August 10, 2007 Old Thread: Important Please Read: MP3 music - it's better than it sounds

[Mr. Afternoon]

Hey a mono mp3 is much smaller, and with a low bit rate you can fit all recored music on a single 1TB hard drive. Then all you need is a garbage can to place it in. Then just mail you money to the record companies, they have a new tithe system for payments.

As far as I know someone did a calculation of music released online in MP3 format and it was 200+ TB.

 

[scifi]

time delay and 192kHz
The AudioPro Home Recording Course

 

[AYanguas]

time delay and 192kHz
The AudioPro Home Recording Course

I am afraid this explanation is false.
It confuses the delay that the human hearing may be able to perceive with the distance between samples. They have nothing to do with it. A DAC smoothes out the analog output waveform by recovering all the "audible" frequencies perfectly.

It is just technobbable to sell Hi-Res technology.

As it is very well known for all who understand how "all this" works, CD resolution 16/44.1 is enough (Nyquist rate). CD dynamic range is higher than vinyl, and the best of all, we don't have cracks/pops or tape hiss. Other thing is when someone "likes" the cracks/pops/hiss because they take them back to the days of their youth with vintage equipment.

All that matters is a well done recording, mixing and mastering. Maybe, Hi-Res technology would be helpful during the record-mix-master process, to minimize losses or spurious frequencies during digital operations. But the final copy to be played by the customer listener can be CD quality and that's enough.

BUT... In the end... We have to sell the Hi-Res, so lets put worse master to the CD to make Hi-Res released format sound better, with a better master.

P.D.: I know MCH have to be released in physical formats with 'Hi-Res' supports (DVD?, DVD-A, SACD, Blu-Ray). Because CD is only stereo or MCH matrixed at most.

 

[J. PUPSTER]

Cope harder, I'll never use MP3 and give up my FLACs. So what if it stimulates my barin differently?

Apparently it has (as long as it's not barren)

 

[jimfisheye]

Audiophiles are supposed to freak out about mp3s and be offended. You'd think they were listening to encoded surround off vinyl of something! Yeah, that's right! THAT's the most altering and degrading format I've ever heard. 320k mp3 delivers better sound than most people have systems to reproduce it with. 192k is still transparent to any one in the ear buds or shitbar camp. Lower than that obviously gets into AM radio territory or worse.

Actually I have heard worse altering damage done to music mixes than what SQ, QS, CD-4, etc can do on a bad day. Poor mastering work overshadows all of the above! Garbage in, garbage out and not the fault of the format.

I don't think there's any defense for using mp3 with the data rates and storage nowadays other than sending rough mix in progress work to clients during production. But it's a pretty decent recording container compared to a lot of other examples from the past that no one ever gets worked up about.

The weird gaslighting and making silly stuff up about stair step waves... that delay claim is a hilarious misunderstanding that sounds like someone was trolling. I suppose they're trying to sell something. Fishing for music listeners that can't hear very well (and thus call them out immediately) I suppose. More likely fishing for some kind of copy protection gone wild system to push.

 

[par4ken]

Cope harder, I'll never use MP3 and give up my FLACs. So what if it stimulates my barin differently? Its pretty much useless in every other aspect!

EDIT: As an audio engineer, anything above 24 bits and 50 KHz is pretty much useless, for the time being. 24/96 I guess is fine, but 24/192 and higher is a scam .

I now do all my vinyl transfers at 192 32-bit float, I believe that the extra samples are especially helpful when you run a de-clicking program. The 32-bit float prevents any possible clipping while recording, I then save the files as 24/192, and sometimes also as 16/44.1 to use to make CD's. I can't say that there is a great difference or any difference between 24/96 and 24/192 but with cheap hard drive space why not just keep the higher rez files?

 

[Mr. Afternoon]

...cheap hard drive space why not just keep the higher rez files?

because the developmental files for bonana were 120gb at 24/48

i nor any of my other artists are not going to be recording/releasing anything past 24/96 for the time being lol, we need the space rn

 

[jimfisheye]

The 8 bits of zeros you record in every sample from your 24 bit converters into a 32 bit floating point container are especially helpful... in increasing your hard drive storage needs!

I know that was trolling but how do some people not see obvious stuff like this? (People supposedly interested at a high level.)

 

[JulesRules]

I am afraid this explanation is false.
It confuses the delay that the human hearing may be able to perceive with the distance between samples. They have nothing to do with it. A DAC smoothes out the analog output waveform by recovering all the "audible" frequencies perfectly.

It is just technobbable to sell Hi-Res technology.

As it is very well known for all who understand how "all this" works, CD resolution 16/44.1 is enough (Nyquist rate).

I used to think that way until I read a post on the Hoffman forums which made a compelling point - in order to get the signal to encode at that sampling rate, you need to apply the brickwall filter, and that is where things are supposedly messed up...

 

[jimfisheye]

I used to think that way until I read a post on the Hoffman forums which made a compelling point - in order to get the signal to encode at that sampling rate, you need to apply the brickwall filter, and that is where things are supposedly messed up...

Yep!
If you try to digitize a signal with frequencies above the nyquist limit for the sample rate (1/2 the sample rate), you get audible artifacts that can sound shitty. With the sample rate RIGHT next to the audio band in 44.1kHz, you have to put a steep eq there to filter out higher frequencies to prevent aliasing artifacts. This filter is an analog device in the circuit! Analog eq circuits are still hard. What you're actually comparing between SD and HD is that potentially shitty analog eq filter. HD doesn't need any kind of eq filter at all because the audio band is right down the middle of a very wide road. This is why upsampling works to workaround converters that don't sound as good at SD as HD. The music content is in there if you can extract it properly.

 

[MidiMagic]

neil wilkes said:

Try flipping a decoded MP3 stream to Mid/Side, mute the Mid component and pan the side across both channels....then tell me it still sounds acceptable.

Any link that elaborates on this method? Should be an interesting read.

You can do that by listening to just the surround channel in Dolby Surround.

I encoded several QS recordings I made into a low bitrate mp3 to enter them in a contest. When I played them back, all of the content I put in LB moved to L and all the content in RB moved to R.

 

[kfbkfb]

When the VideoCD [also CD-i DV] first appeared in ~1993, IIRC, Roger Dressler of Dolby stated that the MP1 sound coding used on it would adversely affect Dolby Surround decoding by reducing the directionality (I don't know of any listening tests that were done to hear exactly what happened, though).


Kirk Bayne

 

[furui_suterioo]

128k mp3 is horribly "gurgley" through matrix or passive decoder but 320k can be good. I often download yt videos in mp3 just to save time, national-kid has a bunch of QS encoded videos which seem to decode fine even in mp3.
http://youtube.com/channel/UCknkWMqydDiTqBiHxwSbJdg/videos

 

[Mr. Afternoon]

128k mp3 is horribly "gurgley" through matrix or passive decoder but 320k can be good. I often download yt videos in mp3 just to save time, national-kid has a bunch of QS encoded videos which seem to decode fine even in mp3.
http://youtube.com/channel/UCknkWMqydDiTqBiHxwSbJdg/videos

youtube is 128kbps audio.

 

[mandrix]

I did send Mr. Selvin an email, but I preferred to keep it as positive as I could. I could have written a book, hell we all could, but I did not want to bog him down with a lengthy diatribe about the music industry, and I chose not to correct him.
I will share what I wrote, and forgive that I wrote this nearly half asleep so I'm sure it could have been better:

Dear Mr. Selvin,

Kudos to you sir, for stating what many of us know, yet puzzle at, the widespread acceptance of inferior audio such as MP3. I give you an extra star also for your cogent explanation of how audio, once it’s left the studio, is continually degraded down the line.



At 70, and having spent time in the military, my hearing is certainly not super great anymore. Yet, even I can discern the difference between, say, a DVD-Audio or SACD disc and the low rent stuff that passes for downloads these days.



Now, there are artists releasing acceptable downloads in FLAC format. It would be unfair of course to tar everyone with the same brush. But they don’t drive the money machine at the record labels.



My personal thing is surround music. With today’s delivery technology, many of us wonder why more isn’t done by the record companies to re-release the old quad recordings in an acceptable format, such as Rhino has done with Chicago and The Doobie Brothers Quadio releases.. After all, much great music was released in the Quad era, just on mainly inferior delivery systems such as the Q8 cartridge. Yet many of us still treasure the old recordings that have been copied from the media of that era, because that’s what we have to work with.



My wish is that your article and voice somehow gets through to the folks that can make all music releases in a higher rez format than the bulk of current nearly un-listenable formats such as MP3.



Stand on your soapbox, brother, and shout it as long & loud as you can.

 

[mandrix]

...and I just found out my email delivery failed. Apparently that email address for Mr. Selvin might no longer be viable?

 

[Old Quad Guy]

I originally posted the article at post #1 14 years ago. I’m surprised it keeps popping up now and then. Back 14 years ago, SACD and DVD-Audio were still around, like at Best Buy, but seemed to be dying out. You had to jump on titles that were out there because they were going away rather fast. The general public wasn’t aware what DVD-A and SACD even was. So, the idea was to put it on the radar at least, of the great rock critic Joel Selvin. He’s also written some great books on the history of Rock. He has been there and saw things firsthand. He co-wrote Sammy Hagar’s biography. Which is an interesting read. I recommend it.

Hard to imagine now, but HDTVs were coming out, and most of us still had tube TVs (I gave mine away to a friend who still uses them).

You would see a title going away and prices go down to nothing, followed by sky high. Other titles just keep going up like Deep Purple’s “Machine Head” with a new 5.1 mix.

I occasionally still use the old MP3’s on portable devices if it’s the only copy available. Otherwise, I save at CD Wav quality only because 32 GB cards are inexpensive. Use whatever you like, life is too short.

 

[mandrix]

Well egg on my face. lol.

 

[Old Quad Guy]

No worries, we all do. Social media is simply like that.

 

[furui_suterioo]

youtube is 128kbps audio.

I usually seek out better quality if I end up liking the content. Been listening through the Space & Image Composer a lot lately since recapping and the gurgling in my folder of mp3 downloads is especially noticeable but many are not so bad. It's that much more exciting to hear the lossless version when you only had mp3 before.