Neil Young’s answer to iTunes
blogs.ft.com
blogs.ft.com
Since the original article was so vague, and we don't have a particular product to critique, can we at least give Neil the benefit of the doubt? His heart is definitely in the right place (and, in case you're wondering, he's more than just a bit of a geek - he's a first-class geek! - And not too shabby a musician, either...)
But the number of people who are like him and you is not enough to support a new format or business model. Most people can't hear any differences beyond a good bitrate MP3.
Consumers over the last 50 years have been on a relentless trend towards greater convenience and poorer quality (look at the quality of any of today's household appliances). A quality play is simply obsolete.
Have you listened to a properly encoded ~200 kbps MP3? Under what circumstances can you tell the difference between a proper MP3 and a CD? Do you think you could under double blind circumstances with music you pick?
If Neil wants to launch a competitor for HDCD and DVD-audio, great, but I doubt it will be more successful than those. He didn't say what the product actually was, so hopefully he has something better up his sleeves.
That is true. However, I think most people could be taught to tell the difference on proper equipment, if they were given a double blind test and they heard at the 50th percentile or better.
There is a very real difference between 128 and 192 kbps MP3s in the sound quality that you can really perceive. In 128 kbps MP3s you lose all sounds above 16khz. With 192 kbps there is enough headroom to keep most of the way to 22.1khz which is the frequency limit of CDs. On some very loud passages (like most modern music) a V0 lame MP3 would probably start rolling off the upper frequencies.
192 kbps with variable bit rate is plenty of sound quality for distribution on the internet. You just can never re-encode it so you don't own the music quite as much as if you had the original CDs.
Since I doubt Neil Young is promoting ideally encoded MP3s, you're probably right about the red herring.
I do.
Firstly it shows good taste. NY is a sound quality nut and I for one is grateful ~ http://news.cnet.com/8301-13953_3-9937142-80.html
"We are trying to give them quality
whether they want it or not. You
can degrade it as much as you want,
we just don't want our name on it."
As for marketing I don't think the "rich hippy" really needs it.
Also, some music actually sounds better as MP3s! Yes, strange...
The fact that some of the 128 kbps samples were consistently judged to be better than their original CD counterparts by this skilled group – even by the best among them – stunned our editor (who participated in the test although his results were not included in the evaluation, and had to confess that he got only 15 points). It seems safe to declare that there is no musical genre that is especially well-suited or ill-suited to compression. It is apparent that there are quite other factors related to the technical aspects of recording that will later adversely affect the results at low bit rates.
Finally, most of the people listen to their music on portable players and/or computers and speakers on those are so bad that you can't really tell the difference between 128kbps and 256kbps. Double blind tests show that there's no statistical significance when you listen on these devices.
So yeah, NY's latest 'better than CD' ploy might work out with audiophiles... same people who buy $400 digital cables and $500 wooden knobs so their music sounds better.
In the end, it all comes down to good mastering and not codecs and delivery medium. Modern music is heavily compressed and there's a lot of clipping and that has nothing to do with MP3s.
One extravagant audiophile investment that would make an actual difference is tapes from this company that sells copies of reel to reel master tapes. http://www.tapeproject.com/ Why bother with a delivery medium?
The problem is that most folks can't properly plug in and configure an HDTV.