Speculation On a Lossless iTunes Store

DrJenny writes "C|net UK has up an interesting blog post predicting that within 12 months Apple's iTunes Store will include a download center for lossless audio. This would be a massively positive move for people who spend thousands of dollars on hi-fi gear, but refuse to give money to stores that only offer compressed music — they could finally take advantage of legal digital downloads. The article goes into details on how Apple's home-grown ALAC lossless encoding relates to FLAC, DRM, and the iPod ecosystem."

they make money on the razors

Speculation On a Lossless iTunes Store

Lossless? I thought the iTunes store was a loss leader?

I'm sure I'll be modulated for saying this, but

As much as it hertz, their loss results in your gain.

Re:they make money on the razors

Lossless? I thought the iTunes store was a loss leader?

No clue. I refused to read the linked article, because I'm a graphics snob, and they used JPEG graphics instead of lossless TIF files.

"Lossless"? Such BS

Forget "lossless" when you've already lost so much of the original wave by mixing it down to 16-bit 44khz stereo in the first place. I'd rather have something that started out with a higher sampling rate/etc, but with good lossy compression to pull it down to something that doesn't require DVD-type storage for a single album.

Re:"Lossless"? Such BS

Sorry, Nyquist's theorem states that you can accurately represent frequencies up to 1/2 the sampling rate. Assuming you are a human and not a dog [lib.unb.ca], you can not hear frequencies above 22khz. As for 16 bit, nobody uses all that dynamic range anyway. So 16bit/44.1khz is entirely good enough for listening.

Now 24/96 has its uses if you're mastering something, so that any errors introduced in the mixing process are below the quantization error in the final 16/44.1 product.

Re:"Lossless"? Such BS

Nyquist's theorem states that you can accurately represent frequencies up to 1/2 the sampling rate. That is 100% true. But in the real world, if you are sampling a digital recorder at 44Khz how do you ensure that NOTHING above 22Khz gets to the analog to digital converter? You need a strong analog filter but there are no filters that have an exactly square cut off Maybe let's say you have a 24db per octave filter. This mens you will have only attenuated the higher frequencies, not eliminated them. Same on playback. You need a theoretically perfect analog filter to playback. Such analog filers do not exist. The way they get around all this is to sample at 96 or 128Khz. If you do this then real-world analog filters can be used.

Re:24/96?

24 bits per sample, cool. With you all the way.

But, 96 KHz sampling? You do know the Nyquist theorem [wikipedia.org], don't you? You are aware that top human frequency tops off around 20 KHz, right? That 48 KHz, even with 24-bit precision, should take care of all sounds possible for the human to hear?

I've had audiophiles* just snub their noses at mathematical proof and regrettably inform me that I do not have "the golden ear." I wonder if there have ever been any research on whether self proclaimed audiophiles REALLY have magical hearing.

(* You didn't say you were, don't take it personally. When I see super-high sampling rates bandied about I get a little red.)

Re:24/96?

That 48 KHz, even with 24-bit precision, should take care of all sounds possible for the human to hear?

Human being the key thing here. What makes you think that parent is human?
On the internet nobody knows you're a dog...

let's take a tour of the Nyquist sampling theorem

Nyquist's theorem states that a wave of frequency f must be sampled at the rate of at least 2f in order for information not to be lost. So, yes, a 44.1kHz sampling rate can accurately reproduce signals up to 22kHz without loss of information, and since that's all we can hear, we should be fine. Right?

Well, not entirely. You see, if the source material contains frequencies above 22.05kHz, they will end up "aliased" onto another part of the frequency spectrum. In short, the extra high-end becomes noise. Information is lost.

Here is the important part, in practical terms. In order to prevent aliasing, the source material must be low-passed to remove the unrepresentable high frequencies. Low-pass filters are not perfect; in order to toss out the frequencies we don't want, we end up attenuating some of the frequencies we do want. Thus it is not uncommon for high-frequency rolloff to begin in the mid-teens of kilohertz, even though we're aiming for 22kHz as the corner frequency.

This causes a real, human-audible difference in the finished product, and it is practically impossible to avoid.

Now, with a 96kHz sample rate, we aim to squash all frequencies above 48kHz, and our non-ideal low-pass filter starts to work in the 30kHz range. The imperfections in the low-pass filter are only apparent at frequencies humans can't hear. The finished audio ends up sounding like the source material, with no human-detectable loss in fidelity.

This is why 96kHz is a good idea.

For a studio

That is a good argument for why a studio should sample at a rate that accommodates the roll-off in their analog low-pass filters. However, once that is done you can use a can use a digital lo-pass filter / downsampler which can easily be designed to have very sharp cut-off rates. There is no reason at all for a consumer format to be more than 48kHz.

Re:24/96?

There is an advantage to higher sampling rates, but it has nothing to do with the frequency content of the recorded material or Nyquist's theory . If you sample at 44.1 khz (CD standard) you get 44.1 khz noise in the output. That has to be filtered out somehow, without affecting the in-band audio signal. Rolling off many DB in a short frequency span (factor of ~2) takes quite a filter, which depending on how it's done, introduces phase shifts of the in-band signal. The sound quality from CD players it largely determined by how, and how well, the D-A conversion (which has a frequency response all it's own determined by the guts of the converter)and analog filtering are done.

      Sampling at higher frequencies makes it easier to build a good output filter. That's a very secondary or tertiary level effect, so it doesn't really make much difference, but it theoretically could.

      Note that this is assuming the standard PCM encoding. "Single Bit"/streaming encoding (like SACD runs at fantastically higher sample frequencies, but the frequencies aren't really comparable (and it's not a good way to go because you introduce other issues (like tons of quantization noise).

        The only identified issue with the standard red-book CD format is the dynamic range, but there are so few sources that need more than 16 bits and certainly very few playback systems/environments that will let you take advantage of it, it's essentially a non-issue. HDCD (which is a 20-bit PCM format) addresses this but hasn't and probably won't become common.

    Bottom line - the guys who came up with the audio CD sampling format pretty well knew what they were doing and there aren't any practical limitations in the recording format. Everything else in the system (from microphone to engineering to speaker) is the limiting factor.

        Brett

Re:24/96?

I know two audiophiles - professional audio mixers, to be exact, who absolutely have golden ears. They listened to a CD of an album master and frowned like something was wrong. The "image" wasn't right; "smeared" somehow. Turned out they could hear the difference between a master CD and a copy of the CD. The difference? Clock jitter. Yes, they could hear the effects of clock jitter. Both of these guys are legally blind which apparently sharpens other senses.

Re:24/96?

What about 24bits/sample, 96K samples/second?

Enough with the 24/96 wet dreams. Yes, 24/96 does offer real advantages for mixing houses in terms of being able to normalize levels generated by different sources and reducing the complexity of filters. But 16/44.4 is perfectly fine for home audio playback.

What does >16 bits get you? More dynamic range. BFD. 16 bits gets you (realistically) 90+ dB of dynamic range. Unless your listening room has a background noise level of 20 dB or less (trust me, it doesn't), you're not even enjoying the true benefit of the 16-bits you have now.

What does > 44.1kHz sampling give you? Wider frequency response. BFD. Let's assume that most people have good hearing beyond 20 kHz (very few do). Let's assume that most music/movie content has lots of information above 20 kHz (some do, most don't). Let's assume that your speakers can reproduce signals above 20 kHz (some can, most can't). There is still the issue of how you get that > 20kHz info on your recording on the first place. You see, most microphones don't record signals out that high, and of those that do, they only do so over a very narrow angle. When we have tech that can produce mics that are omni-directional above 20 kHz for reasonable costs then maybe you'll have an argument.

Let's deal with the loudness wars before we start worrying about 24/96.

Re:24/96?

Once, when my band was recording to a digital medium (a RADAR 24-track hard disk recorder, for those keeping score), we captured some tracks at 16bit, and some at 24bit. All other parameters in the signal chain were held constant.

I did not expect to hear as big a difference as I did. 24b absolutely crushed 16b in the oh-so-unscientific terms of listening enjoyment. Everything, especially the cymbals, sounded clearer, less harsh and brittle, more defined. We had to throw away some good 16b takes because they sounded so much worse than the 24b recordings.

Don't be so quick to discount the difference that a little extra dynamic range can make. Sure, you might not notice when you're listening to your iPod in your 89 Chevy Cavalier with the burned out left rear speaker, but it's not as hard to tell as you might think.

Finally...an archive format

Hope this happens. After transcoding my CD collection to FLAC to arhive it, I now regularly batch re-encode to smaller and smaller bit rates using new releases of lossy encoders. AAC has gotten much better (esp AAC-HE) over the years to the point for a portable player, 48kbs is perfectly acceptable to my ears. With a 16GB iPod Touch, I could see buying music from the iTMS in some lossless format and transcoding to get my entire collection all on a small, flash memory player.

Re:Finally...an archive format

If you're converting to mp3, and have an operating system that supports FUSE (GNU/Linux and FreeBSD are the ones I know about), take a look at mp3fs - it's a virtual filesystem that will encode from lossless to lossy on the fly. It's great for putting stuff on a small flash memory player.

Any chance of better-than-CD?

Linn Records [linnrecords.com] offers downloads of 24-bit 96kHz songs. It would also be great to see DSD [wikipedia.org] files available sometime. Those formats would really bring interest.

It's good to see the possibility of lossless music nevertheless. :)

Let me translate...

From the blog:

"And now I have an inkling Apple will add lossless music downloads to the iTunes Store within the next 12 months."

Translation:

I have no fricken clue that this will ever happen, but because I think it'd be cool if it did, I'll go ahead and blog about it.

The reasons I'll never adopt DRM lossless audio...

Other than selection, which is arguably a non-issue these days, why would I bother downloading something as large as lossless audio when there's no real benefit to doing so? I could just as easily go to the store and pickup the original CD for only a small bit more than or, more than likely, the same price as the download. I get the physical media and it doesn't cost much more, this is a no brainer for me.

The ease of access argument is null, in my mind, because it has DRM and any ease is negated right there. When I spend the time to download FLAC from etree, dimeadozen, or where ever else, it's not a waste because the music is free, pretty much unavailable in any other format anywhere, and there's a huge selection of it.

I'm sure it will have limited success with those that are *that* excited about the delivery medium and are that obsessed with lossless format. For the rest of us that pretend to be audiophiles, we'll probably stick to our free FLAC files and/or purchased physical CDs.

Re:The reasons I'll never adopt DRM lossless audio

Personally, I'm beginning to wonder if the real reason for dynamic range compression is so that customers aren't surprised by how crappy some manufactured idol bands and singers sound in person without heavy studio voice processing.

Watch out, you're about to start an argument with all the people who think that it's normal for good bands to make albums with only one good song.

So...

This would be a massively positive move for people who spend thousands of dollars on hi-fi gear, but refuse to give money to stores that only offer compressed music

So....this is for all 17 of them? I figured since they have that much money for equipment, most would just get the CD's and rip them via those means. If you can afford a $20k speaker, you can afford a a few TB Hard drives to keep your music.

In other words..

Apple can cater to the portion of the market that has rejected AAC, while simultaneously ensuring lock-in by using their proprietary codec that isn't interoperative with other players.

It makes sense.

Win for Apple, and lossy everyone else, including customers. (Inless they have the wisdom to just say no and keep buying CDs. And iTunes store's popularity suggests lots of people don't.)

Or they could just stick with CDs

Most CDs have about 10-19 songs and range in price from $10-$15 (at least the mainstream ones). That works out to usually $0.99 a song. The last album I bought was Timbaland: Shock Value. 17 good songs for $12.

Re:Or they could just stick with CDs

You might like all the songs. Since I listen mostly to rock/alternative genres, I probably only want his singles. Can I buy them cheaply, like my dad could in the 70's? He's got a stack of 45's that probably reaches the ceiling of my apartment.

I do realize they still sell them, but are they $0.99 per song cheap?

Finally! DRM free, lossless, digital music!

Isn't it amazing that 25 years after the release of the CD, we're excited to finally have a way to buy DRM free, lossless, digital music? If this happens, we'll be back inline with 1982 technology.

Livin' Large

Nice idea, but Apple hasn't yet introduced the 1TB iPod Classic you'd need to hold all your uncompressed music...

Lossless iTunes store?

I thought the whole point of having a music store online was so that they could make a tidy profit with minimal expenditure. Wouldn't that mean they've been lossless already?

Doesn't MP3Sparks.com do that already?

Or is it because of the definition of legal?

Zunior already supports FLAC

I haven't RTFA'd, so don't know if this is in there, but Zunior.com is already offering FLAC downloads for $2 more than their mp3 downloads; it was definitely an incentive to buy from them, and I imagine some other, smaller mp3 stores are also offering lossless. Hopefully both Apple and eMusic will take the hint.

iTunes won't get any more sales from me...

Forget Apple... I updated my iPod's firmware to Rockbox (which natively offers several lossless formats, and a slew of other features) and haven't looked back.

I did this for 3 reasons... 1) iTunes stopped supporting Windows 2000. (Yes, I know it's old, but I don't have to deal with the stupid BS Microsoft has built into XP, like WGA). 2) The 1.2.1 Apple firmware for iPod Videos gave me trouble with a bunch of my MP3s--cutting off the song at the 75% marker and refusing to seek within the track. (Of course, the catch-22 is that I can't get a newer iPod firmware from Apple since they refuse to support W2K). 3) I never liked the way iTunes worked in the first place...

I don't hold out much hope that a lossless format sold thru iTunes will truly be lossless. After all, converting an LP to 16-bit 44.1KHz WAV is, by definition, lossy (but outside of the perceptions of 95+% of the people out there)... To add, part of the reason that iTunes even sells DRM-free music is because the record companies can say "if you want higher quality, buy the CD or, better yet, vinyl!" So, I doubt many record companies will be selling uber-high-quality lossless tracks through iTunes...

DRM silliness

So they lock down these files with DRM. Then DVD-Jon (or someone else) comes up with a DRM-stripping program for the files.

Then people can re-encode the files to their format of choice. But by then, most consumers have said "fuck it" and decided to just download their format of choice directly from p2p or usenet because it's easier and simpler than paying Apple and still violating the DMCA just so the music they paid for will work on the audio player they own.

Oh wait, that's already the status quo... Never mind.

If you wish they'd just adopt FLAC...

...make some noise; here's one place to start: http://flac.sourceforge.net/itunes.html [sourceforge.net]

almost everyone else distributing lossless (except musicgiants) is using FLAC [sourceforge.net] and/or WAV. it's supported by almost all s/w except itunes, hell you can even get wmp to play FLAC with some work.

re:TFA, lossless is not directly about quality, mp3 and aac both can be perceptually transparent for the most part, it's about (depending on your personality) perceived quality or format independence -- i.e. being able to transcode to the format you need without quality loss.

Cool if/when it happens

Sure I might buy something in Apple's lossless format from iTunes, but

A - If I'm going to pay extra for DRM'd lossless, I better get the cheap lossy version for free (for my phone, wife's iPod, whatever) because paying them to compress a song for me is ridiculous,and
B - It will be a moot point if the player won't play all the FLAC I already have, because I won't own the player. It's why I don't own one now.

Lossless piracy?

Am I out of the loop? I was under the impression that most piracy was of the low quality mp3s that suck on any high end audio gear.

Lossless is a great idea and may open up a new market to the iTMS, but I can't image it's going to offset piracy. I'd think it will offset physical CD sales.

why it's not about FLAC+DRM

the article claims that apple won't go with FLAC because we're against DRM. I don't think so; if we're to believe Steve then he's against it too. and there's nothing stopping apple from sticking FLAC in an mp4 container with fairplay, we can't prevent that anyway. aside from the principle of it, another reasone we're against it in FLAC is that DRM is doesn't belong in the codec layer, it's a layer on top.

apple's got nothing to fear from FLAC, it can actually be used to their advantage to get a leg up on the competition, since for lossless electronic distribution FLAC is becoming the de facto standard.

I dunno...

Lossless audio is going to involve some large file sizes, and with that, comes increased costs--bandwidth ain't free, and storage/delivery of these files is not going to be cheap or easy. This all translates into fairly expensive downloads.

So for Apple to seriously consider this, they're going to have to figure out if there are enough audiophiles out there willing to pay that kind of money for downloads.

Personally, I kinda doubt it.

Nyquist and less loss

Selling 44.1khz/16bit/stereo audio files is the same business as selling downloadable DVDs. Only freak hobbyists will do it for the next few years until consumers have enough bandwidth, time, storage, motivation to indulge in such a hobby. Commercial big file size media business (excluding game binaries) is just a press release folks. All soundbytes, no usage.

And as for Nyquist... its a theorem, not a fact. Compare a 44.1/16bit file to a 96khz/24bit file on a studio grade sound system and you'll hear the difference. Nyquist didn't listen to music.

tag: rumorsrumorsrumors

Again, if Microsoft is about "Developers Developers Developers" then Apple's meat and drink is "Rumors Rumors Rumors".

Contradiction

This would be a massively positive move for people who spend thousands of dollars on hi-fi gear, but refuse to give money to stores that only offer compressed music -- they could finally take advantage of legal digital downloads.

For serious?

If you've got thousands of dollars to toss around on audio equipment, you're seriously going to be stingy enough to illegally download music on the principle that you don't want to pay the $2-$3 more it costs to buy the physical CD?

I'm sorry, but that's got to be one of the lamest excuses for pirating music that I've ever heard.

To be fair, I actually can tell the difference between a 128kbps and a 192kbps MP3 when listening to certain pieces of music with a pair of decently nice headphones. 'Quieter' pieces, and most classical music don't do all that well under low-bitrate MP3 compression -- however, a 256kbps VBR MP3 (Amazon) is virtually indistinguishable from the original CD, whereas AAC (iTunes) is purportedly an even better codec.

Lossless audio is a waste of bandwidth, and frankly not worth the extra expense to the consumer.

However, if some music store wants to offer FLAC downloads for twice the price, I'm sure the audiophiles will be all over it, just like those $400 volume knobs.

(My prediction: The "They Might Be Giants" model of online distribution will become increasingly popular over the next few years, which will cut the music stores and record labels out entirely. As an added bonus, I'm sure a bunch of the bands will offer FLAC versions for a modest extra fee to appease their audiences.)

Audiophiles

Why would people with high-end audio gear want to download digital music? I thought they all insisted on listening to wax drum recordings to achieve the best possible "natural sound".

How good is your DAC?

Converting digital to analog regardless of recorded format will introduce noise unless you have a really good DAC carefully shielded from electrically noisy power supplies etc in your PC. Sure the DACs can be linear, have low distortion, but they better be in well shielded environment to gain any advantage over a 128 kbps mp3 file quality.

This'd be great

As a musician and audio snob, I really prefer uncompressed audio, and when I got an itunes gift card and selected tunes to use it up, I saw they were 128k AAC IIRC, I was bummed. I wouldn't pay for that. I don't support the free music aka communist wave that is sweeping the industry, so if I am going to pay, I shouldn't get 2nd rate garbage for what I pay.

AIF, AAC, RAW for Audio

The RAW equivalent for audio would nice, but lossless would be what it would take for me (and everyone I know) to buy online.

If any of you remember cassettes, low end MP3s are about equal (IMHO).
I haven't bought / downloaded any music because of this factor - it's just not good enough when I can purchase the CD and deal with it from there.

AAC is pretty damn good, but no, I can tell the difference for the most part and well, really, come on, get real - they already SELL it lossless, it's not like you're twisting knobs to transfer it to the hard drive.
If anyone can get the majority of the Corporate Music above the line brain dead to listen, it'll be Jobs, and Team Apple, both of them.

Lossless.

Dude. Lossless should mean that if you buy a song and your computer explodes later, you should be able to re-download all the songs you bought. Free.

I wish...

I wish I had mod points right now to mod down a bunch of these totally
ignorant descriptions of how bit-depth/sampling rate affect sound quality

Anyone that says "we don't need the dynamic range of 24 bits" has no fking clue
how digital audio works. 24 bits is better because it allows for a smoother waveform,
such that it more closely resembles the infinite voltage range of analog. 16 bits is
is a relatively "jaggy" waveform. Most people perceive it as "harsh" even if they don't
understand why.

I think I'll go tell some doctors how to use a scalpel since I sorta know what the word
scalpel means.

But what about the inter-track gaps?

One reason people love FLAC so much is that it copes well with inter-track gaps, i.e. the gaps between songs on a CD. Some CDs have no gap between songs, they just run into each other ("gapless"). You can play back MP3s encoded with LAME as gapless, but it's a hack. Using EAC, you can make perfect bit-exact FLAC rips that play back exactly as the original CD did, including gapless parts.

I'm betting iTunes won't support it. It took them years to get gapless playback working on the iPod, and they never back-ported it or offered fixes for people who had already bought DRMed tracks. When you factor in the cost of buying a whole album of DRM-free tracks vs. buying the CD from a discount on-line store, it doesn't look good. In fact, often the CD can be cheaper, especially used on Amazon.

Oh, and lets not forget that the sound output from iTunes isn't brilliant anyway. At least on Windows, it goes through the Windows mixer which re-samples everything to 48KHz. Anyone serious uses WinAMP or Foobar with Kernel Streaming/ASIO to bypass that.

No serious Hi-Fi buff will bother with this, they will stick to CDs or pirate FLAC rips.

Just when we thought 160GP iPods were big enough

I pretty much assumed the 160 GB iPod Classic was going to be the end of the line for that... Maybe a few people have more than that amount of music, but not terribly many. And the screen, compared to the touch model, isn't great for viewing video... Add uncompressed music and all of a sudden, 160 GB is likely to seem cramped.

So, yes, on the one hand, I'm sure audiophiles at Apple thought it'd be a great idea. But on the other, I'm also quite certain that the marketing department also thought "what a great way to continue the growth of the sales curve"

Next, they'll stop offering compressed .aac's altogether, just to kind of force the point.

It's not just about the format, buddy.

... a download center for lossless audio. This would be a massively positive move for people who spend thousands of dollars on hi-fi gear, but refuse to give money to stores that only offer compressed music

Whoever will be going to set up such a thing should keep in mind that people who spend thousands of dollars (make this dozens of thousands, if you like) for their audio equipment are not just picky when it comes to the format of the tracks they are offered.

They are equally picky in terms of recording/encoding quality of the tracks, to start with.

They won't be willing to deal with any kind of DRM, watermarks and other annoying side effects.

And last but not least, they are especially demanding when it comes to content. Real content, top quality content. For many of the audiophiles this will be Classical music, featuring the world's top orchestras, conductors and voices, including a tagging scheme that finally makes sense in operas and symphonies, etc. etc.

This could be achieved, but then we're not in Kansas... err... mainstream music business anymore, as we know it today.

Otherwise most people in the target group will just laugh all the way to their favourite downtown CD-and-vinyl stores.

You all just need to go see the Melvins

Quit whining about sampling rates and gold cables and such. Just go see the Melvins or Motorhead live and your hearing will come down to the level of normal people who just enjoy music.

Re:Coincidence?

A witty use of tinyurl - mod parent up! +1 for non-obvious trolling ;)

Re:Flac is gay..

But that's not the point. I encode my CDs to FLAC, I can re-encode to any lossy or lossless codec I like without any degradation in quality. So it's perfect for archiving music. Or, indeed, buying downloads that I'm going to want to keep indefinitely. I see MP3s and other lossless codecs as something transient, an equivalent of cassette tapes - all right to listen to, but you wouldn't want to keep them forever.

Re:Flac is gay..

It's still a lossy format which strips out some of the audio detail. I'm no gold-connector-magnetically-balanced-shielded-cable audiophile, but I do appreciate being able to listen to the entire depth of a piece of music (especially classical).

Perhaps a better way of putting it would be 'the human ear cannot distinguish between 320kbps MP3 and FLAC if listened to on iPod headphones', which is fair enough. There's no need to include everything if all I'm going to do is listen to it on the bus. Which leads to my original point - MP3 is lossy. AAC which is my format of choice is better quality for the space and bitrate, but is still lossy. FLAC isn't, which means I could have my lossless FLAC copy on my desktop where there's easy storage space, then have iTunes automatically create reduced quality versions for carrying around on my iPod. Compression from lossless source is always better than compression from an already compressed copy.

Not to mention that the iTunes store *isn't* 320kbps. 128kbps for the normal content, 256kbps for iTunes Plus.

Re:Flac is gay..

This is true (at least for me - I already can't hear the difference between CD and 192kb AAC). However, the idea here is probably to let the user archive the music, and encode it in the format he or she wants. 320kb AAC sounds awesome, but if your player only plays MP3, you've already got one transcoding action which will take away from the quality of your music.

No...

The AVERAGE human ear cannot distinguish the difference between a *perfectly encoded* mp3 at 320kbps.

However, not all MP3 codecs are perfect, and not all ears are average.

Just as some people have a sense of taste so powerful that they can tell you every ingredient in a sauce, every spice in a stew, some people have an ear so precise that they can (easily) notice the muffled treble and dropped notes.

Not surprisingly, these people are often the ones buying the $80,000 stereo systems.