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Originally Posted by mjbethancourt
It's a disaster, isn't it? People ridicule me when I complain about shitty 128kb/s mp3s, and dammit you don't have to be a fanatic to hear the difference. People are just blockheads. Our only hope is that musicians themselves refuse to settle for a low standard.
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Frankly, I believe the musicians and their album producers are a big part of the problem.
Very few popular music performers record their albums with high levels of quality. Instead, they're usually badly engineered to be loud. Mixing levels are cranked up and the natural waveforms in the music are clipped to hell. This practice DELETES audio information. The tops of the audio waves are gone. But hey! At least the music plays at a good volume!
With so many popular music titles being engineered in that grotesque fashion it's no wonder at all why lots of people can't seem to hear the difference between some lossy compressed, low bit rate MP3 or AAC file versus the store bought CD. It all sounds the same: harsh.
The next problem is lack of 5.1 content support. Again, very few popular recording acts go to the trouble of creating 5.1 (or 7.1) channel mixes of their albums. About the only time you hear a popular song in 5.1 is when it is part of a concert video or music video collection. You rarely get it from an actual music only disc.
Ultimately, those are the real true reasons why DVD-A and SACD never gained a great deal of popularity. The music performers never gave either format a good, steady supply of NEW music. DVD-A and SACD were never going to succeed if most of the albums available were just jazz, classical music and 30 year old rock albums. It takes more than Nine Inch Nails and a handful of other acts to keep either of those music only formats alive.
Internet download-able music in lossy AAC and MP3 formats didn't kill DVD-A and SACD. Those formats serve an entirely different, portable purpose of music listening. Lossy download-able music files do not serve the purpose of music listening on high quality equipment and in controlled environments. Blu-ray is giving the music industry another chance to deliver on that. The nice thing is Blu-ray will live on regardless of what the music industry chooses to do or not do. I believe the music industry itself is in a major heap of trouble for numerous reasons, with sliding quality standards being one of them.