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."
I'm not waiting for more bits (Score:4, Interesting)
What I'd like to see (or rather hear), is that we can have access to the individual tracks of each song, so that we can remix stuff. Kind of like the open-source of audio.
Digital Audio 101 (Score:1, Interesting)
So, no, no-one will be able to tell the difference between 16-bit and 24-bit, but almost everyone should be able to appreciate the diifference between a lossy and a lossless codec. Flac, 24-bit or not will be a good thing.
For the record, most audio that is digitally recorded in 24-bit/96KHz or higher anyway. It is only 'dithered' down to 16-bit/44.1KHzas a last step in preparation for CD. For various technical reasons this results in a higher quality 16-bit recording than if it was tracked in 16-bit.
Quasi-audiophile here (Score:5, Interesting)
My stereo(yes, two channel!) is worth several thousands of carefully-planned dollars. I think it could be put alongside systems worth $20k, and hold its own. (The speakers at present are the weakest link, and they still sound much better than yours. :-)
That said, it's a practical system. I've got enough background in electronics and acoustics (and psychology!) to know better than to buy a huge amount of the insane junk that's out there. Amplifiers that go into oscillation with the wrong cables? No thanks! Vacuum tubes? The guitar amp is downstairs, thanks very much. Cable elevators? Um...no. Just no.
So here's my defense of 24-bit 48kHz recordings: Breathing space.
Nothing to do (specifically) with dynamic headroom or the like, but when producing, mixing, and mastering data recorded as 16-bit 44kHz, there is very little you can do without inadvertently affecting the audio signal. In other words, it's harder to get it right when you're operating right at the threshold of hearing.
If studios did everything in 24-bit/96kHz and actually avoided clipping through the whole chain, then a final mixdown to 16b/44Khz (i.e. a CD) would sound gorgeous - perfect sound to the extent of human hearing. However, mixing is often done poorly, and as hot as possible for better sales, and the result is that the poor CD suffers the abuse caused by the engineers.
Re:Hoopla (Score:2, Interesting)
Can you provide a source for this? What bugs me is that it implies that bit depth is proportional to dynamic range, which isn't really true.
Bit depth can be used to provide accuracy, range, or a combination of both. I could provide 140dB of dynamic range using 8-bits, but it would sound crappy because 90% of the sound would only use the lower few bits. I could also provide a great amount of accuracy in 8-bits, but it would clip on loud items and discard quiet items. (This same situation happens with cameras.)
Re:In other words (Score:5, Interesting)
A year or two back I decided to actually test where I hit transparency on MP3s encoded with LAME as it then was. I thought I'd get transparency at somewhere between 192kbs and 256kbs. I didn't, I got it at roughly 160-170kbs depending on the song. (Too many cymbals does fuck that up but up the bitrate enough and at maybe 210-225kbs cymbals and cornets go transparent for me, too. Maybe I've got cloth ears but since I'm encoding my music for me I don't give the slightest hint of a fuck - also I doubt it, I think the desire to prove how great you are is driving a lot of audiophiles to convince themselves they can hear more than they can.)
A good friend of mine -- a better musician than me by a long way and I'm not actually that bad -- hits transparency at about 150-160kbs on modern encoders, though to be fair he uses OGG by default and I tend to hit transparency down around there on OGG too.
I'd love to see more people who claim they *need* lossless to listen properly do an actual, full double-blind on a range of tpyes of music. I've no issue believing other people hit transparency higher than I do, but frankly I don't believe anyone who says that 320kbs MP3 isn't good enough.
Disclaimer 1: I have FLAC rips of all my CDs except a few which I ripped with iTunes and haven't swapped from ALAC yet. This is partly to have full quality archives of my CD collection, and partly because I'm well aware of the haemorrhaging of quality you get by reencoding compressed files.
Disclaimer 2: Both I and my friend did these double blinds through headphones. Nice quality headphones (Sennheiser over-the-ears, can't remember which model) but headphones nonetheless. The results through a big speaker stack would probably be different and I'd expect to hit transparency a bit higher, at maybe 256kbs again. But I might be wrong and it might be lower (or, of course, it might be higher).
Disclaimer 3: Not really a disclaimer, just that when I record at home I tend to record in 48kHz and 24 bit. That's mainly because my computer is aging. Give me more RAM and I'll happily sit there and record at 96kHz and 32 bit. I'll then downsample it to 16 bit and 44.1kHz because I really don't see the point of doing anything else given I'm compressing everything so that maybe -50dB is the lowest volume my music hits and normally it's between -30dB and -0.1dB...
Disclaimer 4: I'm very loathe to buy anything from online music stores because they're only offering compressed formats, so I've automatically taken a quality hit. But when there's no physical release I buy them anyway because in all reality I can't pretend to tell the difference between a 320kbs MP3 and a CD and nor can I tell the difference between a 192kbs AAC and a CD. But if I ever have to re-encode -- like if I end up back somewhere running Linux and I can't put on MP3 support unlikely as that now seems -- then I know I'll lose some quality. Which may or may not be audible, of course....
Re:In other words (Score:4, Interesting)
The biggest determinant of sound quality is the recording and mastering. Most music coming out these days is mixed for portable players, and is made to be heard through a torrent of street noise. It doesn't matter how good your bitrate or bit depth are, if the track has a 10-15dB dynamic range, and clips throughout the song.
A great recording, on the other hand, demands an adequate sound system. On my reasonably expensive system (MSB DAC, Aragon preamp, B&K amp, Klipsch speakers), I have done blind A/B testing, and was able to tell the difference between a 320kbit MP3 and WAV. On the other hand, using OGG, I was reduced to only being able to tell the difference up to 256kbit at best (depending on source material). My mom, who's a conservatory-trained musician, was able to pick out 256 kbit OGG from WAV 100% of the time (total of 10 tracks), and 320kbit OGG vs. WAV on about half of them. My guess is that a professional musician might do even better.
Cautious optimism (Score:4, Interesting)
We don't really need 24-bit recordings. We need the producers to use 24-bit in the studio, and then a nice 16-bit final output with dithering, and we have all the dynamic range we really need.
16-bit gives you about 90 dB. That's enough to go from "barely audible in a quiet room" to "starting to make your ears hurt". It's enough dynamic range, really.
But look up the "loudness wars" and find that much music being sold these days doesn't even use all that dynamic range. They compress the daylights out of the music to make it "louder".
So, I'm sort of interested in the 24-bit standard, if and only if it implies that the music will be produced with some actual dynamic range. If Rush makes a new album, they can release the CD with the dynamic range compressed away to nothing; and they can release the 24-bit mastered with some actual dynamic range.
Will this actually happen? Who knows. But I'm cautiously optimistic. This will give the studios the chance to release two completely different mixes, the mass-market one that "has to be loud" and the one marketed at audiophiles which "has to be clean". I don't spend $2000 on a power cord for my stereo, but I do appreciate a clean mix, so I hope this does work out.
steveha
Re:Eh.... Some of us listen to classical (Score:4, Interesting)
Most mastering engineers will "cheat" and pump the dynamics on quieter parts of a long symphonic composition on account of the medium, and then they'll accentuate dynamic changes by tucking the faders leading into sforzandos (and that's not even getting into mic placement for room versus ensemble emphasis, cheating spot mics into the mix, varying polar patterns and EQ during the performance...). You really don't get a realistic dynamic of what was originally recorded from a finished off-the-rack CD -- the recording engineers know they're being graded for how dynamic it sounds and how the performance is translated to the medium and not necessarily how accurate it sounds. They really want to have it set up in such a way that the person at home never has to touch the volume knob.
Thus, I'm tempted to say that if something sounds like shit on an MP3, it probably wasn't mastered very well, because if the sound is suffering it means that the mastering engineer is letting the recording drift outside the listener model and are letting the pianissimos get too pianissimo because they can, even if it means dragging the program through the dithers, which is probably why the MP3 is suffering, it's wasting a lot of signal space encoding the mastered dither. There are some engineers that are really pedantic and are really touchy about ever using mixing, and they want to force people at home to have to strain to hear the quiet bits, but these guys are all nutty audiophiles who go home to soundproofed living rooms equipped with Klipsches.
Re:Squandered technology (Score:3, Interesting)
But, as you know, many people aren't participating. And I'm not just talking about microphone geeks recording Mozart for the 18,000th time.
I find the Age of Adz http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Age_Of_Adz [wikipedia.org] to be a great example of how some artists are embracing the latest production techniques, yet employing them with careful compositional intent. Such work deserves to be delivered with the temporal and amplitude resolution with which it was created, says me.