Comment by anon9001 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by anon9001 | Hacker News Reader

Neil Young is an audiophile in the worst sense of the word. He's tried to make a player and music service https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pono_(digital_music_service) and it didn't work because there isn't demand.

If there was demand, Spotify would just add FLAC. They already added 320kbps compressed streams, and I doubt anyone can hear the difference between that and FLAC.

The vast majority of the audio perception people are going to pick up on happens during production. And https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war is why everything sounds worse than it used to. When records were being made for vinyl, the physical material wouldn't allow for the level of "loudness" that removes dynamic range from the track. That changed when all music started being produced digitally for digital distribution. Ironically, digital audio actually has a much larger dynamic range and should be better, but because of the way it's mastered it comes out louder but with less dynamic range.

Audio compression is the least of the problems for people interested in high quality recordings.

Exactly. Audio is mastered for the (generally) cheap equipment it is played back on. The master tape might have awesome dynamic range but a cheap FM radio in the eighties definitely did not. So, producers optimized for that first using analog filters and later digital ones. Not much has changed with this practice despite lots of technical progress. People still listen to music on car radios, on cheap phones with lousy speakers or some cheap head set or a pair of 20$ bluetooth speakers, or worse, in hotel lobbies. Everything is optimized for equipment with poor dynamic range. Worse, many phones add their own filters to "improve" the sound.

It's sort of the the audio equivalent of increasing contrast, sharpness, and saturation in a photo. These are variations of compressing dynamic range. Instagram took this to the extreme. And phone cameras exploit this by simply pairing mediocre lenses and sensors with software that blurs out the noise and yanks up the contrast and saturation. It works. Consumers love it.

Audio filters do the same with sound. What goes on the master already lost most of the information during the editing process and this is on purpose.

The irony of course is that rock musicians like Neil Young used analog audio filters for creative purposes. An electric guitar is basically a guitar that passes sound through lots of electronics to distort the sound in all sorts of pleasing ways. The distortion is intentional. I'm a big fan of Neil Young early Crazy Horse recordings. If you need a nice example, "Down by the River" exists in many versions on Spotify. One of the better ones is a live recording from 1970; four years before I was born. Sort of escalates into some nice guitar work. There's nothing subtle about that and it sounds fine to me on Spotify. Which he grudgingly unbanned a few years ago after withdrawing all his music for a year or so.

It's my understanding that digital production tools also increased the amount of dynamic range compression that could be applied to the signal.

As an aside, there was a study done where they took high-bitrate (do not remember if it was SACD or DVD Audio) audio recordings and truncated the signal to 16 bits with no dithering. Nobody could tell the difference between the truncated and the original. On the other hand the truncated signal often sounded better than the CD version, likely due to better mastering of the high definition version.

Lastly, there is a case for higher definition recordings, and that is for remixing. There is some N at which N stages of applying 320kbps compression will become audible, and that N is fairly low, so if you want to sample and remix audio, lossless audio (and even higher sampling-rate and resolution audio) becomes useful.

There was a study, but it was't obvious if the SACD and DVD-Audio sources really did have 24-bits of audio, or if they were made from for-CD 16-bit digital captures of the original sources.

And even if they were clean 24-bit masters from an original recording, it's not obvious if the recording chain was 24-bit - a lot of early digital recordings were 16-bit - or if the analog masters were compressed and limited to the point where there was 24-bits of detail left.

This sounds ridiculous, but I know for a fact that some CDs in the 80s were recorded from vinyl records instead of being recorded and mastered from the original analog master tapes.

Generally getting hold of original master tapes can be a huge pain in the ass, so it's not unusual for record companies to take shortcuts - especially for relatively low-run formats like DVD-Audio.

The way to do this test is to record a clean acoustic performance through a top-quality microphone with no compression. If you can still hear no difference, then it's fair to say that 24-bit audio is pointless.

In fact it's complete normal to hear a difference on good studio monitors under those conditions.

Edit: the point being that audiophile audio is a thing. Even if only 10% of the population cares about it, that's still a perfectly valid reason for it to exist.

I backed the Pono Kickstarter. I got a player that had some cool features, but I ultimately stopped using it after a few months because it was slow and battery hungry compared to my old Sansa Clip with Rockbox.

Rockbox was (is?) such a great project.

Looks like the last release was in May 2017.

There will possibly never again be a piece of audio equipment with as good of a price/performance ratio as the Sansa Clip with rockbox.

Indeed. In some ways it's precisely the absense of the limitations that exist in other formats that have enabled things to get worse.

Also, I trust the state of Neil Young's hearing even less than I trust my own.

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