Neil Young Says MP3 Isn't Good Enough; Neither Are CDs

[Guest]

According to this article: "Even CDs and their WAV format hold only about 15 percent."

I'd really love to know the source of this assertion. What does the author suggest is in the missing 85 percent? Is it frequency information above 22 kHz? Is it the low level information buried in quantization noise? Is it something else entirely? The quoted figure as it is given in this article just does not make sense to me without some idea of to what it is supposed to refer.

 

[Guest]

Well, it could be a alternative to piracy. U can download the 300mb songs free and explode your brandwidth or buy the CD (DVD because CD is too small) so you don't have to download . Yes, music can be avaible to download as MP3 but I think it's a good idea to sell better than you can download. no?

 

[freggo]

I've been saying it for years, MP3 was good in the old days of limited drive space and bandwidth.
Time to retire the format and go to something more professional; and multi channel !
No commercial studio uses 44 or 48Khz sampling anymore, not even to mention two channel sound.
But, like HD movies, it is the Music Industry that does not want to have consumers access to anything better than MP3. God forbid we may be able to make a -perfect- copy for a secondary device without the RIAA getting a cut of their share. All those Executive Salaries and Attorney Fees need to be paid after all.

 

[shoelessinsight]

[citation][nom]peter111@aolcom[/nom]the german magazin CT has made a test wiht so called "gold ears" a few years ago.experts when it comes to audio, people with the absolut hearing.they should decide if it was played from CD or MP3 (a good hardware MP3 player was used).... THEY FAILED MISERABLY. it was 50% right 50% wrong... just as if you had guessed or thrown dices to decide what is MP3 and what is CD..[/citation]
You're right that high bit-rate MP3s (in the 256-320 kbps range) are effectively indistinguishable from their source CDs to the human ear. But that's not what Neil Young is talking about.

CDs themselves are limited in how well they represent the original performance or master tapes. Super Audio CD and DVD-Audio improve significantly on the audio performance of standard CDs, and there may be room for even more advanced formats.

Of course, any file format that is meant to represent these superior sources will also need to be more advanced than MP3. That part is not really a problem as there are already file formats that could meet the task. The trick is to get the music stores and streaming services to support the higher quality music.

Getting portable players to support higher quality music probably isn't as pressing of an issue, though. After all, listening to music on a portable player in most environments presents other challenges to audible quality that won't be overcome with a new file format.

 

[digiex]

I agree that MP3 sucks, Young is a musician, maybe his hearing perception is way above average but for ordinary listener, CD is already excellent.

 

[floorpug]

PCM 44.1kHz/16bit WAV is the Red Book CD format and has become the go-to digital audio medium since the early 80s, and has grown immensely in popularity over the years.
SACDs using DSD are able to represent the analogue waveform much more accurately due to its high sample-rate but wasn't implemented until the late 90s and didn't stand a chance to be commercially viable in the massive cd market.
One of the problems with DSD is how difficult it is to use when editing in a DAW as the word length is only 1bit. Recording engineers should record and edit in their DAW with high res PCM like 96kHz/24bit or 192kHz/32bit per channel and then downsample to Red Book standard for production.
Also, MP3 is an inferior lossy format when compared to file formats such as AAC, OGG and MPC at similar bitrates. If the recording/editing is done in high-res WAV and then downsampled to 44.1/16, Im sure that we could rip our cds at .OGG VBR 192kb/s and not be able to tell the difference in sound to the original highres master WAVs used in recording; thus we can still have our 500 albums on our 40GB ipod

 

[gamerk316]

[citation][nom]peter111@aolcom[/nom]the german magazin CT has made a test wiht so called "gold ears" a few years ago.experts when it comes to audio, people with the absolut hearing.they should decide if it was played from CD or MP3 (a good hardware MP3 player was used).... THEY FAILED MISERABLY. it was 50% right 50% wrong... just as if you had guessed or thrown dices to decide what is MP3 and what is CD..[/citation]

Because MP3 players are HORRIBLE at music playback. They are incapable of driving any decent speakers/headsets, etc. Try the same test using a HQ soundcard, or at least a mid-range audio receiver, and tell me there isn't a difference.

 

[drwho1]

I believe that this is what the article is referring to:
The Super Audio CD format was originally introduced in 1999.[1] Royal Philips Electronics and Crest Digital partnered in May 2002 to develop and install the first SACD hybrid disc production line in the USA, with a production capacity of 3 million discs per year.[7] But SACD did not achieve the same explosive growth that Compact Discs enjoyed in the 1980s,[8] and was not accepted by the mainstream market.[9][10][11] By 2008, some considered the Super Audio CD a complete failure.[12] However, the format continues to thrive in the audiophile community,[13][14] and new SACD recordings[15] and players[16][17] continue to be made.

Despite the global decline in Compact Disc sales, sales of Super Audio CDs and players increased in 2010.[18]


in other words Super Old News.

 

[shoelessinsight]

[citation][nom]Scarl[/nom]According to this article: "Even CDs and their WAV format hold only about 15 percent."I'd really love to know the source of this assertion. What does the author suggest is in the missing 85 percent? Is it frequency information above 22 kHz? Is it the low level information buried in quantization noise? Is it something else entirely? The quoted figure as it is given in this article just does not make sense to me without some idea of to what it is supposed to refer.[/citation]
SACD does store frequency information above 22 kHz (up to 100 kHz, for whatever that's worth), but that's not really the main draw. The two major attractions in high-fidelity formats are dynamic range and multi-channel audio.

Multi-channel audio is pretty straightforward. Instead of only having your music in stereo, you could have it in 3.0 or in 5.1 surround. A lot of research has shown that the most ideal listening experience (as in most realistic and enjoyable) is usually found with three front channels. Surround or rear channels don't tend to add to the enjoyment of the music itself, but offer artists the chance to experiment with audio gimicks.

Dynamic range is a bit more of a complicated issue, but it makes a large difference in the perceived quality of music. The short of it is that dynamic range is the difference between the loud and the quiet sounds in the audio recording. CDs have a theoretical range of 96 dB (though in practice sees about 90 dB). SACDs claim a range of 120 dB, and I believe that DVD-A can reach as much as 144 dB. This means that SACDs have well over 100 times the dynamic range of CDs, and DVD-A can potentially reach almost 100,000 times. Of course, anything over 120 dB is probably overkill since average human perception is over 100 dB in hearing range.

Of course, the dynamic range advantage is moot so long as recording studios keep mashing their songs up with dynamic range compression in an attempt to make them sound LOUD. Dynamic range compression is great on your portable music player or car stereo for when you're in noisy environments, but it's not cool to ruin the source recording with it so that nobody can enjoy the full-quality music in quiet environments.

 

[Guest]

There are alredy several formats much better than mp3 at lower bitrate and higher quality.

 

[stoogie]

You won't tell any difference if you get any purer in audio quality because the human ears have limitations.

 

[stoogie]

So in other words Neil Young you are an idiot. I believe in science not your words.

 

[shoelessinsight]

[citation][nom]shoelessinsight[/nom]Of course, anything over 120 dB is probably overkill since average human perception is over 100 dB in hearing range.[/citation]
Ugh, can't edit my comments on Toms Guide. I had a bad source on that 100 dB number. According to Wikipedia, the dynamic range of human hearing is about 140 dB. So assuming that DVD-A can actually achieve 144 dB (with a 24-bit digital recording), there is actually cause for going with that format.

 

[MU_Engineer]

[citation][nom]JackFrost860[/nom]Isn’t Steve Jobs the very reason why loss compressed music file are ubiquitous today?[/citation]

I think the original Napster had more to do with it than anything. People were sharing MP3s online well before the iPod became popular. If Apple really was responsible for compressed music, the format everybody thinks of would be AAC/M4A rather than MP3. The fact that we call portable digital music players "MP3 players" to this day pretty well backs that up.

 

[modena1230]

I'm more currious about the endding of that article. I too would enjoy higher quality music, but lets build up our infrastucture. We built up the land lines, now we need to upgrade that degradding system to fiber. Plus it would boost domestic spending producing jobs.

 

[CaedenV]

[citation][nom]billybobser[/nom]According to my Digital Signal Processing course, you only need to sample at 2x the max frequency to have enough data to fully reproduce the signal. Which is roughly 44khz (2x the top end of human hearing and a bit more).What they may lack however is quality sound reproduction hardware (digital signal processors are expensive and a bit too big to fit into an mp3 players) so the lame and brute force method of solving this issue would be to sample it so much that you wouldn't need to hardware to reproduce it, which to me is retarded and would essentially take us back to analogue.That's my understanding of my course however, may be wrong![/citation]

While this is technically true there are upper harmonics that the human ear precieves which can change the mood and tone of the music in very subtle ways. If you want proof go listen to a high quality CD vs a record in good condition, there is simply no comparison! That said, I generally record my gigs at 88.2 for CD or 96 for video/high end work, true professional work is done at 196KHz which covers the range of even the highest of overtones and harmonics. The problem is that when you get to high quality files like that then you need the hardware to play it back, and the space to store it. Quite honestly MP3 players (especially iPods) have woeful audio quality (granted, they have steped up their game in the last 2 gens, but a 8 year old creative Zen still rocks better audio fidelity!), and most people have terrible speakers/headphones to play back on, so it really dosn't matter anyways. If you are an audiophyle then you allready know all of this and use something better like lossless MP4 or OOG format for your audio, there are allready plenty of ways to get around the limitations of the mainstream audio world, and it really isn't that hard to do.

 

[eyemaster]

I can easily find the difference between MP3 and CD when I listen to my music, not so much when I listen to other music because I don't know how it's supposed to sound. If you can't hear the difference, try listening to the cymbals, high pitch voices, guitar and such, you will notice that it's flutters or is cut off from doing it's full sound.

 

[Guest]

Even a 100k audiophile speakers will have distotion above to regular CD.

 

[neiroatopelcc]

300mb per song would be a killer for my storage system!
I've got 184.000 mp3 files at the moment, and I just can't imagine how to fit them onto my storage, and let alone backup system, if they were that big.
Also I doubt I could hear the difference. I can't really distinguish between 128 and 320kbit encoded mp3 nor a difference between mp3 and flac (except for the filesize), so I doubt such audio quality is needed for normal music lovers like me.

In short: MP3 is fine until considerably bigger storage is available, as the quality benefit is only theoretical in my case.

 

[Traciatim]

I'm not sure I get the math quoted in the article They say that "The format uses 1-bit sampling at 2.8224 MHz, which is 64 times higher than the 44.1 KHz used by CDs." . . . But isn't 2822.4Khz @ 1-bit only four times 44.1Khz @ 16 bit?

Plus, you can get pretty good lossless compression already at 48Khz @ 16-bit. Even then I would bet on most people's equipment you'd be very hard pressed to tell the difference between any of the digital formats anyway. Unless you have someone with an entire library of 96Kbps MP3's of course . . . but who uses that anymore?