Comment by LiquidPolymer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by LiquidPolymer | Hacker News Reader

I have great nostalgia for physical media beyond the current reemergence of vinyl records. Compact cassette, minidisc, CD, reel to reel, and digital audio tape are in my hifi system.

I also love blu-ray and DVD. I just bought “Mank” on Blu-ray despite being easily seen on Netflix.

Obviously I’m an outlier. Yet my 26 year-old daughter has become enamored with cassette tapes and CD’s when the used car she bought had a head unit capable of playing both.

So it’s not just me being old and nostalgic. Beyond the familiar arguments about the art and extras that come with physical media - I do have a problem paying monthly for access to music or movies. Or having digital purchases disappear when formats become obsolete. I still pay for these services, but I like the idea that I can stop paying and I lose nothing I love.

I’ll probably buy a copy of Wes Anderson’s Netflix short “The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar”. It’s utterly delightful and will look spectacular on my 12 foot projection screen - much better than the Netflix compression allows.

I’m familiar with all the streaming and digital purchase arguments. But I’m curious if my daughter and her friends are a precursor to a fatigue with the ephemeral nature of digital purchases.

It would be very interesting to hear a 26year old's comparison of compression between mp3-4, cassette (i miss my dolby expander), radio, and vinyl vs cd and also streamed audio (film or music). I once endured a shitty mp3 of AC/DC (bon version) and it made me gag. Played a vinyl version to the dude...they had no idea of what dynamic range was.

Someone singing from the bottom of a well while covered in a wet blanket vs anything else.

If you pull out a good-quality pre-late-'90s recording on almost any medium, it will destroy the dynamically-compressed "remastered" version that is streamed today. I wonder if this is, in fact, what his daughter likes. The sonic quality and non-fatiguing nature of well-mastered music is seriously enough to make a person LIKE the music more and play it more.

It's depressing and disgraceful that everyone has incredible fidelity available, but the publishers have rendered it moot by destroying the music itself at the source. Rolling dynamic compression back was a nearly hopeless idea once the "loudness war" took off, but as time goes on it's even worse because young people will never have heard good-sounding music and don't even know how shitty it sounds today... unless they are accidentally exposed to it like this. And even then, they're not going to identify the issue and call for change.

The problem isn't data compression. An MP3 of a 45 RPM record from the '80s will sound better than the Apple Lossless copy of the "remastered" version from 2017.

Luckily us parrot enthusiasts can get stuff in lossless flac. Sometimes even recorded from vinyl.

The straight market is frankly for stockholmized suckers.

You realize that lossless FLAC doesn't address this problem at all, right? A 100% faithful copy of dynamically ruined music is... still ruined music.

A vinyl source might be less compressed, though.

Ya I was thinking that. I assume that the source is something of quality. I mean what's the point otherwise? It isn't like they're selling it.

Indeed. But so many people just don't know what the problem is.

"my daughter and her friends are a precursor to a fatigue with the ephemeral nature of digital purchases"

Maybe, but I strongly suspect that her preference is a great example of LISTENER fatigue caused by the dynamic compression that has destroyed all post-'90s releases.

I wish Apple and Spotify would somehow put the boot down and reject ruined masters, the way Netflix dictates technical quality for new material. That's really the only hope of fighting the "loudness war" that has ruined music for your daughter's entire life now.

Your daughter, and a vast numbers of her peers who are so into '80s music, should be a wakeup call on this issue. But unfortunately there are very few people who even understand what it is... even artists who decry the shitty quality of today's recordings often blame data compression and want to increase sampling rates or bit depth. NO. The problem is dynamic compression. Period.

The strangest part is, the compression has absolutely zero benefit. From the listening experience, to the production process, to the business aspects of making music, it has no redeeming qualities.

Exactly. I'd say it's the saddest part. The one time I remember reading that some record exec was challenged on it, and the excuse was "nobody wants to have the quietest CD in the changer."

WHAT? As if anyone on the planet would go over to the changer, eject this allegedly offending CD, look at the label, and then declare, "Welp, I'm never buying another album put out on Arista records!"

The utter stupidity of it is mind-boggling.

And add to that the fact that, if people wanted compression so much, it could be done by THE PLAYER. In fact, this used to be done. My 1996 Mustang's CD player has a "Compress" button on it, to make listening to highly dynamic music more feasible in a noisy car environment.

> My 1996 Mustang's CD player has a "Compress" button on it, to make listening to highly dynamic music more feasible in a noisy car environment.

I believe _this_ is where the issue mostly originated (well, radio, really). Radio is already massively compressed, and many people were either listening to things in the car, on some tiny little radio in the kitchen, or with awful cheap headphones with their walkman's built-in radio.

All of these weren't great environments to start with, and the dynamic range of radio was tiny given the overall bandwidth available to most FM stations.

So, companies compress, people get used to it, and thus the horror continues.

For sure, radio stations always compressed in order to sound "stronger" on the dial. Just another reason that compressing the actual recording was unnecessary.

Right, and because radio stations do that I'd wondered whether marketing choose to "make it sound like radio" so people don't complain when they buy the disc

Not out of the question. When I was a little kid I'd buy 45s and notice this difference. I asked for an equalizer for Christmas, thinking this was the issue.

But of course it wasn't, and before long I realized that I liked the sound of the records better.

I do not miss having to store physical media. It took up so much space, and would get damaged.

Or have your car broken into and your entire collection of cassettes stolen.

Thankfully, that was right around the time CDs became popular, so I replaced them all with CD's

And then my car was broken into again and they were stolen too.

Good riddance to my tiny music collection that would get scratched if I didn't handle them like an archaeologist handling a 2000 year old mummified ball of yarn.

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