Apple in Talks to Improve Sound Quality of Music Downloads 450
Barence writes "Apple and music labels are reportedly in discussions to raise the audio quality of of the songs they sell to 24-bit. The move could see digital downloads that surpass CD quality, which is recorded at 16 bits at a sample rate of 44.1kHz. It would also provide Apple and the music labels with an opportunity to 'upgrade' people's music collections, raising extra revenue in the process. The big question is whether anyone would even notice the difference between 16-bit and 24-bit files on a portable player, especially with the low-quality earbuds supplied by Apple and other manufacturers. Labels such as Linn Records already sell 'studio master' versions of albums in 24-bit FLAC format, but these are targeted at high-end audio buffs with equipment of a high enough caliber to accentuate the improvement in quality."
In other words (Score:2, Insightful)
Labels such as Linn Records already sell 'studio master' versions of albums in 24-bit FLAC format, but these are targeted at high-end audio buffs with equipment of a high enough caliber to accentuate the improvement in quality
In other words, they're making money off the placebo effect.
Not in theory (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:In other words (Score:2, Insightful)
Not really, although possibly, depending on the recordings. The difference between 24-bit and 16-bit audio is the dynamic range, with 24-bit having a much wider range between the quietest possible sound and the loudest possible sound. This is something that can definitely be heard, even on lower end equipment.
Today's music, however, is so compressed (as in audio-compression, not data-compression) in the quest to "make it louder" that it doesn't even get close to reaching the possible dynamic range of 16-bit, which effectively makes an upgrade to 24-bit completely worthless.
Google "Loudness Wars" if you want more information on that.
red herring (Score:5, Insightful)
the bit depth is interesting, but the largest improvement would come from simply not using lossy compression. one hopes that TFA glossed over this and that nobody is seriously considering 24-bit MP3's.
Squandered technology (Score:5, Insightful)
Perhaps is music wasn't overly compressed (talking about dynamic range, here) they wouldn't need so many more bits of resolution for the -3 dB they're mastering audio at these days.
Been tested time and again (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't even want to get started on "audiophiles". They're institutionalized hatred of the sound of live music sickens me...they claim to want the best quality possible, but won't suffer through anything that hasn't been run through an unintentional distortion or dynamic range limiting filter.
Re:In other words (Score:5, Insightful)
Not really, although possibly, depending on the recordings. The difference between 24-bit and 16-bit audio is the dynamic range, with 24-bit having a much wider range between the quietest possible sound and the loudest possible sound. This is something that can definitely be heard, even on lower end equipment.
16-bit audio has a 100dB dynamic range and if properly dithered from 24-bit to 16-bit almost no one will notice the difference. To claim otherwise is to fly in the face of ABX tests which back this up.
Re:red herring (Score:5, Insightful)
Loudness Wars (Score:4, Insightful)
Sure they'll be 24-bit, but they'll also have the dynamic range compressed to shit.
Unless that's the actual selling point, getting copies of the songs before they've passed through the hands of the mastering engineer whose job it is to destroy the difference between the quietest and loudest parts of songs, or worse yet causing horrible clipping.
Re:Never Underestimate the Placebo Effect... (Score:5, Insightful)
From an audiphile forum:
20% of the money will buy you 90% of the sound...another 30% of the money will buy you another 5% of the sound...you can't buy the remaining 5% of the sound because nobody can agree about what it is.
audiophiles, phooey (Score:4, Insightful)
Not just audiophiles. I can't hear worth crap. Never could. I could hardly care less for the difference between a scratchy record and a CD, much less what color my cable is, gold or green or fuscia. What I do care about though, is being able to format shift my music. My archive is in FLAC, which I transcode to a lossy format for general use. When something more palatable comes along, I'll be able to transcode to that instead of having to repurchase everything -- that assuming I could even find half of it, which is very unlikely. And unlike if my collection were solely in a lossy format, I won't have to endure the progressive distortions of transcoding from one lossy format to another, the cumulative effect of which would eventually drive even me nuts.
Re:In other words (Score:5, Insightful)
>>>Today's music, however, is so compressed (as in audio-compression, not data-compression) in the quest to "make it louder" that it doesn't even get close to reaching the possible dynamic range of 16-bit, which effectively makes an upgrade to 24-bit completely worthless.
>>>
Ding-ding-ding-ding-ding. We have a winner!
As for quality I used to care, but not anymore. As long as the MP3s I download.... er, I mean purchase sound as good as the FM Radio where I originally heard them, that's good enough. ----- If an artist releases a Greatest Hits CD I'll buy that, but mainly to "support" the singer with his commission, not because of quality.
BTW Super Audio CD and DVD-audio failed because nobody cared about quality. I expect these 24 bit things to fail too. If Apple really cares about quality, they should start selling Lossless versions of their songs.
Re:Hoopla (Score:5, Insightful)
Right.
I've been in the auditorium at Dolby Labs in San Francisco, which is set up for high quality audio. (The entire room is vibration-isolated from the rest of the building and soundproofed to the point that external noise is essentially zero. The audio gear is, of course, good.) In there, 24 bit audio with full dynamic range can be clearly distinguished from 16-bit audio on orchestral music. The soft passages don't get that awful 4 to 6-bit sound quality when the high bits are all zero.
Through earbuds, on the street, or in a car, no way can you detect that difference in quality. For rock, it doesn't make sense. Hip-hop could probably be clipped at 8KHz without much loss. As long as you had enough speaker power for the bass nobody would notice.
Well, maybe (Score:5, Insightful)
If you don't think there is real high end equipment it just means you've never looked/listened. I'm not taking $1000 speaker cables or other such snake oil, I'm talking high end speakers and so on.
Speakers in particular have a wide range because they are almost always the worst component of a system. An amp that has THD in the fractions of a percent may be hooked in to a speaker that has THD in the 5-10% range when played at a high volume.
There can be a pretty big difference between normal and good equipment. There's also a pretty big monetary difference so it isn't worth it for everyone, but if you like good sound, maybe it is. It also isn't something magical that you have to have faith exists, it is stuff you can measure. Flatter frequency response, lower THD, lower noise, better dispersion, etc, etc.
Now, does that mean 24-bit is useful? Eh, I dunno. In theory possibly. You get 96dB of dynamic range out of 16-bit audio. You can extend that through dithering, but at the cost of raising the noise floor. Human hearing is more in the 120dB range. 0dB SPL (20 micropascals) is chosen as 0 becuse it is roughly the threshold of human hearing. Some people can hear a little below that, many cannot hear that low because of hearing damage/loss. 120dB SPL is about the level where you start to feel immediate pain and thus going past it is not recommended.
So to fully cover the human range of hearing you'd need 20-bits, but then more can be useful because of course if you are trying to represent low level sounds with just 1 or 2 bits, they are going to have rather bad quantization artifacts. Again dither can deal with this, in trade for higher noise levels, but just going 24-bit solves it.
As a practical matter though, it is of questionable usefulness. For recording it is quite useful because it allows for headroom. You want to be able to have plenty of digital headroom (to prevent clipping), but still capture all the detail. However when you mix everything and normalize it down, that's not so important. It also takes some fairly high quality equipment to start getting 100dB or more of actual effective SNR and dynamic range out of a system, not to mention a rather quiet room. You can hear sounds below the room's noise level, but only maybe 10-15dB below.
I've played with it quite a bit since audio production is a hobby and I really can't form an opinion. I can set up tests where I can hear the difference, but I can set up tests where I can't.
Over all I think it would be nice to move to 24-bit since space is rapidly becoming a total non-issue and it just avoids it ever being a problem. Kinda like moving past 8-bits per channel for video. However I don't think it is a big issue and it isn't something I'll tell people they gotta have. "CD quality" has endured precisely because it is "good enough" for most things. Maybe not perfect, but you don't really notice any problems in normal use and that's what matters.
Re:Squandered technology (Score:4, Insightful)
Perhaps is music wasn't overly compressed (talking about dynamic range, here) they wouldn't need so many more bits of resolution for the -3 dB they're mastering audio at these days.
I 100% agree. Modern music is so overcompressed, you could probabbly have 8bits of resolution and not tell the difference.
The reason it is overcompressed, is make it to make it sound 'loud' and therfore 'more exciting' on typical low dynamic range equipment such as FM radio, PC speakers, cars, shopping centres.
One reason people like vinyl, is simply because the mastering is not as compressed, so it sounds better on high end equipment, even though vinyl sucks as a medium of transport.
What the record industry needs, is meta layer for compression, where the end user can select low/high dynamic range, and the meta layer contains the compression settings which are applied in DSP of the end equipment.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Gmex_4hreQ [youtube.com]
Re:Hoopla (Score:2, Insightful)
To add to that, some of your numbers are scued by noise floors. Live classical concerts have about a 40dB noise floors, and rock concerts have a good 80dB noise floor, so the most you're going to get is between 38-78dB dynamic range, if you're using Ampex's 118dB figure. I don't care, 24bit doesn't make one lick of difference for the final product.
The main reason that music is recorded at 24bit is because between the stages of "mic input" and print there are a quite a few stages of dynamic processing, which can cause aliasing. Ideally, all Digital processing is floating point, so it won't cause aliasing until it is output, but that's not always true, especially if you're using analog hardware as well. Same with the mastering process. So the least amount of process rescaling you're going to have is two times, but often it will be 4-5.
Go into photoshop, and import a 300dpi photograph. Then rescale it to 93%, then rescale it to 105%, then rescale it a few more times, then scale it back to it's original dimension. Then compare it with the original. You'll notice the difference. THAT'S why engineers use 24bit processing. Not because 24bit sound inherently better, truer, or superior, but because it's able to handle more processing "wiggle" than 16bit. Master a 16bit file, and it'll likely come out sounding more like 12bit.
24bit shouldn't even be on the minds of the consumer because it really doesn't make a difference.