The Rolling Stones - Hackney Diamonds CD + BD Audio

[bigshot]

I'm old enough to have grown up in the era of LPs and 8 track tapes. I would never ever want to go back to the way music sounded back then. Removing unwanted distortion, noise and speed fluctuations doesn't remove the life from music. It reveals it. Distortion is great in electric guitars, but that is a creative choice. The crackle and pops, inner groove distortion, surface noise and wow and flutter of LPs aren't creative choices. Digital audio is the best thing that ever happened to recorded music since the introduction of hifi in 1949, and it keeps getting better and better. At this point, we've topped out with fidelity. Digital audio can reproduce sound better than our ears can hear it. The future lies in signal processing, and spatial audio is an early hint of what the future holds- the sound of ideal speaker setups but with headphones, and dimensional sound fields that add a whole new palette of sound for musicians to work with.

I say this as a longtime record collector. I have over 10,000 LPs and 78s and I love them... but not for the sound. I love them for the music they contain that never made the leap to being released on digital. I don't need an LP copy of Dark Side of the Moon. If I have it on CD, that is better. And if I have a blu-ray with both the stereo and multichannel mix, that is perfect.

I remember as a kid dreaming of having perfect sound and thousands of songs in my pocket. Now I have that, and it's a telephone and PDA too!

[fighthefutureofhd]

Digital audio is MOST CERTAINLY not the best thing to happen to recorded music. And if spatial audio is a hint of what the future holds then I give up. Might as well take the musical art form and flush it down the toilet if that is the future. And if one was dreaming of having perfect sound and thousands of songs in their pocket on a telephone that is a PDA, then it must've been a nightmare. Musicians and artists never dreamed of their songs being played on a telephone. And if you told them that was the future they would've quit making music.

No self-respecting artist wants to have their songs heard on a telephone. Or solely on a telephone. That is disrespectful. You may ask then why is their music on streaming services. Because the industry screwed the artists over chasing the almighty dollar. For all the thousands of songs in your pocket, the artists lose because they get paid less than a bagger sacking groceries at Kroger. Which is sad and reprehensible. And YES, modern music is robbing the life out of music. ALL in the name of perfection.

Music wasn't meant to be perfect. It was meant to be imperfect and ramshackled. Nothing about today's recording practices makes music "BETTER". The life is being squeezed out of the performances. The things you mention that are wrong with vinyl, for example, are exactly what makes music so wonderful and what gives it life. It's the imperfections and little things you hear that make it so much better. Perfect, pristine sound is so dull and listless. I'll tell you now Neil Young would have a field day with these comments.

Originally Posted by bigshot

[Show spoiler]If you did a line level matched, direct a/b switched blind listening test between them with multiple trials, I bet you'd find that the difference disappears. Expectation bias is a real thing. You have to eliminate it from the equation. The difference between lossless and lossy isn't muddiness or high end roll off. It's artifacting. Below a certain point, the encoder can't keep up with the sound and starts inserting short bits of electronic gorf instead of music. It isn't a subtle thing at all. But at a certain data rate, the whole track is able to be resolved and the sound is identical to human ears. High end rolloff is used at low data rates to squeeze a little extra out of the file size, but at streaming rates, there is no high end rolloff in the audible range.

It's perfectly possible to stream audibly transparent lossy audio, even multichannel. Codecs and bandwidth are much better than they were just a few years ago. We're able to stream great looking HD video and that is much more demanding of bandwidth than audio is. I have a blind listening test that compares three different compression codecs at three different data rates that I am happy to administer for anyone who is interested to find out the truth. Just let me know in PM and I'll give you details.

People put too much stock in numbers. Lossless audio is full of digital excelsior to reproduce sound that human ears can't hear. Your speakers and room degrade the sound MUCH more than lossy does, and hearing the minute amount of artifacting in modern lossy codecs underneath the distortion and noise in even the best home audio installations is extremely difficult even at relatively low data rates.

You're absolutely correct that the quality of mixing and mastering is the real wild card, not lossy vs lossless. Good and bad engineering exists in all formats. Thankfully hot mastering has been on the decline since streaming has overtaken people ripping their own MP3s from CDs. The reason for hot mastering was to make tracks loud enough to compete on shuffle play. People don't listen like that any more and the streaming services have mastering quality policies in place. Recently released CDs sound a lot better than they did five or ten years ago.

Recently released CD's sound no better than they did 15 years ago. It's still plenty brick-walled and has no warmth whatsoever to it. A shiny veneer does not make good music. The terrible mastering and "loudness wars" are still going on. I miss the days when the product being put out actually sounded GOOD. Garbage is what we are getting now.

[dobyblue]

There are just as many awful CDs now as there were, Slowdive's 2023 album is mastered by the same person (Heba Kadry in NYC) that mastered their self-titled 2017 release and this one is even hotter! No idea why so many of the UK shoegazing artists suddenly want this mastering engineer to destroy their albums, but many of them seem to love her. Depeche Mode's 2023 release, DR4. Awful.

It is perfectly possible to stream lossy transparent audio and I've never said otherwise, in fact I know I can find posts of mine stating I find 320 Kbps mp3 to be transparent...I do NOT find 768 Kbps DD+JOC to be transparent and if you have a blind listening test comparing lossy and lossless Atmos I'd be happy to take it. Of course I could easily cheat by pressing the button on my AVR that shows me what I'm listening to, but I know I'd rather find out whether I can honestly tell the difference without knowing because I would bet $100 I can. I would bet you I CANNOT tell the difference between 24/96 wav and 16/44.1 wav of the same mastering, or 24/96 wav and 320 Kbps mp3 of the same mastering.

With Apple being able to offer lossless stereo, it's ridiculous they chose such a lossy format for Atmos. Their lossless stereo streaming bitrate is a magnitude higher than their Atmos files. It's like they jumped ten years back in time. We get lossless 24/192 streaming from Tidal, but 768 Kbps Atmos?

They often seem to handicap surround, no shortage of DVD releases with high resolution stereo but 448 Kbps Dolby Digital 5.1 only for the surround (Tubular Bells, Ommadawn, etc.)

I believe for a true double blind listening test with Atmos, you'd need someone else to administer it. It has to be in the place you're used to listening to Atmos in, not some computer with rinky-dink headphones.

[bigshot]

Music is not a recording medium. Music is matter of creativity. A recording medium is a matter of fidelity. It is perfectly possible to achieve audible transparency with modern lossy codecs. And multichannel sound offers a whole new range of possibilities for creative artists to explore.

[dobyblue]

Originally Posted by bigshot

Music is not a recording medium. Music is matter of creativity. A recording medium is a matter of fidelity. It is perfectly possible to achieve audible transparency with modern lossy codecs. And multichannel sound offers a whole new range of possibilities for creative artists to explore.

Who is arguing against this?

[dobyblue]

Here's the front left channel of Come Together, lossless Atmos on top, lossy Atmos on bottom. As I stated, it's the same mix...but it doesn't sound the same, and it's clear the bandwidth limitations with lossy DD+JOC Atmos must be playing a role.

I can convert the lossless audio to 320 Mbps mp3 and post the same comparison and there will be no difference. So yes, lossy codecs can be transparent...as long as they have the bandwidth to be. DD+JOC consistently has a sonic signature to it that it hurting for bandwidth to achieve transparency. That's not because it's lossy, it's because it's not given the right bandwidth. If they had just doubled the bandwidth, which would still be very lossy compared to TrueHD/Atmos, I have no doubt they would have achieved transparency.

[bigshot]

It's bandwidth and codec. Fraunhofer MP3 is a very old codec. AAC and Dolby's codecs are much more efficient at lower data rates.

[dobyblue]

And just as we discuss whether the loudness wars are abating or not, along come The Beatles with their new single Now and Then mastered more horrendously than any other Beatles track to date. What a topsy-turvy world when the option with the poorest objective fidelity (lossy Atmos) trounces the option with the best objective fidelity (official 24-bit/96kHz lossless download) for listening enjoyment (unless lifeless music is your cup of tea).

I had a brief exchange with Miles Showell on Twitter who stated the lack of dynamics were baked into the mix and signed off on by the band, producers and label - nothing he could do.

However the double A side, Love Me Do (2023), is the complete opposite, mastered with the dynamics you'd see from a 1990 release. Sounds fantastic. At least this means we can look forward to all the other new 2023 stereo mixes appearing on the 1962-1966 set next week. All the more frustrating that this is being released as an EP, typically in a "collection" of songs, whether a maxi-single, EP or LP, you master them consistently.

Here's "Now and Then" official 24-bit download compared to the official 24-bit download of Love Me Do (2023 stereo mix):

[bigshot]

Now And Then is mixed poorly.

[dobyblue]

Originally Posted by bigshot

Now And Then is mixed poorly.

Plenty of well-mixed 2023 stereo releases with horrendously hot mastering, the trend isn't abating fast enough...it's just about reaching its 30th anniversary.

Fortunately the Atmos mix of Now And Then is good, I've already rendered it down to stereo for the car and what a difference it makes.