Apple Working on High Resolution Audio

[Josh]

Gizmodo reported on this story, and also mentioned that an audio codec already exists which does exactly what the article claims:

MPEG-4 SLS

Also know as "AAC-HD", its is a scalable lossless audio codec which is fully compatible with legacy AAC. Interesting, huh? It has existed for some time, but maybe Apple is finally getting ready to use it?

[HanksAudio]

For 99.9% of new music releases- I would be happy if we could just have 16 bit 44.1 kHz quality and have it not compressed and limited in the mixing/mastering process

Don't get me wrong, 24 bit would be great, but with current mainstream mastering trends, it wouldn't be utilized. I do like that people might start to care about the quality more- I think the massive success of Beats by Dre is a welcome shift from standard apple earbuds, and shows a growing consciousness about quality. Or maybe they're just fashionable

[PanaPlasma]

Originally Posted by HanksAudio

For 99.9% of new music releases- I would be happy if we could just have 16 bit 44.1 kHz quality and have it not compressed and limited in the mixing/mastering process

Don't get me wrong, 24 bit would be great, but with current mainstream mastering trends, it wouldn't be utilized. I do like that people might start to care about the quality more- I think the massive success of Beats by Dre is a welcome shift from standard apple earbuds, and shows a growing consciousness about quality. Or maybe they're just fashionable

I guess fashionable. Some headphones in the 50$-100$ range sound much much better (Grado, Sennheiser,...)...

[ZoetMB]

Originally Posted by HanksAudio

For 99.9% of new music releases- I would be happy if we could just have 16 bit 44.1 kHz quality and have it not compressed and limited in the mixing/mastering process

Don't get me wrong, 24 bit would be great, but with current mainstream mastering trends, it wouldn't be utilized. I do like that people might start to care about the quality more- I think the massive success of Beats by Dre is a welcome shift from standard apple earbuds, and shows a growing consciousness about quality. Or maybe they're just fashionable

Most original recordings that are produced in pro studios are already 96/24 and have been for years. They're down-sampled for CD mastering. That's not the issue. But music is in a bad place now and everyone wants their record to be the "loudest" and so I (unfortunately) don't think we're going to see a change away from over-limited and over-compressed recordings.

I may have posted this before, but about ten years ago, I attended a mastering engineers symposium at the Audio Engineering Society convention and the question was asked whether the Beatles would have been as successful as they were in today's engineering environment of over-compressed recordings. Many people felt they wouldn't have been because mastering in today's style would lead to tedium, especially for a group who got so much radio play (although recordings are further compressed and limited when played on the radio anyway).

Every one in a while, I hear some 1950s blues or r&b recording and it sounds incredibly superior to the recordings of today in spite of all the technological advances that have been made since.

[singhcr]

Originally Posted by ZoetMB

Most original recordings that are produced in pro studios are already 96/24 and have been for years. They're down-sampled for CD mastering. That's not the issue. But music is in a bad place now and everyone wants their record to be the "loudest" and so I (unfortunately) don't think we're going to see a change away from over-limited and over-compressed recordings.

I may have posted this before, but about ten years ago, I attended a mastering engineers symposium at the Audio Engineering Society convention and the question was asked whether the Beatles would have been as successful as they were in today's engineering environment of over-compressed recordings. Many people felt they wouldn't have been because mastering in today's style would lead to tedium, especially for a group who got so much radio play (although recordings are further compressed and limited when played on the radio anyway).

Every one in a while, I hear some 1950s blues or r&b recording and it sounds incredibly superior to the recordings of today in spite of all the technological advances that have been made since.

I agree. Today's music is largely low-fidelity and compressed to death to the point where the music is just grating to listen to and has no musicality or soul to it. It's just noise as opposed to music. If anyone has been following my music related posts, I'm a huge Journey fan. I have all of their albums on LP if they are available, and I have the newer ones on CD. The 1996 reunion album "Trial By Fire" on CD sounds better than the 2011 release "Eclipse", but both of them just pale in comparison to any of the LP releases. There's such a wonderful depth and range to the older recordings that makes the music fill the room and provides a wonderful, emotional experience. The CD recordings sound tinny and weak, and it's very obvious that I'm listening to a recording instead of something resembling a live performance. Whenever my mood is down, I'll spin one of these LPs or a good Bee Gees or Chuck Mangione record when I want to hear wonderful music to cheer me up. Why is it that a Bee Gees album from the 1960s sounds so much better than a 2011 recording? Aren't we supposed to be more advanced in terms of recording technology? I guess not.

Were the artists of the 1960s-1970s and even the 80s better than today's artists? I would say yes just in terms of sheer creativity but if the Bee Gees recorded everything at maximum volume with no dynamic range and released on CD or MP3 quality music, I bet a lot of the magic and enjoyment of these songs would be lost.

[Josh]

Apple is said to be planning a major overhaul of iTunes this fall. The emphasis will be sharing and the cloud, but who knows. High resolution audio might be part of the package.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-0...e-sharing.html

[Teazle]

By degrees we are getting closer. Flash memory is so cheap it's no longer much of an issue for portable devices; downloading larger files steadily getting easier.

Quality earphones are getting more widespread too. Next thing is to see how good the DACs on portable devices can get w/out breaking the bank.

Unfortunately cloud streaming & storage might set things back as these are more space & bandwidth limited than for local storage & playback.

[Josh]

Originally Posted by Teazle

Unfortunately cloud streaming & storage might set things back as these are more space & bandwidth limited than for local storage & playback.

At the top of this page I linked to a description of MPEG-4 SLS. It bascially makes audio tracks (and I assume video) scalable, so that if you are streming from the cloud on your iPhone, it would be one quality, but if you download to your laptop/desktop, it would be of a higher quality. It allows one file to be stored in the Cloud and depending on how you want to use the file, the quality adjusts to match the bandwidth/storage limitations of that devise.

Neat stuff.