An industry commits suicide and blames us | Hacker News Reader

An industry commits suicide and blames us

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54 pointsmariuz51 comments

The bashing of MP3 in that article is unwarranted. I can't find any decent source, but I'm pretty sure a 192kbps MP3 is indistinguishable from a CD for 99.999% of the people. Especially with the crappy included headphones everyone is using.

I would bet you my day salary I could find an article from 30 years ago, bashing CD's vs vinyl in exactly the same way.

> bashing CD's vs vinyl in exactly the same way

And tubes vs. mosfets.

I though it was tubes vs. bipolar junction transistors

And mosfets behave much more like a tube than them. Oh well...

Many (most?) vinyls are pre Loudness War (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war). But CDs are mostly post Loudness War, where all the sound has become wimpy due to bad mixing practices driven by marketers. This also affects digital music, no matter how it's compressed.

So in general, many vinyls actually do sound more dynamic and clear. It's not because of the media, but because of how they were produced at different times in the industry.

Which is hugely ironic as the major advantage of CDs over vinyl (at least, the one that was touted back then) is their wider dynamic range. Which we now use all of 5% of.

Yup - and to be fair, there were, especially earlier on, some CDs that were mastered beautifully, and sound just fantastic on a half decent setup (no crazy stuff... just decent speakes and a plain old amp). I recall hearing some Pink Floyd at a friends place and saying "Holy crap! What are you listening to? That's an amazing recording" and he pops out a CD, from a regular old CD player and his homebuilt heathkit amp, and a pair of speakers that looked like he picked them up back in the 70s.... point being, the dynamic range was there.

You can generally tell it's there when you put the CD in your car and say "Hey that's too quiet"... that's a good candidate for some more serious listening.

I recall comparing several units in a listening environment. A Philips deck, plugged into the same amp and speakers, was noticeably better than the competitors we were trying. Suddenly, I could hear the scrape of the cellist's bow against the strings at the start and stop of strokes.

It wasn't an absurdly high end Philips deck, but it was into the range where they spent to put in good analogue circuitry -- what happens to the signal after the D/A converter gets done with it.

The CD format didn't obviate the need to take care of and spend on the rest of the delivery mechanism. And not on the associated marketing hype, but on good and well-matched components.

CD's were a revelation -- in the right production hands. But then they became coasters played in $50 boom boxes.

And they never outright obviated high quality analogue recordings and playback. They presented an interesting addition and counter-point to audio reproduction.

I doubt that scrape survives very well at 192 Kbps.

One of my biggest disappointments in life was buying CD after CD that sounded absolutely muddy compared to my old vinyl. At first I thought they were just hiring, you know, lumberjacks to do the transfers. I'm still floored that was done on purpose.

I had the same experience. For me it manifested as "this sounds louder, but I can't crank it up anymore". With a vinyl, I used to be able to just crank that volume dial into the stratosphere and rock out, the CD just turned into a sonic fog bank that tired you out trying to listen to when you tried to turn it up.

Sometimes you can fix this with better equipment (although the fact that your vinyl worked fine suggests that your equipment works fine).

But, yeah, it is all kinds of frustrating to discover that the band you like has no listenable recordings. There's stuff that literally just needs to be played in the car.

I've got the same Cerwin Vega's and Marantz amp that I (ahem my parents... thanks dad) had in the 80's. I've tried a couple different CD players.

The wakeup call came when I converted my vinyl to CD myself with nothing but the built-in ADC on my Mac and it still sounded better than the commercial release.

I have to completely agree here. You can still find some material that was published (on purpose or not) before it got adjusted and the difference is huge. I was really impressed by DM's Lillywhite sessions CD which was leaked before it was "finished". It's got the best sound I've heard in a long time on a professional recording. I wish more were released that way - without the unnecessary compression (of sound, not the file format).

Oh God, Holy Mountains from Hypnotize actually has CLIPPING! This isn't some college band, it's System of a Down. They couldn't hire an engineer that knows the first thing about sound?

I'm just a guy and I know your fucking track shouldn't clip ever. They ruined that song.

You just reminded me of something a friend collaborated on: http://www.myspace.com/clippingdeath

Your apt rant brings up a tragic point: It's not just the loudness war anymore. As David Lowery pointed out in his essays, recording studios are expensive beasts and audio engineering takes a lot of time by skilled labor. As the money drains out of the ecosystem all those corners get cut. Unfortunately, mic technology isn't as good as our ears and just aiming mics at a stage and pressing record won't give you high quality, even if we assume the live mix is good. Which is not always the case.

But is it not true that the tools necesary for decent recording are only getting cheaper and more accessible?

I'm not suggesting a crappy mic and no brains is all it takes to produce a record, but your home PC these days can handle the mixing that it used to take hundreds of thousands of dollars in gear to do, and good recording gear can still cost a pretty penny, but it must be getting better and cheaper like everything else. We've seen more well-produced stuff by "amateurs" these days than any time in the past...

Unfortunately, if you make one component of the supply chain cheaper it doesn't affect the other components.

Digital audio workstations are, indeed, a lot cheaper. But they're just one piece of equipment, and it's capital equipment at that. (That is, you buy it once and then use it for years, to produce hundreds of recordings. You don't pay by the hour and it doesn't wear out rapidly with use, though it does become gradually obsolete.)

The rest of your kit includes mics, preamps, amps, cables, consoles with jacks and lights and knobs and sliders, power supplies, stands, properly designed studios with isolation and acoustical treatments and talkback mics and quiet air conditioning, and so forth. Although almost none of the technology behind these things has changed since 1965, they are a bit cheaper today, because we've gotten more productive at manufacturing. But they aren't "Moore's Law cheaper". Meanwhile, revenues from music sales are "Moore's Law smaller".

The other thing that hasn't gotten cheaper is the time. Audio engineers are trained experts. Setting up all those mics and positioning them right and listening critically to the results through take after take is necessarily time-consuming, and your audio pros need to be around most of that time, fiddling with things. And they're paid by the hour.

There are definitely specific genres of recording that are in their golden age. If you like the sound of stuff that doesn't bother with all the recording techniques that have been patiently developed since the 1950s, but just parks a few mics around the garage and plugs them into the 4-track, you're all set, because every part of the production chain after the 4-track has tiny capital cost now, and distribution is cheap. If you stick to digital instruments, you're all set. If your talent consists of taking samples and mixing them into music, or spending months recording one track at a time in your bathroom with strategically placed towels on the walls and a single decent mic, and then mixing and transforming the results in post using that cheap DAW, things are pretty good for you. And lord knows that there's never been a better time to be an amateur audio engineer.

But if you want the modern equivalent of, say, Revolver? Decreasingly economical, unless it's part of a larger project, like a show or a soundtrack.

"Shouldn't clip ever" is overly simplistic. If you're trying to get a track loud (making it sound drastically better in cars and on laptop speakers — a trade-off), you have to find a balance between distortion and compression. Badly done compression sounds way worse than a little clipping. Listen to Oasis's Definitely Maybe for an example of a CD that doesn't clip at all, but is virtually unlistenable because the dynamics were squashed out of it.

Short lengths of clipping (just a few samples) or clipping on drums can't usually be heard. The one thing that will always start sounding bad right away is clipped vocals, but that doesn't usually happen on professional recordings. These people know what they're doing.

If you open up all your favorite albums in a wave editor and rage everytime you see clipping, you'll be doing a lot of raging. But most of those sound engineers know their stuff and aren't being stupid. Worry about how it sounds, not how it looks.

Give the particular track a listen, I didn't just load it into Audition and look. The vocals clip, it sounds very bad.

Aside from cost, size, and convenience; the problem with vinyl is consistency. I remember reading a study stating that the quality degrades after only 8 plays. Then again if you're an audiophile maybe 8 good plays is better than what they consider garbage 100% of the time.

I would back your assertion up. I think I could only distinguish one 192 kbps mp3 in my blind listening tests, but I don't have especially great equipment. I couldn't tell anything above 192, and for Ogg the threshold bitrate was much lower.

I'm fairly certain that the vast majority can't tell a 192 kbps mp3 from CD, and that's a good thing.

> I'm pretty sure a 192kbps MP3 is indistinguishable from a CD for 99.999% of the people.

That's because people are completely oblivious to the existence of proper loudspeakers (ie. "studio monitors").

Near-field monitors are expensive and entirely inappropriate for most applications.

> Near-field monitors are expensive

Something like this would serve you well: http://www.thomann.de/gb/adam_a7x.htm?sid=65707ea4b4bf3f43af...

I paid 900 euros (second-hand) for my pair of studio monitors - back in 2004..

They're the best investment of my life, by far, as they've provided me with countless hours of music listening joy, and I'm using the same speakers even now.

1000 euros is nothing weighed against the value you get.

> entirely inappropriate for most applications

The "application" here would be: "maximizing your enjoyment of music, and listening to it the way it's meant to be heard". That's something you want to do.

The pursuit of 'state of the art' in audio has changed a little I would say. That 99.999% of listeners can't hear the difference between audio sources has been true in the past as well, even in the pre compressed era. Most people listened to car radios and other lo-fi equipment.

Consumer formats aggravate the audiophile alchemists regularly. Looking through chat from a few decades ago about CD's versus vinyl, adjectives like 'hard' and 'brittle' crop up a lot. The solution technically, was of course to add more distortion, in the form of dithering, to provide an early form of psycho acoustic modelling.

Being a musician as well, I've taken a couple of online 'dare you to tell the difference' tests as well, while researching DAC's for mixing, but not under uncontrolled conditions. I put the top end through custom ribbons comprised of 4Kg of magnet focused on 0.001g of ribbon ( a crude description, but good enough ), and it's an observable difference.

Sitting outside listening to noisy wildlife of all types in the woods, I'm sure 100% of listeners could tell the difference between that aural landscape and any recording, including an MP3.

> That 99.999% of listeners can't hear the difference between audio sources has been true in the past as well, even in the pre compressed era. Most people listened to car radios and other lo-fi equipment.

That's what I meant. Most people have shit loudspeakers, but might be able to hear the difference with proper ones.

As much as Im' a fan of studio monitors - they're built for the sound engineer to do his work, not blow his hearing, and hear the details he needs to hear. He's not producing music to be listened on those speakers, though - he's producing music to be listened to on a wide variety of playback situations, none of which match what he's working with, and he knows it. If he made stuff only to sound perfect on his gear, it would suck everywhere else. Instead, he makes things to sound good on whatever it needs to (whatever that is in a given situation, I don't know).

That said - I'm the first to stand up and prefer a pair of nice towers and a decent amp, even if it's 20 years old -vs- some tiny "sound good" speakers. Those are fine for the family-room surround setup, with the big subwoofer that rumbles the house, but the secret bat-cave has only a nice little amp, a couple of nice towers (and a few good headphones for various types of music when it's quiet-time). mp3's, or any compressed music, are just fine if they've been recorded well, I think arguments based on those formats are ill-conceived; like anything, if you don't use the format properly it's not going to work well. I've found that a 192kbps mp3 can occasionally sound different than the source CD, but in a blind test I could only tell you that they were different - not which one was the CD - both sound good... and that difference could probably be engineered out in the majority of cases. Which isn't to say I don't have some humungous high-bitrate stuff hanging around - but I like to enjoy my music, not obsess over it or blow rediculous money on audiophile gear. (okay - one pair of really good headphones - so sue me)

Yes, I'm aware that they need to take shit loudspeakers into account when mixing music. But that doesn't mean they can't make it sound good with proper speakers too.

256 is indistinguishable from CD but must people want 320. 192 is near CD but I can hear phase alignment problems at higher frequencies most noticeably for me on hi-hats and in what is called AIR, or high frequency content that gives definition and space to individual voices.

That said I used to buy 3 records a week. When Napster came along it was basically catnip for music lovers. If they had worked out a deal with Napster then to charge me a monthly subscrptn it would have been a no-brainier for me. But they went the route of isolating the music lovers and creating political wedges between musicians and fans. It is unfortunate.

I can't remember the link but a professor for some distinguished US college does a blind listening test asking new students to rank different formats for subjective preference. As MP3 became more mainstream the preference for that MP3 sound increased. People like what they hear or are familiar with rather tan what is best - which should be clear to understandable to crackly record lovers. Also heavily compressed musical forms like pop, rock and dance can benefit from the digital phased hash that lower quality MP3 exhibit.

Personally I prefer MP3 at this stage. I have hundreds of records but MP3 is far more convienent. I can have a constant stream of music wherever I am, I do not have to have clean the stylus, record or change side, I no longer have to curse at noise and pops, and I can have my music on all my devices.

Also it is difficult to argue against the negative impact of payola on music. The standard for popular music now, during focus group listening tests, is not whether the music is good but whether the listener is more or less likely to change channel before the ads. Music as a form of expression can never live under those circumstances.

source: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/06/concluding-the-grea...

This has nothing to do with the recording industry. The reason the record is / has died is progress. The labels didn't shut down record stores in Costa Rica, people stopped caring about them. There barely even is a recording industry in Costa Rica and this is the most developed country of centroamerica.

The reason latinos want MP3s and MP3 players is they're cheap as piss and they can jump on limewire in any internet cafe and download more songs. It's convenience and it's progress and it's why the MP3 won everywhere, not just in CR.

Interestingly, the vinyl record is still making a comeback in the US, even while MP3s continue their inevitable spread.

I used to DJ and think something has been lost with the virtualization of media, which is why I'm in no hurry to get a Kindle. But when you say vinyl's making a comeback, I'm skeptical of whether this amounts to more than a niche market of hipsters, among whom the space and cost requirements of collecting vinyl can serve as a status marker. Could you expand on your comment?

http://www.digitalmusicnews.com/permalink/2012/120104vinyl/

It would be nice if you mentioned what was in the link rather then posting it without context. In this case: "It's Official: Vinyl Sales Up 39 Percent In 2011..."

I thought the context was abundantly clear from the parent, although adding the title undeniably provided enough information to allow me to skim over the link altogether!

I just saw a TV comercial for a new album by a popular band, where they said, album available as digital download and LP, no mention of a CD.

(I am from Denmark, not the US but still...)

Someone else posted some stats. It's fairly widespread and the growth rate is rather strong, but it's still, of course, rather niche in comparison to the total market.

Fred Meyer started selling vinyl recently due to an ordering error, they ordered the vinyl instead of cd version of REM's "Accelerate" album, most stores realized the error, some put the album up for sale regardless, and sales were so strong the chain decided to start carrying a limited selection of vinyl albums. Currently vinyl album sales are still maybe 1-2% of CD sales, but at the rate vinyl is growing and CD is slipping that ratio is likely to increase.

It doesn't really matter in a country like CR though - it's got a tiny population and online shopping is a pain in the ass, it can barely even contribute to a revival let alone support one within its own borders.

I see a lot of smaller bands putting their record out on just vinyl, but providing it with a download code for DRM free MP3.

Friend of mine is in an amateur band. They sell vinyl records and download links. They have ignored CDs. If you want the physical object, you probably want a record.

That comeback has a pretty low floor though. It's never going to come back like it was during its heyday... it will be a niche thing forever, just coming back from extinction.

The death of "record" stores is just part of a larger tragedy in retail sales where cashiers have become scripted popups during checkout rather than being able to interact like with customers as intelligent adults. When I buy some pens at the office supply store, the poor cashier has to give me the same pimp for copy paper and the online survey she just gave to the two customers in front of me.

The bookstore is the worst. I remember when (Hey! You kids get off my lawn!) bookstore cashiers were expected to ask about or remark upon or share knowledge about books. No I don't want to buy the gold discount card, subscribe to People or go online for a chance to win. If I wanted to go online I'd already have ordered from Amazon. And get this, Amazon doesn't ask me to fill out a survey or pimp magazine subscriptions.

During the holiday season 2011/2012, the most sold record in the most popular record store in Croatia (4+ million people) sold 52 copies. And that was a land slide against the second most popular record - 16 copies sold.

I was flabbergasted with that info, thought the numbers would be MUCH higher.

Seems like the sales charts is rather insignificant.

Also, a lot of those are probably purchased by some media/radio/archiving companies.

blaming the decline of the industry on the sound quality of mp3 is plain bs. well encoded mp3 with bitrates higher than 169kbps have repeatedly been shown indistinguishable from the original.

for an informed discussion and public listening test you may want to check the hydrogenaudio forums:

http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showforum=40

more background info in this article on audio codecs by christopher “monty” montgomery of ogg-vorbis fame:

http://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html

See "Loudness War", above, and the comments below that one.

Yeah, MP3s can be great if producers actually use them for greatness.

The author's argument is based on the emotional appeal of vinyl and the experience of purchasing from people who care about the music they sell. I'd tend to agree that in the world of music company profits and MP3s (notice there were no references to CDs in the article) that this has been lost and in some ways this is regrettable.

A high value experience for people who care passionately about something is always going to be at odds with mass market appeal - the article could also be written for bookstores - and it is entirely possible that the value the author put in records and record stores was purely an accident of change, the same way that listening to early radio broadcasts on a valve-based, bakelite set was or people sitting around a piano to share songs.

I like the imperfect translation from Spanish to English it greatly adds to the style and appeal of the article.

This is why I bought some ethnic percussions and learned how to play. I enjoy it a lot more now than listening to flattened mp3 drums. Small live concerts is the place where the music lives now. Like one I visited in Prague during the last Xmas. You know, these guys don't even care for a "record". They earn their living by playing live. Like it was hundreds of years ago. And I personally think, it should be like this.

On the upside - now I know where to find an actual record store, even if it's across town...

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