The Death of High Fidelity
billbradley
You want BBQ sauce? Get the fuck out of my house. 2,905 Posts
In the age of MP3s, sound quality is worse than everhttp://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/17777619/the_death_of_high_fidelity
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People were complaining about Amy Winehouse's Back To Black[/b] sounding like crap on CD, even though part of the appeal is that it has that old soul feel. All of us on this board know that, but the average bon bon eating dukalats isn't going to care. However, people said if you want to hear a better version of the album, buy it on vinyl. The mastering is completely different. Same for The White Stripes, Wilco, and more recently the Red Hot Chili Peppers, fans are now going out of their way to say "I want better, put it in the hands of someone who knows how to do the job".
Unfortunately those fans are in the minority, but others are getting wind of it, wondering why their CD's sound like crap when the vinyl version is a lot better.
High fidelity as a mainstream thing is arguably over, why bother with a turntable system and pre-amp when Apple is telling you that everything can be had in the palm of your hand, placed in your pocket, less weight than it is to lug 20 boxes of records or CD's.
I had also heard that some people think that producers are becoming lazy with a lot of mainstream pop hits, claiming that a lot of the mixes are just narrow stereo. In other words, they're lazy.
But you have a battle between those who love the convenience of MP3's vs. those who prefer to take in their music in a high quality fashion. The average/casual listener probably does not know a thing about brickwall limiting, all they care is that "the song is loud, I can hear it, that's good for me". It's like finding an old 45 at a thrift store, playing it at home and realizing the record had seen better days, and you're hearing more of the record than the music. With a lot of brickwalled songs, you're hearing more noise than music, and no one ever said "music sounds better sometimes if you hear a bit more dynamics". To someone younger, that sounds like old man bullshit.
It's less of an audiophile issue and more about hearing music better, because I can't stand it when I do buy a CD and the sound is cluttered in my face like Gianna Michaels titties. At least with Gianna there's joy, there's no joy in hearing something that is truly worse than "clock radio speakers". It's cheap sounding, for the sake of spending less money on making quality product. Quality should be important, but it's more a volume issue.
As I said elsewhere, may have been here, get the CD for the Jungle Brothers' Done By The Forces Of Nature[/b]. One of the tracks has a peak level of I think 43 percent. Back then, albums weren't mastered for CD, they were mastered for cassette, especially with hip-hop. While one can tweak the levels to 99 or 100 percent, mastering engineers do a bit of tweaking to where it's more than the peak levels being reached, it's about compressing the sound to the point where it doesn't sound like it was meant to sound. Volume shouldn't have to be forced, and it irks the shit out of me when it is. Fortunately for the collector, this is the reason why many seek old vinyl, because the limitations of vinyl made a lot of those old records sound great. Early compact discs sounded better because all mastering engineers did was take the master tape, digitize it, and release ith with little to no digital additions. Now, it's all fuck lutz.
I hope people will read that article and truly discover what they are missing.
There is a reason people will pay for these early 90s CDs and not the recent remastered editions - even though the gear used these days is better, the mastering philosophy has changed to the point that even some conservative engineers will slap a sonic maximizer and a brickwall limiter on a mix to boost the volume.
I know people are setting up computers just to send .wav to the stereo system. I never use head phones, I always listen to my mp3 through speakers. Still sounds like shi
I do believe in audible tube magic without question, though I would never ever buy this.
It is all I know of MP3 audiophile recreation, but if the MP3 you're listening to is mastered for a clock radio I don't think the epos or the tubes can help you out much.
so
Are there other options in the digital mastering spectrum?
I been tube faithful for life from playing bass and guitar, and only musical format that survived my wreckles youth was LPs, so I'm way out of their listening loop. A large awareness of these complications is news to me.
The info on these limitations in digital mastering further solidifies the vinyl to mp3 transfer culture for good to me, and the shotty department store usb turntable is just scratching the surface of the trend.
Considering the sound quality, and with the hot garbage that labels call studio releases nowadays I'm not at all surprised the entire music listening world is lurking the used record community here and way beyond.
Vinyl nor CD helped this, such a shame.
Vinyl still sounds the best, I don't think anyone "in the know" can argue that. I love listening to disco/boogie 12's that play at 45 (extra phat grooves), they just sound amazing, warm and punchy. Most people laugh when you say that but it's the truth. The sad thing is I don't think it's even possible to get major radio play without the "brickwall" mastering these days, sad really. I'm as guilty as anyone on this account.
Let me introduce to you, the devil himself...
on a related note I was reading recently about Loudness Wars recently
Hopefully people will go for quality and start ripping wav files or some uncompressed format and itunes will start selling albums as wav or uncompressed. I'd never pay for an mp3 when I could get a cd but I would pay for to download uncompressed audio.
This just doesn't make any sense to me. So after spending thousands you just jumped ship and suddenly don't care, but still keep your gear around?
yeah, if you dont give a fuck now that MUSIC is free, why did you bother buying a really expensive stereo in the first place? there were cheap stereos before mp3s, too.
Pffft. When schitt wasn't free & it was nice to have a good rig. Now its free, so there's really no point to having a good stereo anymore.
I think there will be a digital hi-fi boom, and I also think a good portion of them will have digital and turntables side to side, or at least those with an awareness of how to combine the two. As you said, people are turning their computers into music servers to not only play WAV's, but lossless files such as FLAC, APE, SHN, WV, and a few others. You have hi-pro music servers that are costly ($5000 and up) that some say are excellent. There's a company called Olive where it plays nothing but lossless files.
This model can hold up to 2000 CD's worth of content when converted to lossless, so all one needs is a decent receiver and all the clutter is gone.
Universal DVD players are becoming increasingly popular for those who want to go down the digital route, where it plays CD's, DVD-A's, and SACD's. While the SACD and DVD-A formats failed, a lot of collectors and hobbyists are archiving their vinyl to hi-resolution files and creating their own DVD-A's, in order to preserve their cherished first pressings or long out of print albums, especially those that have not been released on CD legitimately.
There was an article in The Absolute Sound about the topic of digital hi-fi, and audio equipment dealers are preparing for an eventual rise, especially since it is believed that some will feel that their iPod's sound like crap, and they want more than a speaker system you can buy at Target for $49.95. Someone already posted the Fatman docking bay, although one can probably get the same or better sound from doing a bit of thrift store digging for old from the 70's or 80's. So, a gadget you can put in your pocket with ease, working with a big ass Panasonic receiver that will pull a muscle or two, side by side. It can and will happen if music, and more specifically listening to music, is still of importance.
To sum it up, people are moving to an all digital hi-fi set-up right now, and the outlook at the moment seems very good. While the hi-pro audiophiles will continue to shell out $250,000+ for their rooms, one can do it right for $2000 or less, and without having to toss out their turntables either. The fact that people are holding onto their vinyl and buying more, while embracing the technology of today with the potential of what will be coming tomorrow, shows the power of those early records, and why people are converting them to a hi-resolution format and explaining to people how the major labels did it wrong during "the CD era".
Hey - if you're actually serious, ship it my way. I make do with an effing all-in-one to save money for the actual music I play on it.
I read somewhere that iTunes may be introducing the Apple ALAC (Apple Lossless Audio Codec) format into their stores. ALAC, from what I heard, can only be played on iPod's, although if you have the right software, it can be decoded to WAV files and either burned onto a CD or re-coded to FLAC.
Apple, however, doesn't want to deal with FLAC, APE, SHN, or other lossless files, they want to promote their own, so it seems the idea is that Apple will try to persuade labels into encoding their catalog into their format, and you can only download that legitimately, and exclusively, through iTunes. A number of labels are distributing their music in lossless. Check out Sonar Kollektiv, Jazzanova's label. You make a purchase for an individual song or the full album, and you get exclusive links to the FLAC files.
Lossless is an option for independent music and labels, but it's not as widespread as MP3's are. At least not yet.
Yeah, affordable TB storage is really not that far away. The net will probably get faster too. Uncompressed audio won't be a big deal and the mp3 may even become obsolete.
I didn't think the article was that great, RS is about as edgy as the Golden Girls. I'm definitely not losing sleep over what a brick limited Hawthorne Heights album "could have been" ...
The mastering trend itself is interesting but old news.
Ha! Yeah, I keep this stuff kinda as a momento. My first system was an Aiwa all in one. Then I moved up to a Technics TT & a Harman Kardon amp. Later, when I started working, I got some good B&W speakers, a Clearaudio TT, Unico amp & Rega CD player. I got good use out of them for years, but then the soulseek bug bit. Now, I just listen to MP3's on my laptop with AKG headphones. I think I bought 5 records in 2007. One of them is sitting on my turntable right now, covered in so much dust that it looks like I threw a blanket over the damn thing. Maybe RIAA will win & I'll use my stereo again. Who knows?
?????I really don't understand at all. I mean just because you can get music for free doesn't mean you have to! Obviously you used to care about fidelity, why not hook your laptop up to your stereo or better yet uninstall soulseek. Forget about it and listen to your records again.
I agree it is only a matter of time: Some digital releases are already available as wav files.
I could be wrong, but isn't Steven Hoffman famous because he was the first to say that mastering engineers should actually master for CD instead of just digitizing the master tape?
I think the issue is that as far as mastering something properly, it should be done from the best generation master tape, if not the first. When labels digitized masters, they did not know if it was the first generation, a safety copy, or something that was an 8th generation dub. They didn't care, all they wanted to do was convert everything to digital and have a CD on the market.
As labels moved towards releasing their catalog on CD, it was not done well, and the archiving system was not as in-depth or thorough as it is today.
I know Steve Hoffman has his own process of doing things, but you also have people like Dennis Drake and Barry Diament who were in charge of making CD's for Polygram and Diament respectively, and some of those early Polygram atomic and WEA target CD's are of value because they sound close to what the original albums sounded like, before remastering became big business in the mid-90's. Not all of those early CD's are worthy, but some fans will listen and hear a significant change in audio quality. I also think it's the issue of taking a tape that was mixed in analog from the analog era, vs. doing a remaster and reaching a digital phase of the production process.
A good example of digital messing up a great album is the Johnny Winter album Second Winter[/b]. I bought it to hear the extras on the second disc, but I played the album proper. I heard a bit of digital reverb that did not belong, and because of that it sounded different. I myself want to hear the best version of an older album without any additions, and it sounded cold. I played my MFSL CD of it and it reminded me of the original Columbia album, especially during the breaks that are on the album, that loose drum sound that was dominant in the era (pre "adding a pillow in the bass drum" sound). For me, Columbia Legacy messed up. A lot of people probably wouldn't notice it or make it an issue, but I don't want to hear it that way.
Some collectors have been transferring over their records to CD for years, but are now going the hi-res route, realizing that there are very few mastering engineers who will do it right, and most of them will never have access to the albums that could be reissued properly.
To be honest, there are a number of ways to master a recording, and many ways to argue about one's mastering style, whether it's adding NoNoise to remove hiss, brickwall limiting, digitizing the masters and tweaking levels with modern technology, or doing everything analog until the very last step. It's all interesting, but it still has to result in something good. If it's good, people will take notice and want to keep track of their work. Vic Anesini of Sony has done some incredible work. Bill Inglot, who worked with Rhino, always did not only incredible work, but the research which made it possible for other labels to hunt down certain mixes to the point of exhaustion. If I see Suha Gur's name (he works with Universal), I will generally avoid it.
Johmbolaya, you seem to be the wizard on recording, will Windows Media Audio Lossless format grant the same results as a .WAV file? My research quantifies it does.
I actually think the sound of music is gonna get even crappier before it gets better.
Sorry I just had to do that.
Carry on.
And that's what I find ironic - I know several serious record collectors who have amazing vinyl collections yet have the cheapest, crappiest-sounding turntables and stereo systems to play them on.
In that light, I'm hardly going to be mad at digital-only listeners who settle for lesser sound quality when so many of their oldschool analog predecessors do the exact same thing.
Hey!
It's all in what takes precedence to the listener. My turntable sounds good enough to me. Of course, I'd rather have a great set-up than a poor one, but I'd rather have a top-notch collection (and a nice apartment or house) than a great set-up.