THIS IS YOUR BRAIN ON COMPRESSED MUSIC

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16 hours ago, NOMBEDES said:

A quote from Neil:  (from the Boing Boing site)

 

"The compressed, hollow sound of free streaming music was a big step down from the CD and a huge step down from vinyl."

 

"We are poisoning ourselves with degraded sound.  The development of our brains is led by our senses; take away too many of the necessary cues, and we are trapped inside a room with no doors or windows.  Substituting smoothed-out algorithms for the contingent complexity of biological existence is bad for us."

 

 "Engineers often responded to the smaller size and lower quality of these packages by using cheap engineering tricks like masking the softer parts of the song as loud as the loudest parts. This flattened out the sound of recording and fooled listeners's brains into ignoring the stuff that wasn't there anymore"  (MQA?)

 

And further:  "It is an insult to the human mind and the human soul"    

 

I can't argue with Neil.  Plastic nano particles are in the rain and in the snow, no fish is plastic free, governments are worthless.  Hate is ascendant, big insurance companies have tame police forces chasing "insurance fraud", people actually purchase surveillance devices and place them in their homes.  Right wing dictators cut down the rain forest.  And now we know why, low rez compressed music has destroyed our brains.   

 

 

There are two types of compression, one is analog and it’s function is to limit a sound-field’s dynamic range. The other is digital, and its function is to somehow allow a musical performance to take-up less digital space either in storage or in streaming. The latter type can be broken down into two further categories, lossy compression and lossless compression. The former actually “throws away” portions of the music that the compression algorithm has decided are unimportant. Heavily compressed lossy schemes such as MP3, can sound just awful, but high bitrate MP3s can be surprisingly benign - and the compression, all but inaudible. The BBC uses Apple lossless compression to stream the “Proms” concerts (going on now through Sept. 11, every night in London [11:30 AM PDT, or 2:30 PM EDT daily at BBC3.com] over the Internet, and I’ve yet to hear anything that I could recognize as being a compression artifact (and I’m pretty sensitive to digital compression artifacts. The only MP3 compressed musical performances that I can stand to listen to is the live music (such as the Boston Symphony concerts) streamed via Boston’s WCRB.com. They stream at 192 kbps, and occasionally, I hear an artifact (I think, on headphones), but I never hear one on speakers.). “Auntie Beeb”, OTOH, with their lossless compression, present a performance that is sonically very satisfying (IMHO), with no audible artifacts and a 48 KHz sampling rate (giving a top-end of 24KHz).

I try to be careful when it comes to throwing the baby out with the bath water and do not automatically condemn compression schemes used in Internet Radio streaming, ‘till I’ve had a chance to listen. One misses. Too much great music otherwise.

 

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15 minutes ago, mansr said:

If it's lossless, there can by definition be no artefacts.

Of course, but there are those amongst us who believe that they hear artifacts even in lossless streaming/downloading technologies such as FLAC. I just wanted to be clear to everyone, that in spite of the controversy in some quarters surrounding the notion of lossless compression, that I’ve heard none from Auntie’s Proms “broadcasts” over the Internet, all the way from Ol’ Blighty!

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2 hours ago, botrytis said:

Hearing 

If you can't measure, what are they hearing? It might be their sub-conscious adding in those artifacts. This is known to happen.

 

Agreed, but you can’t dislodge this kind of mythology with logic or fact, once it has taken hold. Many audiophiles  rely 100% on their ear/brain, and reject out of hand any thought that their brains are telling them that they are hearing things that aren’t there. You can show them all the physics and math that you want to proving that what they think they are hearing cannot be. It will make no difference. They hear what they hear and that’s all they care about.

 

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2 hours ago, Cebolla said:

 

Are you certain of this?

 

Last I heard, the BBC have yet to adopt lossless compressed audio streaming following their experimental FLAC carrying MPEG-DASH trial streams of the 2017 season BBC Proms:

http://www.audiomisc.co.uk/BBC/Flac/LackAlas.html

 

I haven't seen any mention of the Apple lossless audio codec being used by the BBC for their internet radio broadcasts. I hope you are not confusing lossless compressed ALAC with lossy compressed AAC (both can be contained in an .m4a file which could lead to confusion). The BBC are certainly using AAC in both their HLS and MPEG-DASH streams!.

Yes, I’m sure. It is actually called out on the BBC3 web-site

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3 hours ago, Rexp said:

On the contrary, why bother measuring when true audiophiles like Neil Young know THERE ARE NO MEASURING DEVICES CAPABLE OF DETECTING WHAT CAUSES MOST CD TO SOUND UTTER CRAP. 

 

If “most” CDs sound like utter crap, it’s because they were indifferently recorded or transferred from analog sources, incompetently processed, or cynically mastered and pressed. The best CD quality audio is as good as the best high-res. It’s not so much the number of bits or the sampling rate that decides the quality of a commercial release, it’s the care taken in production of the release. I’ve said this before, but I have Red Book CDs that sound better than the same material on either SACD or high-res Blu-Ray or download. Many of these are JVC XRCD, but not all of them.

 

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4 hours ago, mansr said:

Link?

It was on the web-site before the 2019 Proms started on July 19th, but I can’t find it now. It may well be that the Apple Lossless is only used on the Proms streams and not the regular programming. A couple of years ago the Proms was streamed using FLAC, but one had to go to the BBC’s technical web-site and use Firefox 23+ to access it.

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23 minutes ago, Rexp said:

Strange that someone as concerned with SQ as Neil Young couldn't get his CD's to sound acceptable?

Well, I don’t know about that (Young was a rocker. Due to his long exposure to high SPLs, I wouldn’t trust his hearing as far as I could throw the man!). Of course, it may be that he’s talking about the lousy sound of rock CDs. With the horrid sounding, high levels of volume compression of many pop recordings, I don’t doubt that Neil Young can’t get his CDs to sound acceptable.

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3 hours ago, Cebolla said:

 

You're in danger of spreading fake news here. Why would there be this sudden (and apparently no longer announced) adoption of ALAC in favour of FLAC that was carefully & successfully trialled, especially with the BBC clearly stating that they don’t currently have any plans to provide any permanent lossless services following that FLAC Proms streaming trial of 2017?

 

Please read carefully the page I linked to in my last post. Similar info can be found on the BBC Radio 3 forum (and similar to the BBC's own website, absolutely no mention of the BBC streaming in ALAC for the current Proms season), eg:

http://www.for3.org/forums/showthread.php?20518-High-Resolution-Stream

 

 

BTW, there's no shame in admitting that lossy 320kbps AAC internet radio streams can sound good too!

Perhaps, I jumped to a conclusion and confused AAC with ALAC. If it is 320kbps AAC, it does indeed, sound very good - much better than any Internet streaming MP3 that I’ve heard. Thanks for the correction.

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1 hour ago, NOMBEDES said:

 

 

Oh yes, those Aztecs were brutal.  And those Europeans did such a good job of enslaving the natives.  And those wonderful Priests who made sure that most of the codex(s?) were burned.  No good guys back then.   In fact, I would like to see Spain and Portugal cut a $1000. check to each surviving native person from Mexico to Chile.  We could call it reparations!

I would call it a very poor idea. But this is an audio forum, and no place for politics.

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1 hour ago, NOMBEDES said:

 

 

Oh George.   Mr Young sez that your brain is under assault because of missing bits and bytes and you are worried about politics?

Get thee to vinyl and, as the Jefferson Airplane once said:  "Feed Your Head".

 

Ok, Ok, lets cut the payment down to $500. and call it a day.

Let’s cut the payment down to NOTHING and avoid a really destructive precedent.🤐 

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23 minutes ago, psjug said:

Do you think Neil Young is supporting Pocahontas for president?

To be honest, I have no opinion and don’t give a damn about who or what Neil Young supports. 

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18 minutes ago, mansr said:

Cutting some other payments might have avoided a really destructive president.

You are assuming facts not in evidence. Even so, you are just begging Chris to shut this thread down due to the politics. 

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22 hours ago, Rexp said:

I'd take live AAC streaming over CD playback anyday. How about you? 

Depends. The assumption that CD is somehow an inferior format is pure mythology. As I’ve said before, if some CDs sound lousy, it’s either the source material or the execution. Before arbitrarily throwing the baby out with the bath water, do yourself a favor and track-down the JVC XRCD release of Prokofiev ‘s “Lt. Kiji Suite” with Fritz Reiner and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (I believe it’s available through Amazon). It’s Redbook CD, not high-res, but if you don’t find it spectacular to the point of being better than the SACD release of the same material from BMC/Sony, and better than most high res material of any kind, I’ll eat the disc!

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59 minutes ago, Rexp said:

I did buy a couple of jazz XRCD's ages ago and they were not good, classical sounds better on CD to me, no idea why. 

I have a lot of jazz XRCDs and most of them sound pretty good. OTOH, many of these XRCD jazz CDs are from labels like Riverside and Impulse, from the 1950s and were mono, recorded at 7.5 ips. Those recorded by Rudy van Gelder fare better. But the point is that there is nothing wrong with CD as a format. Well produced ones are marvelous, poorly produced ones wouldn’t sound any better in a high-res format.

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On 8/23/2019 at 6:37 AM, botrytis said:

Not a Mac or itunes person, why would I listen to AAC? No reason to. Prefer CD, FLAC or high-res depending.....

Perhaps simply because some services use it. If you make some arbitrary decision not to listen to a specific CoDec, you are simply cutting yourself off from certain sources of music. For instance, I’m certainly no fan of MP3, but if I decided not to listen to it, I couldn’t enjoy the live, Boston Symphony Orchestra concerts streamed on WCRB’s Internet feed on Saturday nights. There’s an old adage that covers this kind of thinking: I believe it’s called “Cutting-off one’s nose to spite one’s face.”