Neil Young restores catalog to Apple Music, Spotify & other streaming services

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Comments

  • Reply 21 of 33
    irelandireland Posts: 17,798member
    Great news! I'll spend the night listening to Neil. A pity about Pono not working out, I guess Neil discovered how hard it is to survive in the music business these days. It's not just about making great music anymore
    Agreed. It's about making shit music.
  • Reply 22 of 33
    irelandireland Posts: 17,798member
    macxpress said:
    Neil who?????
    Neil Young. It's written up there.
  • Reply 23 of 33
    Everyone!  All True!  But, Apple should hire Neil to oversee the optimization of HD audio.  It's time.  All Apple Music creation Apps + Files + future roadmap should be PONO quality.  That's tbe cred I seek
  • Reply 24 of 33
    quinneyquinney Posts: 2,528member
    @kamilton: Oversee? maybe… just not overhear.  Neil is 70 and has played thousands of 120 decibel concerts over more than 50 years, not to mention all the rehearsing and recording.  There is no way his hearing is not damaged.  I saw him play with Promise of the Real last year, and it was the first time I ever saw him wearing ear protection.
    jibberj
  • Reply 25 of 33
    Neil Young is a fabulous musician. I absolutely love his great music. The problem is, he hasn't done anything great or non-derivative since the sheer beauty and poetry that he displayed with CSNY and his solo album Harvest, both four-and-a-half decades ago. 
  • Reply 26 of 33
    irelandireland Posts: 17,798member
    Neil Young is a fabulous musician. I absolutely love his great music. The problem is, he hasn't done anything great or non-derivative since the sheer beauty and poetry that he displayed with CSNY and his solo album Harvest, both four-and-a-half decades ago. 
    Disagree.
    jibberjHunterSThompson
  • Reply 27 of 33
    Neil Young is a fabulous musician. I absolutely love his great music. The problem is, he hasn't done anything great or non-derivative since the sheer beauty and poetry that he displayed with CSNY and his solo album Harvest, both four-and-a-half decades ago. 
    I totally disagree. 

    I will say that years ago, I purchased his Archives box set on cd and later found a blu ray copy on sale so bought that as well. I did a comparison in sound quality, and I'm not totally convinced I could hear any difference. 
  • Reply 28 of 33
    macxpressmacxpress Posts: 5,801member
    ireland said:
    macxpress said:
    Neil who?????
    Neil Young. It's written up there.

    Neil who?? 
  • Reply 29 of 33
    koopkoop Posts: 337member
    As long as you clear a certain threshold in the audio source, headphones/speakers are what makes or breaks your audio experience. Pono was nonsense for the most part, even if it did spark an important discussion about audio quality. DACs are an interesting subject, but mostly an easy bottleneck to solve that doesn't require spending insane amounts of money on dedicated devices. 

    24bit is a sham, everything I've ever read about 24 bit audio has been along the lines of nobody ever going to notice a difference whatsoever.

    "HiFi" however, is not a sham, but it's not a night and day difference, even with expensive equipment. But there's enough nuance and subtleties when you jump up into a FLAC-like audio source that I think Spotify/Apple Music should really offer this feature.

    All in all, audio equipment very quickly spirals into snake oil territory. I'd argue Pono was in the snake oil business.

    99% of consumers would benefit from enabling "extreme" quality in their streaming service, enabling offline mode to locally store your favorite audio (no quality reduction if the stream decides your bandwidth is crap) and buying a solid pair of headphones from a reputable company. That's really all there is to it.
  • Reply 30 of 33
    19831983 Posts: 1,225member
    Neil was trying to do the right thing for music aficionados, but the music player was just so poorly designed.  It would have been better if he simply tried to partner with Apple on offering his own library of music, plus those of artists he likes, as lossless digital files.  Let the consumer decide whether they want to pay for a higher quality sound using their existing devices.
    He did try to initially partner up with Apple, he was discussing it with Steve Jobs but after Steve passed there was nobody else at Apple that could be bothered. I don't now think Apple will ever offer an HD audio streaming or download option. Because it's not something the masses are interested in I suppose.
  • Reply 31 of 33
    AppleZuluAppleZulu Posts: 1,989member
    kamilton said:
    Everyone!  All True!  But, Apple should hire Neil to oversee the optimization of HD audio.  It's time.  All Apple Music creation Apps + Files + future roadmap should be PONO quality.  That's tbe cred I seek
    I'd be interested to see something implemented through AppleTV, which is the device most likely to be hooked up to a bigger incoming pipe, and outgoing to a system that would bear out any actual audio differences. Lossless files, tracks mastered for dynamic range (and to escape the "loudness wars"), and things mixed and mastered in surround sound would all be desirable. (Ever heard the quad and 5.1 mixes of Dark Side of the Moon"?) The gear is already in living rooms. All they need is software and data on a server.
  • Reply 32 of 33
    I just tried listening to Harvest Moon (the album). It is streamable from Apple Music but can't be downloaded except for two tracks ("Such a Woman" and "Natural Beauty"). All other tracks on the album are not downloadable; even "Harvest Moon" which is downloadable from the Greatest Hits album.

    Is this some f-up or has Neil decided to put part of the album as stream only?

  • Reply 33 of 33
    sphericspheric Posts: 2,544member
    zoetmb said:
    AppleZulu said:
    The truth is, for the average music consumer, sound quality has never been better. Comparing an iPhone and Apple Music to what you might get from a $10,000 audiophile listening system is the wrong comparison. The right comparison is standard consumer electronics that have been in use over the years. Sony Walkman cassette or CD players, home stereo systems from K-Mart, cassettes and 8-tracks and mass-produced vinyl. iTunes format files - played through a decent set of headphones, car stereo or even through an AppleTV plugged into a decent home system - are orders of magnitude better than most of the preceding consumer electronics means for listening to music. Add to that the fact that Apple Music streams at the same quality as downloaded files and opens up (almost) the entire record store for $10 a month, most people have never had it better.

    Audiophiles can continue to argue over Pono, lossless files, Blu-Ray Audio, 180-gram vinyl and whatnot, but that's always been a high-end niche market. What's changed is the much smaller difference between that stuff and what the average person can get out of the thing they're already carrying around in their pocket. 
    Absolutely right and the fact is that most people, including so-called "golden ears" and audiophiles, can't tell the difference if given a blind A-B test.  There's a big battle in the audiophile world between subjectivists and objectivists.   The subjectivists usually refuse to take a blind A-B test. 

    And then there are those people who love their vinyl because it's "analog", except that something like 93% of new vinyl is mastered from digital sources.   

    Years ago, I bought a standalone CD-R recorder that was capable of up to 96/24 recording and was very excited about it until I made my first test recordings and couldn't tell one iota of difference between that and standard Redbook (44.1/16) recordings. 

    Although I can tell the difference between Pandora streaming and copies of CD tracks that I've loaded lossless into iTunes.   I was listening while riding my bike the other day and a track came on which I have in iTunes and I thought the iPhone had switched from Pandora to iTunes.  The track didn't sound as good as it usually does and I thought to myself, "hmm...I think I've lost some high end hearing" and then I realized it was Pandora playing the track.  Switching back to my version restored the fidelity.  
    FWIW, A-B testing has its merits, but it's not necessarily reflective of reality. If I'm intimately familiar with material, I may notice eventually that something is not right - the way you did on the Pandora track - but it may not be so stark as to be immediately obvious in A/B'ing as a 128 Kbps butchering.
    Here's a take that rings true to me:
    http://tapeop.com/blog/2016/11/07/problem-bing-and-why-neil-young-right-about-sound-/
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