It's about time that the big guys got on-board for hi-res. MP3 has been doing major damage to the quality that we had with CD's and SACD's for years.
Being able to purchase the original master tracks in hi-res is just what this market needs. The recording companies will of course be concerned about piracy, which will happen with 99% of college and High-School students, and of course the Russians. They need to look past this and realize that there is money to be made from those that can afford it, since CD sales are not paying the salaries anymore.
I can and already have access to lots of great tracks at 88.2, 96, 176.4 and 192 from websites like HDTracks, bluecoastrecords.com linnrecords.com, BSO.com and 2L.no
What people dont realize is that 99% of the time your DAC will sound better when playing 24-bit data. This is due to the way that the digital filtering has to be implemented. The same track at 96 will sound better than 44.1 due to the DAC behavior alone.
My hope is that they provide these tracks in AIFF format, with no compression of any kind. It has been demonstrated that even these lossy compression methods, like FLAC and ALAC can color the sound due to poor performance of the CODEC software.
Apple is likely never going to directly support FLAC for the same reasons it's likely never to support WebM, or any other format that it didn't create, or doesn't have safe licensing.
Apple had the option of going with FLAC instead of developing ALAC, but the problem was that if Apple went with FLAC, patent trolls would finally see deep pockets and sue Apple. It's more than just the $$$ for the patents, it's potentially about having sales being suspended. The risk is far too high.
If you want Apple to support FLAC, WebM or whatever, get a patent pool around it, or point to someone who will indemnify Apple.
As far as Blu-Ray, you can get both external and internal ones that are Mac compatible for the Mac Pro, iMac, mini, and MacBook Pros. At some point, if demand is high enough Apple will offer these too, but the problem here again is licensing. And it's a very complex issue.
Apple is different from others in that they're selling the box, the OS and the applications. Each has to be licensed for Blu-Ray independently. Remember how when DVD drives came out, how you couldn't actually watch a DVD movie on a PC unless you purchased software? On the Mac though, you could play movies, burn data, burn movies, edit movies, picture discs, etc... It was all ready to go as soon as you turned on your new Mac.
Apple wants to provide that same experience, but doesn't want to pay the licensing for the box, software and OS, for every person, despite most not even wanting Blu-Ray to begin with.
These licensing issues keep getting worked out, so things may change, but demand needs to change along with it.
As far as higher quality songs on iTunes, yes, absolutely this is going to happen. This should've been obvious from day one. The question of course is when will this happen. My guess is that it will happen sooner rather than later.
If Apple offered 24/96 lossless songs today at the same price (or slightly higher), and had the whole iOS line support it as well, it would have a HUGE impact . I'm not sure Apple can jump that far right now, so maybe take it down a notch, but still Apple is all about quality and being a whole other level above everybody else would be HUGE.
It was my understanding in the past that Apple created ALAC because FLAC didn't have the necessary album art tags.
I forgot where I read that, might need to look it up again. I know there are certain programs that support album art on their own but I'm not sure if they get embedded in the actual files like ALAC.
Except for a very small, very vocal minority, I don't think anyone cares about having, or not having, Blu-Ray in Macs. It's just really not an issue for most people.
Does a manufacturer such as Apple have to license Blue ray in order to distribute a driver in the OS? If they can do that without a license or at very minimal cost, at least it would let end users buy their own BD reader/writer. I'm pretty sure the professional video editors using FCP wouldn't mind being able to save BD format. I agree with you that playing BD movies on a Mac monitor is silly, but watching on big screen TV is a nice experience, assuming the movie is any good and not just a bunch of special effects strung together with no plot.
As far as Blu-Ray, you can get both external and internal ones that are Mac compatible for the Mac Pro, iMac, mini, and MacBook Pros.
Those drives alone may let you read Blu-ray media. But you still need software to play the movies and navigate the menus as you can on a standalone player. Is there such software available for Macs?
Except for a very small, very vocal minority, I don't think anyone cares about having, or not having, Blu-Ray in Macs. It's just really not an issue for most people.
Despite their marketshare of iPhones and iPads, Apple is still a minority when it comes to computers running Mac OS. So for one minority to dismiss others as a "minority" is a case of the pot calling the kettle black.
1. There is a quality difference between 16-bit and 24-bit playback, but it is very subtle. As someone else pointed out above, the cheap, high-noise D/A converters built into Macs and PCs are incapable of resolving the subtle increase in dynamic range that 24-bit files would permit. If the files were provided using a lossless format like Apple Lossless or FLAC, they would be a great treat for those with highly-resolving playback equipment.
2.Do away with lossy compression first. This is where fidelity suffers, not in the conversion from 24-bit to 16-bit. Again - the difference between 16 and 24-bit is real, but is very subtle. The audible damage wrought by lossy compression is far more audible, distracting, and unmusical. A move to lossless files would benefit everyone, no matter what equipment they were using.
3. AAC, MP3 - they're amazing technology, but they work by throwing away 70-80% of the original sound information. The resulting small file size was useful in the age of dial-up Internet. But storage and bandwidth capacity have exploded in the ~15 years since MP3 came on the scene. Why continue to compromise audio quality unnecessarily?
Blu-Ray is dead tech, The DVD format has proved this. Having a digital format and upgrade path for a low price to a new HD format and plus the convenience of space saving and being available on many devices is the best technology to grow into.
Movies will always be available in any format forever. Unfortunately for music, many great music recordings on vinyl and CD will never be digitally remastered or reprinted and possibly lost forever. Any way to preserve music at the highest quality is a great thing.
If is wasn't important to others, they would have let it go long ago.
Quote:
Originally Posted by anonymouse
Except for a very small, very vocal minority, I don't think anyone cares about having, or not having, Blu-Ray in Macs. It's just really not an issue for most people.
So Apple won't give us Blu-Ray, a huge leap forward in quality over the DVD drives they offer now, but they want to increase song files from 16 to 24 bits, a virtually inaudible upgrade?
Wrong. This is extremely audible. If this happens, says finally goodbye to vinyl, which currently still has the quality edge for high end.
As far as I know you CAN buy movies in HD. Usually they cost $5 more compared to SD quality.
You're right. At some point they added the ability to buy HD; strange, because there was no announcement whatsoever. Probably because there's only 114 movies available to purchase in HD. Most of which are movies no one would ever want, like "Lake Placid 3" and "The Covenant".
Quote:
Originally Posted by Lukeskymac
Oh, and "worse than DVD" HD? You are starting to look stupid.
I was referring to their SD movies, the only ones I was aware you could purchase to own. They are worse than DVD quality.
1. There is a quality difference between 16-bit and 24-bit playback, but it is very subtle. As someone else pointed out above, the cheap, high-noise D/A converters built into Macs and PCs are incapable of resolving the subtle increase in dynamic range that 24-bit files would permit. If the files were provided using a lossless format like Apple Lossless or FLAC, they would be a great treat for those with highly-resolving playback equipment.
Ryan
The dynamic range difference is 48dB (roughly 6dB per. bit from sampling theory) between 16bit and 24bit. The problem is not so much that it is a subtle difference but, given you are at roughly 130dB sound pressure on CD at the top (30dB quite room noise + 96dB CD dynamic range) you have to go very very loud indeed (around the same as a jet engine next to you) to appreciate the difference. You might succeed but you'd probably be deaf afterwards!
Blu-Ray is dead tech, The DVD format has proved this. Having a digital format and upgrade path for a low price to a new HD format and plus the convenience of space saving and being available on many devices is the best technology to grow into.
There is no low-priced upgrade path for digital movie purchases, most of which cost the same or more than a virtually-lossless blu-ray copy. Once you own a film on blu-ray there's no reason you'd ever need to "upgrade" your copy because the quality really can't get any better. And talk to me about space saving when you lose thousands of dollars in movie purchases in a single hard drive crash. I can borrow a blu-ray movie to any of my friends or family with a blu-ray player, which many of them now have; how's that for being able to play on many devices?
This article adds only confusion to the popular debate about sound quality. Because of the association with current music business mega-sellers this CNN story is being picked up and repeated ad infinitum. Some readers are pointing out the errors but the great majority - the average consumers - will not question the statements.
Jimmy Iovine blames bad sounding consumer audio files on the conversion from 24 to 16 bit, without any mention of compression which is the primary cause. For popular music audio files that use only a small part of the dynamic range, the difference between 16 and 24 bit audio is completely irrelevant.
It's just wrong to claim that consumer audio files can be made high fidelity just by making them 24 bit and also to publicly state that your endorsed products (HP laptops and smartphones - some of which have only a mono speaker) sound like studio systems in part because they support 24 bit audio (surprisingly, there is no evidence HP Beats Audio products actually support 24 bit audio).
Jimmy Iovine's claim to reveal Apple's intentions is just silly. 24 bit audio is not a "major obstacle" for Apple's portable devices; iPods and iPhones have long been able to play CD quality audio at 16/44.1 ,24/44.1 or 24/48 (bit/kilohertz) with the Apple Lossless format. The only "retooling" required is greater storage capacity to accommodate the larger file sizes.
I have no doubt that Apple will increase the quality of iTunes audio files as last mile bandwidth and flash memory capacity increases; not because Jimmy Iovine and HP prodded them with a nonsensical brand promotion.
I still use CDs. I've been disappointed with some CDs lately. Way back when they first came out we were told that they were better than vinyl records. My friends and I all said at the time that they did lack presence. Eventually we did acknowledge that they were clean sounding.
There are a few CDs that I think sound good and there are some that don't. When remixes of Led Zepplin came out they didn't sound the same. Different parts had higher volume and some parts seemed to be missing. I didn't like it.
If the music industry could decide on a simple mastering method, and a reproduction method, then the music produced by the artists could be delivered to their fans exactly as intended. Do artists not care about this anymore?
Anything that makes music reproduction true to the original form is something I support.
iTunes and all iPods support this format. Okay the files would be much larger, but the sound quality is noticeably improved. There's not much point in increasing the bit/sample rate if you are then going to throw away a large chunk of the information by compressing it using AAC.
It makes me laugh to see people spend a fortune on high-end audio equipment (e.g. valve amps) with iPod docks and then play MP3 files through it.
If Apple made true hi-fidelity recordings available through the iTunes Store I might be tempted to buy more through it. At the moment I prefer to buy CDs (which can often be picked up for less money than the download) and import using Apple Lossless to get true CD quality.
Most people can not hear a difference between moderately high compression rates, say 223 kbps, and uncompressed source material.
24bits is pointless. All it does is lower the possible noise floor to levels where there are few places on earth quiet enough to be able to begin to take advantage of it on playback. As for 96khz - WTF? Dolphins and bats might appreciate the higher frequencies such a sampling rate allows, but humans won't. I very much doubt that more than 10% of posters on here could hear beyond 18khz, let alone the 48khz 96khz recordings allow for.
Highly compressed popular music actually sounds better on really poor systems such as earbuds and tiny computer speakers than it does on a good system. For most people louder = better and 24 bits is completely pointless.
Regarding sample rates above 44.1: The ability to capture and reproduce frequencies above 18 kHz in and of itself isn't what makes higher sample rates sound better. They sound better because distortion (only audible when listening to music) caused by the sharp high frequency filter used in front of the samplers is moved up and out of the perceptible range.
My hope is that they provide these tracks in AIFF format, with no compression of any kind. It has been demonstrated that even these lossy compression methods, like FLAC and ALAC can color the sound due to poor performance of the CODEC software.
Steve N.
Empirical Audio
I'm always up for a good laugh, could you please provide details or a link to somewhere that provides details of where and how it has been shown that there is an audible difference between AIFF and ALAC or FLAC. By the way, FLAC and ALAC are not lossy compression algorithms, they are LOSSLESS.
Anyways, 24-bit sound coming from an iPod or iPhone or Macbook would be totally overkill, as the D/A converters Apple uses in their products are pretty much the shittiest you can find (that goes for pretty much the entire computer industry).
It's not just the D/A converters. The amps are underpowered and distortion-prone and then there's the piéce de resistance, the unbelievably lousy earbuds that ship with iPods/iPhones. Given all that, I just don't understand Apple's quest for "higher quality" files like the 256kbps files they already sell iTunes music as. Especially since most people can't hear the difference anyway.
Comments
Being able to purchase the original master tracks in hi-res is just what this market needs. The recording companies will of course be concerned about piracy, which will happen with 99% of college and High-School students, and of course the Russians. They need to look past this and realize that there is money to be made from those that can afford it, since CD sales are not paying the salaries anymore.
I can and already have access to lots of great tracks at 88.2, 96, 176.4 and 192 from websites like HDTracks, bluecoastrecords.com linnrecords.com, BSO.com and 2L.no
What people dont realize is that 99% of the time your DAC will sound better when playing 24-bit data. This is due to the way that the digital filtering has to be implemented. The same track at 96 will sound better than 44.1 due to the DAC behavior alone.
My hope is that they provide these tracks in AIFF format, with no compression of any kind. It has been demonstrated that even these lossy compression methods, like FLAC and ALAC can color the sound due to poor performance of the CODEC software.
Steve N.
Empirical Audio
Apple had the option of going with FLAC instead of developing ALAC, but the problem was that if Apple went with FLAC, patent trolls would finally see deep pockets and sue Apple. It's more than just the $$$ for the patents, it's potentially about having sales being suspended. The risk is far too high.
If you want Apple to support FLAC, WebM or whatever, get a patent pool around it, or point to someone who will indemnify Apple.
As far as Blu-Ray, you can get both external and internal ones that are Mac compatible for the Mac Pro, iMac, mini, and MacBook Pros. At some point, if demand is high enough Apple will offer these too, but the problem here again is licensing. And it's a very complex issue.
Apple is different from others in that they're selling the box, the OS and the applications. Each has to be licensed for Blu-Ray independently. Remember how when DVD drives came out, how you couldn't actually watch a DVD movie on a PC unless you purchased software? On the Mac though, you could play movies, burn data, burn movies, edit movies, picture discs, etc... It was all ready to go as soon as you turned on your new Mac.
Apple wants to provide that same experience, but doesn't want to pay the licensing for the box, software and OS, for every person, despite most not even wanting Blu-Ray to begin with.
These licensing issues keep getting worked out, so things may change, but demand needs to change along with it.
As far as higher quality songs on iTunes, yes, absolutely this is going to happen. This should've been obvious from day one. The question of course is when will this happen. My guess is that it will happen sooner rather than later.
If Apple offered 24/96 lossless songs today at the same price (or slightly higher), and had the whole iOS line support it as well, it would have a HUGE impact . I'm not sure Apple can jump that far right now, so maybe take it down a notch, but still Apple is all about quality and being a whole other level above everybody else would be HUGE.
Oh, and "worse than DVD" HD? You are starting to look stupid.
I forgot where I read that, might need to look it up again. I know there are certain programs that support album art on their own but I'm not sure if they get embedded in the actual files like ALAC.
Except for a very small, very vocal minority, I don't think anyone cares about having, or not having, Blu-Ray in Macs. It's just really not an issue for most people.
Does a manufacturer such as Apple have to license Blue ray in order to distribute a driver in the OS? If they can do that without a license or at very minimal cost, at least it would let end users buy their own BD reader/writer. I'm pretty sure the professional video editors using FCP wouldn't mind being able to save BD format. I agree with you that playing BD movies on a Mac monitor is silly, but watching on big screen TV is a nice experience, assuming the movie is any good and not just a bunch of special effects strung together with no plot.
As far as Blu-Ray, you can get both external and internal ones that are Mac compatible for the Mac Pro, iMac, mini, and MacBook Pros.
Those drives alone may let you read Blu-ray media. But you still need software to play the movies and navigate the menus as you can on a standalone player. Is there such software available for Macs?
Except for a very small, very vocal minority, I don't think anyone cares about having, or not having, Blu-Ray in Macs. It's just really not an issue for most people.
Despite their marketshare of iPhones and iPads, Apple is still a minority when it comes to computers running Mac OS. So for one minority to dismiss others as a "minority" is a case of the pot calling the kettle black.
1. There is a quality difference between 16-bit and 24-bit playback, but it is very subtle. As someone else pointed out above, the cheap, high-noise D/A converters built into Macs and PCs are incapable of resolving the subtle increase in dynamic range that 24-bit files would permit. If the files were provided using a lossless format like Apple Lossless or FLAC, they would be a great treat for those with highly-resolving playback equipment.
2. Do away with lossy compression first. This is where fidelity suffers, not in the conversion from 24-bit to 16-bit. Again - the difference between 16 and 24-bit is real, but is very subtle. The audible damage wrought by lossy compression is far more audible, distracting, and unmusical. A move to lossless files would benefit everyone, no matter what equipment they were using.
3. AAC, MP3 - they're amazing technology, but they work by throwing away 70-80% of the original sound information. The resulting small file size was useful in the age of dial-up Internet. But storage and bandwidth capacity have exploded in the ~15 years since MP3 came on the scene. Why continue to compromise audio quality unnecessarily?
Ryan
Movies will always be available in any format forever. Unfortunately for music, many great music recordings on vinyl and CD will never be digitally remastered or reprinted and possibly lost forever. Any way to preserve music at the highest quality is a great thing.
If is wasn't important to others, they would have let it go long ago.
Except for a very small, very vocal minority, I don't think anyone cares about having, or not having, Blu-Ray in Macs. It's just really not an issue for most people.
So Apple won't give us Blu-Ray, a huge leap forward in quality over the DVD drives they offer now, but they want to increase song files from 16 to 24 bits, a virtually inaudible upgrade?
Wrong. This is extremely audible. If this happens, says finally goodbye to vinyl, which currently still has the quality edge for high end.
As far as I know you CAN buy movies in HD. Usually they cost $5 more compared to SD quality.
You're right. At some point they added the ability to buy HD; strange, because there was no announcement whatsoever. Probably because there's only 114 movies available to purchase in HD. Most of which are movies no one would ever want, like "Lake Placid 3" and "The Covenant".
Oh, and "worse than DVD" HD? You are starting to look stupid.
I was referring to their SD movies, the only ones I was aware you could purchase to own. They are worse than DVD quality.
Three thoughts --
1. There is a quality difference between 16-bit and 24-bit playback, but it is very subtle. As someone else pointed out above, the cheap, high-noise D/A converters built into Macs and PCs are incapable of resolving the subtle increase in dynamic range that 24-bit files would permit. If the files were provided using a lossless format like Apple Lossless or FLAC, they would be a great treat for those with highly-resolving playback equipment.
Ryan
The dynamic range difference is 48dB (roughly 6dB per. bit from sampling theory) between 16bit and 24bit. The problem is not so much that it is a subtle difference but, given you are at roughly 130dB sound pressure on CD at the top (30dB quite room noise + 96dB CD dynamic range) you have to go very very loud indeed (around the same as a jet engine next to you) to appreciate the difference. You might succeed but you'd probably be deaf afterwards!
Blu-Ray is dead tech, The DVD format has proved this. Having a digital format and upgrade path for a low price to a new HD format and plus the convenience of space saving and being available on many devices is the best technology to grow into.
There is no low-priced upgrade path for digital movie purchases, most of which cost the same or more than a virtually-lossless blu-ray copy. Once you own a film on blu-ray there's no reason you'd ever need to "upgrade" your copy because the quality really can't get any better. And talk to me about space saving when you lose thousands of dollars in movie purchases in a single hard drive crash. I can borrow a blu-ray movie to any of my friends or family with a blu-ray player, which many of them now have; how's that for being able to play on many devices?
Jimmy Iovine blames bad sounding consumer audio files on the conversion from 24 to 16 bit, without any mention of compression which is the primary cause. For popular music audio files that use only a small part of the dynamic range, the difference between 16 and 24 bit audio is completely irrelevant.
It's just wrong to claim that consumer audio files can be made high fidelity just by making them 24 bit and also to publicly state that your endorsed products (HP laptops and smartphones - some of which have only a mono speaker) sound like studio systems in part because they support 24 bit audio (surprisingly, there is no evidence HP Beats Audio products actually support 24 bit audio).
Jimmy Iovine's claim to reveal Apple's intentions is just silly. 24 bit audio is not a "major obstacle" for Apple's portable devices; iPods and iPhones have long been able to play CD quality audio at 16/44.1 ,24/44.1 or 24/48 (bit/kilohertz) with the Apple Lossless format. The only "retooling" required is greater storage capacity to accommodate the larger file sizes.
I have no doubt that Apple will increase the quality of iTunes audio files as last mile bandwidth and flash memory capacity increases; not because Jimmy Iovine and HP prodded them with a nonsensical brand promotion.
There are a few CDs that I think sound good and there are some that don't. When remixes of Led Zepplin came out they didn't sound the same. Different parts had higher volume and some parts seemed to be missing. I didn't like it.
If the music industry could decide on a simple mastering method, and a reproduction method, then the music produced by the artists could be delivered to their fans exactly as intended. Do artists not care about this anymore?
Anything that makes music reproduction true to the original form is something I support.
iTunes and all iPods support this format. Okay the files would be much larger, but the sound quality is noticeably improved. There's not much point in increasing the bit/sample rate if you are then going to throw away a large chunk of the information by compressing it using AAC.
It makes me laugh to see people spend a fortune on high-end audio equipment (e.g. valve amps) with iPod docks and then play MP3 files through it.
If Apple made true hi-fidelity recordings available through the iTunes Store I might be tempted to buy more through it. At the moment I prefer to buy CDs (which can often be picked up for less money than the download) and import using Apple Lossless to get true CD quality.
Most people can not hear a difference between moderately high compression rates, say 223 kbps, and uncompressed source material.
24bits is pointless. All it does is lower the possible noise floor to levels where there are few places on earth quiet enough to be able to begin to take advantage of it on playback. As for 96khz - WTF? Dolphins and bats might appreciate the higher frequencies such a sampling rate allows, but humans won't. I very much doubt that more than 10% of posters on here could hear beyond 18khz, let alone the 48khz 96khz recordings allow for.
Regarding sample rates above 44.1: The ability to capture and reproduce frequencies above 18 kHz in and of itself isn't what makes higher sample rates sound better. They sound better because distortion (only audible when listening to music) caused by the sharp high frequency filter used in front of the samplers is moved up and out of the perceptible range.
My hope is that they provide these tracks in AIFF format, with no compression of any kind. It has been demonstrated that even these lossy compression methods, like FLAC and ALAC can color the sound due to poor performance of the CODEC software.
Steve N.
Empirical Audio
I'm always up for a good laugh, could you please provide details or a link to somewhere that provides details of where and how it has been shown that there is an audible difference between AIFF and ALAC or FLAC. By the way, FLAC and ALAC are not lossy compression algorithms, they are LOSSLESS.
Anyways, 24-bit sound coming from an iPod or iPhone or Macbook would be totally overkill, as the D/A converters Apple uses in their products are pretty much the shittiest you can find (that goes for pretty much the entire computer industry).
It's not just the D/A converters. The amps are underpowered and distortion-prone and then there's the piéce de resistance, the unbelievably lousy earbuds that ship with iPods/iPhones. Given all that, I just don't understand Apple's quest for "higher quality" files like the 256kbps files they already sell iTunes music as. Especially since most people can't hear the difference anyway.