THIS IS YOUR BRAIN ON COMPRESSED MUSIC

[gmgraves]

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.

 

[mansr]

2 minutes ago, gmgraves said:

“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).

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

[botrytis]

47 minutes ago, crenca said:

 

This.  The truth of what Nyquist–Shannon is telling us about sampling and the fidelity of the resultant waveform to the "original", is hard.  Calculus is hard.  The physics of sound-as-waveform-through-medium is hard.  

 

Most folks don't have the education or interest to get it right.  This is perhaps the truth of certain audiophiles and the 'audiophile press' deference to gurus such Bob Stuart.  Yet in reality Bob Stuart is a charlatan - a "post-Shannon" genius on the level of Copernicus, or so they say

 

Another example:   John Atkinson is a believer in the allegedly erroneous "leading edge" or "transient leading edge" behavior of digital sampling/DAC reconstruction.  Why?  What is the evidence?  Bob S and others (who mostly sell stuff) allege it, but is it true?  

 

 

 

Please not Copernicus, maybe Fleischmann and Pons (U of Utah Cold Fusion scientists).

[gmgraves]

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!

[wgscott]

1 hour ago, botrytis said:

 

Just crummy management.......

 

Just management.

 

(See, I compressed it without loss of any information.)

[kumakuma]

19 minutes ago, wgscott said:

 

Just management.

 

(See, I compressed it without loss of any information.)

 

That's the low bitrate mp3 version

 

The MQA version is "Just bad management"

[mansr]

1 minute ago, kumakuma said:

That's the low bitrate mp3 version

 

The MQA version is "Just bad management"

MQA after rendering: "Just bad management tnemeganam dab tsuJ"

[lucretius]

1 hour ago, Rt66indierock said:

 

I prefer to imagine Neil standing on the Bonneville Salt Flats.

[Rt66indierock]

9 minutes ago, lucretius said:

 

That looks a bit like El Mirage Dry Lake. Not much salt there though.

[botrytis]

1 hour ago, gmgraves said:

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!

 

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

[kumakuma]

30 minutes ago, mansr said:

MQA after rendering: "Just bad management tnemeganam dab tsuJ"

 

So true!

[gmgraves]

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.

 

[Cebolla]

5 hours ago, gmgraves said:

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.

 

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!.

[fas42]

12 hours ago, SJK said:

That hasn't been my experience.  I find that, on average the PA systems in place today provide a musical presentation with an accuracy, clarity and detail that was never there before. 

 

Sure, sometimes they get the mix wrong or the singer has a hot mike, but whether big arena events or small local theater, the sound has never been better.  

 

This could be very well true, down in Australia now - I haven't been to a 'premium' event in some time, and they may have learnt from each other, to elevate the standard. Even 30 years some of the best presentations showed that the equipment was up to it, if it was intelligently handled - but lack of the latter was far too evident, far too often. Typically, musical climaxes were torture, the huge levels of OTT distortion were diabolical - the rare ones that carried this off without drama demonstrated that it was indeed possible to get it right.

 

The obsession in the 'pro' ranks used to be to make it loud, loud, loud - above everything else - certainly amateur affairs I come across now are still as bad ... just wander by a fashion parade, for example!

[gmgraves]

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

[mansr]

26 minutes ago, gmgraves said:

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

Link?

[Rexp]

6 hours ago, botrytis said:

 

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

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. 

[Ralf11]

So, do a blinded listening test

[wgscott]

For many years, I listened to that 1977 Grateful Dead Cornell Barton Hall concert on a bootleg cassette tape, which was probably the copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy (all analogue), and the distortion and tape speed variance etc was laughably bad.  Then the high res (24/192) version of the original recording was officially released, and I got to hear it how it is "supposed to" sound.  The official high-res recording is of course vastly better than the bootleg, but it isn't at all clear I got any more real enjoyment out of it.  The quality of the bootleg tape was so bad that I am sure it was far worse than the crappiest mp3, but somehow, contrary to these kinds of claims, it did not destroy the music.  (It did, however, destroy the cassette tape player in my Toyota Emasculator minivan, RIP.)

 

I've also bought Neil Young high-res music that turned out to be crappy up-sampled redbook recordings, and everyone raved about how much better they sounded.  

 

Expectation bias is far more powerful in terms of its ability to distort than is musical compression.

[botrytis]

1 hour 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. 

 

Right - get a better CD player

[gmgraves]

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.

 

[gmgraves]

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.

[Rexp]

16 minutes ago, gmgraves said:

 

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.

 

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

[Ralf11]

Based on Reiss's work, I'm gonna go with:  The best CD quality audio is [almost] as good as the best high-res. 

 

i.e. the difference is difficult to detect, but trained listeners can do so to a high statistical likelihood

 

as for Neil, I dunno - love his music but not his audiology or his one-sided history of the Aztecs (they were brutal)

[gmgraves]

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.