 256kbps! I have been humbled. Oh well. I used to know some people who listened to music at 64kbps. >_>

 

[matt87_50]

[citation][nom]marsax73[/nom]There's a band called King Crimson and they have the right model. You can get a high quality mp3 or for a little bit more, you can buy the FLAC version. Honestly, a properly encoded 256K MP3 or 160K MP4 is pretty darn near cd quality. Most online vendors are selling their MP3's at higher bitrates. I record my own tracks in 24 bit/48K and I can hear the difference when I dither down to 16 bit/44K (cd). So to call a CD a pure format no longer holds water.Just my two cents[/citation]

I aggree with what you say about CDs, but then thats whats so irritating about digital distribution as it stands. The move to digital distro should have also been a move to Higher quality audio, with there no longer being a physical media limitation, instead it shifted to LOWER quality...

I don't agree with having an mp3 version, and then charging more for a flac version. but I could understand having a flac version, then charging less for an mp3 version... if you get what I mean...

Like its no more expensive to make a flac version than an mp3 (in fact i would think that reducing an mp3 to mp3 resolution and then maybe mp3 licencing fees would make mp3s More expensive) so we shouldn't pay MORE for a flac version, but I can understand that people should be able to get the mp3 version cheaper, as they are getting less of a product.

 

[g00ey]

To Jech et al: I remember the good old days when I was convinced that 128kbps was good enough. I even laughed at people who said that 128k mp3s were not as good as CDs. I encoded mp3s using Xing and I encoded them to 160kbps just in case. Then one day I started downloading mp3 using Napster and the mp3s had varying quality. I noticed that some of the songs sounded better than the others and I couldn't put a finger on what it was. It turned out that they were all higher than 160kbps.

After that I started figuring that the mp3s had to be at least 192kbps and encoded them in 224 or 256kbps just in case. Then came Lame and I used -r3enc which for a long time was supposed to be the best "audiophile" VBR quality as the new psychoacoustic model was implemented by Naoki Shibata. It was alright but it did miscalculate occasionally and give some frames too low quality which resulted in intermittent drops in quality which was audible.

Then I started to have problems with a few songs, especially those that were acoustic (e.g. The Cranberries - War Child, Uncle Cracker - Follow Me). I heard ringing songs and such, even at quality levels as high as 320kbps, especially when the equalizer was turned on. So I started using Muespack which didn't suffer from these problems and I encoded at --preset-extreme or insane.

If you listen to the mp3s on a cheap Boombox you'll probably never be able to tell the difference between 68k and 192kbut if you listen to them on more sophisticated gear like I do, you will. I'm no audiophile but I enjoy listening to music and I do it on a pair of decent studiomonitors which I believe is the best price/quality trade-off for speakers in the market today although they weren't cheap. And I can tell you that the difference between 192k and 256k is so noticeable that it beyond reason to go below 256k or even 320k or even use mp3 when there are so much better lossy formats out there such as Musepack and Ogg. And then I figure audio equipment will only get better and better so why not take the full step and use ape or flac instead and be sure to enjoy the same songs in 20 years from now?

One other thing with mp3s or lossy formats is that they only sound good from one angle. It's like those painted masonite boards for houses used in cheap western movies. They look like buildings when you shoot with the camera from the front but from the side you'll see that theyr're just a pice of masonite. The same goes with lossy tunes, as soon as you alter the sound material using DSP (echo, equalizer, time-stretch, pitch-control, ...) the sonic illusion falls apart and they'll sound like rubbish.

 

[jimbowne]

[citation][nom]mitch074[/nom]About 'sound resolution': a CD uses 16-bit integer, 44100 Hz, stereo channel sound resolution - which is the range an unaided human ear can cover.However, we don't only hear with our ears, and not everybody is the same.For example, in higher frequency, due to the very limited resolution a CD can offer, there is not much that can differentiate a high frequency sound from another: on a CD, they'd actually be normalized to an identical signal.However, if you double that (96 KHz), you get much higher resolution in mid to high frequencies. That can be heard with sufficiently good hardware and a trained hear. The same, why is stereo not enough? Because each ear is able to give a sound's general direction (that's what the ear's outer pavilion is for), making a pair of channels far not enough (5.1 was a good start, 8.1 is closer to what an ear can catch).Why are vinyls so much better? Because, in practice, the 'analogue resolution' is much higher than most digital medias allow: if you get down to it, it means a vinyl has a sound sampling approaching 2 MHz on 192 bit floating point resolution - which is mitigated by media decay, reading loss etc.So, CD quality is the minimum an audiophile can ask for. But even that is not enough: if average sound level compression took place on a CD (like it happens more often than not these days), then CD quality is right down horrible (I don't think Metallica fans will object, when most of them bought Guitar Hero 4 instead of the actual album, only because the album was so compressed there were audible harmonics and distortions!)Personally, the last album I bought was from 1999: Shimmer by Fuel 238; second hand, a bit scratched, the first thing I did was rip it to FLAC; the second thing I did was convert the lot to Ogg Vorbis so as to take less room on my Rockboxed iPod.I like Vorbis because even at high compression ratios it doesn't introduce ringing nor harmonics, like WMA or MP3 do. If I really have to get MP3, I do quality-based, independent channels, full spectrum search, no cutoff frequency, unlimited variable bit rate LAME compression.[/citation]

When you say you convert the lot to ogg vorbis, what exactly does that mean? I always rip my CD's to .flac for the quality. What program do you use to rip them to vorbis and what are the advantages over .flac?
Thanks, -Jim