kenrockwell.com — I had never bothered with these little players or compressed digital audio since I presumed the sound quality was awful. WRONG! The little things sound great for serious music listening, presuming you click a couple of the right buttons in iTunes' preferences. I'll explain these in this article.
Mar 14, 2006 View in Crawl 4
livesunkeptMar 14, 2006
128 to 192 you can tell the difference in MP3's no question... plus this guy is on crack the error checking has been off on my stuff... no blips no audio problems.... my drive does it automatically anyway. If you have installed the drivers for your drive/ your system knows the model of your drive do not worry about error correction there is probably a plug in running in the background... play around with this it is on an individual basis.... :)
brustyMar 15, 2006
I want to see some truly comprehensive, non-biased tests on all the mediums, so everyone will shut the f**k up and the data can speak for itself.
Closed AccountMar 15, 2006
Sorry I guess you know more than the professional audio engineer who in his own words:I was prejudiced after decades of designing my own recording equipment and working in and around the music and recording industries. Not only have I understood all the math behind digital since the 1970s, I even worked with one of the original designers of the MPEG audio standard and delivered a paper to the audio engineering industry's standards-setting body, the AES, in the 1990s. I've been a member of the AES also since the 1970s. Back a few years ago compressed digital audio wasn't that great and even at 384kbs you were making excuses.Yeah, sure you know more than this guy...
dcharlesMar 15, 2006
Replying to denz88, My suggestion of using an array of speakers to be the "A" in true A/B comparison is to get people to understand that to truly emulate and "Compare to" a natural recording you have to be completly surrounded by speakers. A live performance of any music simply cannot be "truly" replicated using a pair of speakers, headphones and a Lossy recording - CDs are just what the industry "has" and "uses". CD's ARE lossy, period. Its what could be engineered and produced affordably at the time (25 years ago...) So people got used to CDs sounding the way they do - LOUDER than records. More dynamic range. Smaller. Easier to manage. Digital. Cool. Thats about it.History and origination of CD - <a class="user" href="http://www.exp-math.uni-essen.de/~immink/pdf/cdstory.pdf">http://www.exp-math.uni-essen.de/~immink/pdf/cdstory.pdf</a>Any computer CD player/Superdrive/DVD-ROM etc is making mistakes everytime it rips a CD as it is removing an enormous amount of information from the recording (hence the need for error-correction) and then downward-compresses the data to a smaller file. For convenience, NOT AUDIO QUALITY. So thats a problem, right? MP3 and AAC are a step backwards in audio quality, period. We should be going foward, not backward.Drive space is cheap. 250 gigs for what, $90 now? Retail? And people choose 128's or 256's? DMP's (Digital Music Players) are gonna be 200 gig in a year. Shouldn't the quality of the files be increasing, not decreasing with drive size?? Its all gonna change - this is just beginning. DMP's will play any bit rate in a year, any file. Wouldn't you rather have that? The Ferrari of sound (24/96) vs an old beater like a 160 AAC? Hey the choice is with the end user.Whatever works for you. Its your music.SACD's (I dont own one) are obviously whats next. DVD-A is years old technology, the manufacturers are holding out and pricing high because there simply isn't enough SACDs or DVD-A's out there to justify all the marketing expense - there arent enough discs. Soon to change.Musicians are just recently recording digitally at 24/96 (a higher recording standard, much larger file size) which CD won't recognize. On my $299 Audio Editor I can record my music at 24/192 bit rates and burn a DVD-A just as easy as burning a CDR. No big deal. Sadly the often mis-informed, easily mis-led and gadget-consumming General Public (no disrespect to anyone) are being dumbed down in to beleiving that stuffing 60 gigs of music at low quality bit-rate on your iPod is whats "best or cool" - its not, it's just convenient. Hey we all like convenience, but at what level of tradeoff? Who needs 5479 music files all at once anyways? Who has the time?
nabilanwarMar 15, 2006
reply to sykotic. The future is always where its at. I know Mp3 is hot right now, but AAC will rise exponentially as soon as all the HD tech hits shelves. My suggestion for ripping: 192kbps/VBR AAC (Audiophile Setting) or 128kbps/VBR AAC (Average User Setting). Anything more than 192 vbr is a waste of space. Trust me, i learned the hard way.
fishlabsMar 15, 2006
Very well put dcharles. I tried to explain this in my comment above but didn't articulate as well as you did, and got negative votes. People just don't get it, they can't see 1-2 years into the future of 250gig ipods, and 5-10 terabytes of storage at the house. I don't compress music and never will. I won't use iTunes. I convert all music to .wav format using EAC. I can't wait until a couple years when people wake up and realize they have to replace their entire iTunes collection because they want a better compression rate, or no compression at all. Affordable storage will soon eliminate the need for compressing music files. I have 600CD's on less than 1/2 a terabyte. I have about $6000 into my home stereo, and use Shure E5c for ipod headphones: I can easily distinguish on both systems, the difference between 128/192kbs .acc files and .wav files. In fact, my girlfriend can too, and she's not even into that kind of stuff. To generalize, the bass is lacking and the high's are harsh.I live in Music City, Nashville, TN. There are hundreds of studios here, and tens of thousands of engineers and producers. I get into this discussion all the time, and the replies I get from pro's about the best sound from an iPod are generally all the same:-Avoid compressed music and iTunes if you can.-Use good sound isolating headphones- Shure, Etymotic, Sennheiser are great brands.If you're rich, get these: <a class="user" href="http://www.stereophile.com/headphones/1204ultimate/">http://www.stereophile.com/headphones/1204ultimate/</a>They will set you back about $600-$1000 and a trip to the doctor's office for the molds.I love my Shure E5c's.Stop wallowing in the stupidity of compression, and look a couple years in the future. In the long run you will save yourself a bunch of money.Let's turn our attention to better compression from the studio, and SACD's, DVD-A and such, Not dumbing our sound quality down, so we can fit 4 million songs on and iPod.
dcharlesMar 16, 2006
hi fishlab,word. admittedly I am using MP3's to more or less demo and promote my music, I think most musicians like myself are thankful for the ease of use and promotion that digital music files give us, but sadly at the high cost of giving up control - but it seems that may occasionally work to the benefit of us struggling artists with the free promotion angle. I just read some bands are selling thousands and tens of thousands of CDs - direct - on myspace. Wow.But as far as audio quality goes, just like food for most people, whatever is easy, cheap and quick will do. Digital distribution has changed the music industry forever, and the quality can only go up from here.
fishlabsMar 17, 2006
dcharles,You hit the nail on the head, MP3's are for distributing music samples, mainly via the web, not critical listening. I checked out your site, awesome resume. Good luck with your career. The sax is my favorite instrument.My girlfriend is a musician, but surprisingly, not a critical listener. She appreciates live sound, but doesn't care much about home systems and ipods and stuff, which bothers me. But due to her career, I get to hang out in studio w/ studio musicians all the time. The systems they have, and the skills of the studio musician, and how good it all sounds- Unbelievable.Heres her site - <a class="user" href="http://www.sherrisides.com/">http://www.sherrisides.com/</a> - Best of luck.