Popular Post jacobacci Posted January 21 Popular Post Share Posted January 21 Disclaimer: I am not a native English speaker, so please give me some slack if a word is not absolutely correct. I find that both the article and the many comments about the article completely miss the issue that is really at hand here. In my view this is about the fundamental question of access to (audio or video) material in different qualities. It becomes contentious in the context of the current trend to move away from physical media. This is a (for the retailers) totally understandable and economically reasonable move. I expect that in 5 years there will be no more physical BluRay discs available. This basically means that access to audio down the road will be exclusively through streaming, which again makes total economic sense for the content owners from several perspectives (bandwidth for distribution, customer lock in, control). For the consumer this means that he can only get access to the quality that the streaming service choses to deliver. Quote form the article: "Our MP4 version of Atmos is identical to Apple Music's version, at 768kbps. Our Dolby TrueHD bitrates average around 6000kbps with peak data rates up to a maximum of 18,000kbps for high sampling rate multichannel content." "For comparison, stereo 24/192 uncompressed has a bitrate of about 9000kbps, so that's a lot of data." The point whether there is an audible difference between Apple Music Dolby Atmos and TrueHD Dolby Atmos is somewhat besides the point. Quite surely the mastering of the material was done at 24/48kHz, so as a customer I would like to own the material in the quality it was mastered in. I am ready to pay for this privilege, but I would like to have the choice. Besides the quality issue I am extremely bothered by the fact that content owners are moving away from ownership models to streaming / rental models. Should the content owner decide to pull a release, it is no longer available to me. An real life example to the point. At high end 2019, PMC presented a Dolby Atmos remaster of Miles Davis 'Kind of Blue', done by Steve Genwick. I had met Steve at the Sheer Pleasure of Sound Event in Basel that same year and we discussed extensively about the project and how the legacy of Kind of Blue had been meticulously transferred into the immersive era. The demo of the Dolby Atmos mix at high end 2019 was as expected very impressive. After this it became very quiet about this project and it was never released on physical media for whatever reasons. It did surface on Apple Music some time later, as did many of Steve's Dolby Atmos mixes. Next episode in the saga. Yesterday I attended a demo at SE Musiclab (created by Jürgen Strauss, Swiss sound engineer) in Bern. The BluRay demo was really impressive. I then asked the operator to find 'Kind of Blue' on Apple Music, which he did. I don't have an Atmos Setup at home (I hope this does not disqualify me from making my points), so this was my first reencounter with the remix since 2019. I really enjoyed it. Lossy Apple Music does sound good, no doubt. Would it have sounded even better in TrueHD? I will never know how Steve's mix really sounds, unfortunately, unless someone publishes it in TrueHD. In the end this whole issue is one of control by the content owner, what quality we have access to, be it in streaming or in physical media form. All of this is deja vu of course (I won't go into the MQA debate, that one has been done to death). There are loads of CDs from 20 years ago that carry the moniker 'remastered in 24/96kHz). Why was the 24/96kHz remaster never published as a download. I would like to hear what the remastering engineer intended. I would simply like to have the choice, to have access to the source. And by the way it does not have to be at the same price as the lossy version. PeterG and DuckToller 1 1 Link to comment
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