apple ][ said: What does pre-digital VS digital have to do with quality or things?
Analogue recordings are susceptible to condition issues in storage, which means the quality of the source used to create the digital version isn't uniform when you're talking about multi-millions of tracks from thousands of different artists of varying importance.
And then you can have things like this happen too...
Oh, yeah. When I was working with RCA in the late 1970’s, trying to press some earlier recordings, we ran into problems. Some tapes were a total loss. Others took extreme efforts. I had to modify a tape head to add a vacuum so that the coating would be sucked up as soon as it played because it was being scraped off the tape base as it was being played back. Ugh. We had just one chance.
tapes were often not treated with respect, and there was a reason. Back in the ‘50’s and early ‘60’s, companies thought they would always be recording new music. So masters would be bulk erased and recorded over. Others were often put in un air conditioned, unheated warehouses, and forgotten. There would be leaks, etc. A lot of masters got damaged and ruined. Sometimes we had to call executives of the company and ask if they had a second generation master we could use. Even worse, we might have to find a record in good shape and use that.
its easier to fix problems now, with digital.
i just bought a device that removes pops, clicks and tape noise from records (adjustable), and allows me to rip them to any digital, or analog medium. It gets the metadata and applies it to the recording, eliminating the most time consuming part of it. I can’t wait until it arrives.
BxBorn said: Curious about the scale of users who would actually use this service.
IMO, it's mainly a sly way of getting a % of their customers to pay more for the same thing. Most people can't consistently tell the difference between 256 kbps and 16-bit/44.1 kHz in the first place. Then when you start adding in the various sound quality factors from pre-digital recordings vs digital recordings etc + the types of hardware people are using, it's largely a wash for most of the people who sign up for it.
Like those thousand dollar gullible Audiophile ethernet cables!
It's 0s and 1s! Just get a CAT6 cable and be done with it! (pet peeve)
And yet... it makes a difference that everyone can hear. How can you call people gullible when they actually notice a big improvement?
I borrowed a $1000 Audioquest power cord from a hifi store for my Bryston amp. Just a 1.5m long power cord. My family and friends thought it was all marketing bullshit... they came over and we did the comparison and were all blown away at the massive difference in sound quality. Same with optical cables... same with speaker cables... same with interconnects... same with sort cones...
The surface math and science says it shouldn't make a difference... and yet it makes a huge difference. Almost like a multi billion dollar industry knows what it's doing.
I have a very expensive A/V system, and I don’t use high end cabling, even though I know a number of the manufacturers, and I could get them for free, because the cost to make them is a small fraction of what they charge.
as far as interconnects go, about 80% sound exactly the same. Of the rest, most of the differences are hardly noticeable. The more noticeable they are, the worse the cable is. Sorry, but this is basic physics. Their is an ideal way to make any cable, and we know what it is. The farther the manufacturer gets from that ideal, the more difference you will hear. You may even like it, but it’s still wrong.
the systems where different cabling is most noticeable is where components are badly matched. The more the mismatch, the more differences you will hear.
a DAC maker, one that makes VERY expensive DACs, MSB, has, in its manual, and I can personally confirm it’s true, says to not use a high end USB cable to update the firmware. Why? Because high end digital cables rarely meet the proper specs. They drop bits. In an audio setting, unless it’s too bad, the signal will pass. You might hear a slight increase in treble, a slight sharpness. But when trying to do a firmware update where data integrity is required, it fails.
power cords are even worse. So you’ve got several hundred miles of high tension wire carrying that million volts. It gets dropped down to where it’s about 2,000 volts in the neighborhood, then dropped to 120 to the home, or office. If you’re in many parts of the country, you’re stuck with crappy unshielded Romex wire in your home. All the garbage coming in won’t be stopped by a 6 foot higher end power cord. Sure, if there’s a ferrite core on the cord, that will help, but it doesn’t matter what they do to that wire, or insulation, it won’t affect that 120 volt 60Hz power. Even if it’s shielded. The power gets converted to DC in the power supply. If that’s decent, it’s enough. A $25 line noise reduction unit will do the rest. It can’t affect distortion or frequency response.
theres a lot of placebo effect and conformation bias in audio.
While I'm sure that this will make Neil Young happy, I don't see much of an audience for this feature for one simple reason: the vast majority of listeners won't notice or be able to detect any difference and thus will not bother to pay for or enable it. Even with "nice" equipment, the audible differences between 256kbps MP3 or AAC and CD-level lossless are very, very small - far too small for a mass audience to care about, IMHO. This is at best aimed at a niche market.
Sidebar: Amazon claims to offer this in "HD" and "Ultra HD", the latter being 192kHz/24-bit. That's swell, but how many recordings are natively recorded at 192/24? If a recording was made using 44.1kHz, 48kHz or 96kHz sample rates, then no amount of upsampling helps and you're just wasting data. I wonder what their logic is, beyond "more is better"?
Most studio digital recordings are indeed recorded at high sample and bit rates, and then downsampled for making CDs or the various online formats. Studio work is necessarily done at high resolution and depth to avoid the mathematical errors and artifacts that are cumulatively generated when you start editing and mixing multiple tracks.
It's probably easier to think of visually. If you have ever edited pictures in photoshop, you know that if you start with a small, low resolution photo, any editing you do will be easily perceptible in the final product. If you start with a high resolution image, however, you can zoom way in and make corrections that are completely invisible in the final image, especially if you end up downsampling and compressing that image to share around or post online. Same thing goes for digital audio recordings. No professional studio is going to record or master anything at 44.1kHz/16-bit. The resulting product would have errors and artifacts that could easily be heard by even an average listener.
Using visual metaphor further, if you're only going to look at a photo on a phone screen, you don't need a 100MB tiff file, but if you're going to make a large format print from it, you probably do.
In any case, recording studios do start with very high resolution audio. Most listeners won't be listening in a way that would benefit from having a direct copy of the master files. Some will, so it's nice that the industry is starting to look at ways to make those things available via the digital pipe coming into your home. Likewise, professional recordings made in the pre-digital age are generally high-quality engineering, and likewise benefit from being converted to digital at high sample rates and bit depth.
Ironically, despite all of Neil Young's advocacy and commentary about high-resolution audio, it was mentioned in a recent interview with him that his favorite place for listening to music is in his car. This is hilarious, because Neil likes those good vintage cars, so there is no way that his inherently noisy automotive listening environment is one that would ever benefit from plugging in one of his Pono players.
I’ve yet to see, in controlled sessions, reliable results showing that people can hear anything above 16/44.1. Generally, most listening “tests” I see at audio shows and clubs, have the bit depth and resolution told to the listeners right before it’s played. That’s useless. Most listeners don’t want to think they can’t hear the differences, so they say they do.
We/re going to play this in 16/44. Now we’re going to play it in 24/96. And now, the last one we’ll play will be 24/192. Who heard the difference? What difference do you hear?
thats totally worthless.
back in the late 1990’s, John Ergle, a friend of mine, and a well known recording engineer, did tests. He recorded a very high quality analog tape on 1”. He then took that, and progressively digitized it down to 16/44.1, starting at what was then the highest quality possible, 24/96. He then has]d a number of well known music producers, artists, engineers, executives, and a few others, including me. After the work was done, it was found that nobody could hear anything above 18/48. That was the limit. I agree.
what a lot of people don’t know is that different bitrate files are often mastered differently. That’s where most of the difference comes from. If it’s mastered more carefully, it will sound better. It’s why there so much controversy about SACD.
Here's what you need to know about article headlines that start with "Here's what you need to know". You very rarely "need to know" any of it.
By the same logic, here's what you need to know that we're rarely need to know about a comment that start with "here's what you need to know about the article that starts with "here's what you need to to know"".
The music can be downloaded onto to an iPhone so you can save bandwidth that way. You really can't listen to this with any wireless headphones. You can, but you loose quality. Even bluetooth 5 don't have the bandwidth to support some of these files. You have to attach an external DAC to the lightning port and good wired headphones. In the home, you need a pretty good wired system to take advantage of this. Even my college age son said the sound is smoother. Apple Music can't compete with this quality.
Will most people notice a difference in sound or does it depend on the hardware used to listen?
No. There have been many discussions over the years about lossless and/or high-definition music and the overall consensus is Joe Consumer listening to whatever contemporary music (rock, pop, hip-hop, rap, country, whatever) on his/her smartphone's earbuds or in their car can't tell the difference. 256kbps 16-bit AAC is perfectly adequate. Hell, contemporary music for the past 20-30 years has mostly been authored and mastered to play back adequately in a compressed range.
Lossless and/or high-def audio makes more sense when certain conditions come together. First of all are the listening conditions/hardware: you need very good speakers in a room with decent acoustics. Then you need the appropriate music that would benefit from an expanded dynamic range: classical, baroque, opera, some jazz. Then you need someone with a good set of ears who is really paying attention.
I've acquired high-def audio tracks which I've ripped to 256kbps AAC and yes, I can hear the difference if I am concentrating and listening to it on my big speakers, particularly in the pianissimo sections or in pieces with an extremely wide dynamic range (some symphonies, some operas). If I have the stereo blasting while I am in the kitchen, again it doesn't matter; I can't tell the difference.
Streaming lossless/high-def audio to a portable device is basically a big waste of bandwidth unless it's plugged into a $500 headphone amp and $1000 headphones.
TL;DR:
If you care about music and have a decent playback system with a decent pair of ears, you can and will notice.
I don't understand why Apple Arcade is $4.99/month when Apple Music is 9.99/month. I do however understand why Apple TV + is 4.99/month as, as of right now it is only Apple originals on the service and so with that, they cut the middle man out.
I don't understand why Apple Arcade is $4.99/month when Apple Music is 9.99/month. I do however understand why Apple TV + is 4.99/month as, as of right now it is only Apple originals on the service and so with that, they cut the middle man out.
Just about all of Apple Music is 3rd party content. Basically, Apple has to pay for each and every song play. Music can also be "consumed" more often and from more devices than a game could be.
I would wager to guess that every title in Apple Arcade, Apple has put up money to produce them, just as they have with tv+ content.
Will most people notice a difference in sound or does it depend on the hardware used to listen?
Its been shown in many studies that if you do a proper blind ABX listening test, people prefer AAC to the lossless audio file 50% percent of the time. In other words, people simply can't hear the difference. You'd be waisting your money paying more for a lossless audio service.
If you're still skeptical, you can try it yourself.
Cancelling my Apple Music subscription and switching to Amazon. I am not Amazon fan but I can't wait forever for Apple to offer lossless music in their service. Yes, I have a high end gear to appreciate the quality.
Cancelling my Apple Music subscription and switching to Amazon. I am not Amazon fan but I can't wait forever for Apple to offer lossless music in their service. Yes, I have a high end gear to appreciate the quality.
With current fake unlimited data plans and no more 3.5 mm jacks on smartphones (except LG), this service is meant for home listeners.
Er, if into this sort of thing, why wouldn’t you use the digital port on your smartphone? If not USB or Lightning headphones, then an adapter to your favorite pair? Again, BT is not the only option just because the legacy analog port was replaced with a digital one.
Not all smartphones have the right DAC to handle the lossless. Currently, LG V40 is the only smartphone can drive the high-end (power hungry) headphones, and it only works with 3.5mm jack.
Comments
Oh, yeah. When I was working with RCA in the late 1970’s, trying to press some earlier recordings, we ran into problems. Some tapes were a total loss. Others took extreme efforts. I had to modify a tape head to add a vacuum so that the coating would be sucked up as soon as it played because it was being scraped off the tape base as it was being played back. Ugh. We had just one chance.
tapes were often not treated with respect, and there was a reason. Back in the ‘50’s and early ‘60’s, companies thought they would always be recording new music. So masters would be bulk erased and recorded over. Others were often put in un air conditioned, unheated warehouses, and forgotten. There would be leaks, etc. A lot of masters got damaged and ruined. Sometimes we had to call executives of the company and ask if they had a second generation master we could use. Even worse, we might have to find a record in good shape and use that.
its easier to fix problems now, with digital.
i just bought a device that removes pops, clicks and tape noise from records (adjustable), and allows me to rip them to any digital, or analog medium. It gets the metadata and applies it to the recording, eliminating the most time consuming part of it. I can’t wait until it arrives.
as far as interconnects go, about 80% sound exactly the same. Of the rest, most of the differences are hardly noticeable. The more noticeable they are, the worse the cable is. Sorry, but this is basic physics. Their is an ideal way to make any cable, and we know what it is. The farther the manufacturer gets from that ideal, the more difference you will hear. You may even like it, but it’s still wrong.
the systems where different cabling is most noticeable is where components are badly matched. The more the mismatch, the more differences you will hear.
a DAC maker, one that makes VERY expensive DACs, MSB, has, in its manual, and I can personally confirm it’s true, says to not use a high end USB cable to update the firmware. Why? Because high end digital cables rarely meet the proper specs. They drop bits. In an audio setting, unless it’s too bad, the signal will pass. You might hear a slight increase in treble, a slight sharpness. But when trying to do a firmware update where data integrity is required, it fails.
power cords are even worse. So you’ve got several hundred miles of high tension wire carrying that million volts. It gets dropped down to where it’s about 2,000 volts in the neighborhood, then dropped to 120 to the home, or office. If you’re in many parts of the country, you’re stuck with crappy unshielded Romex wire in your home. All the garbage coming in won’t be stopped by a 6 foot higher end power cord. Sure, if there’s a ferrite core on the cord, that will help, but it doesn’t matter what they do to that wire, or insulation, it won’t affect that 120 volt 60Hz power. Even if it’s shielded. The power gets converted to DC in the power supply. If that’s decent, it’s enough. A $25 line noise reduction unit will do the rest. It can’t affect distortion or frequency response.
theres a lot of placebo effect and conformation bias in audio.
I’ve yet to see, in controlled sessions, reliable results showing that people can hear anything above 16/44.1. Generally, most listening “tests” I see at audio shows and clubs, have the bit depth and resolution told to the listeners right before it’s played. That’s useless. Most listeners don’t want to think they can’t hear the differences, so they say they do.
thats totally worthless.
back in the late 1990’s, John Ergle, a friend of mine, and a well known recording engineer, did tests. He recorded a very high quality analog tape on 1”. He then took that, and progressively digitized it down to 16/44.1, starting at what was then the highest quality possible, 24/96. He then has]d a number of well known music producers, artists, engineers, executives, and a few others, including me. After the work was done, it was found that nobody could hear anything above 18/48. That was the limit. I agree.
what a lot of people don’t know is that different bitrate files are often mastered differently. That’s where most of the difference comes from. If it’s mastered more carefully, it will sound better. It’s why there so much controversy about SACD.
If you care about music and have a decent playback system with a decent pair of ears, you can and will notice.
Enough people do that this service matters.
On decent speakers and a good amp, you should.
Just about all of Apple Music is 3rd party content. Basically, Apple has to pay for each and every song play. Music can also be "consumed" more often and from more devices than a game could be.
I would wager to guess that every title in Apple Arcade, Apple has put up money to produce them, just as they have with tv+ content.
Its been shown in many studies that if you do a proper blind ABX listening test, people prefer AAC to the lossless audio file 50% percent of the time. In other words, people simply can't hear the difference. You'd be waisting your money paying more for a lossless audio service.
If you're still skeptical, you can try it yourself.
https://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2015/06/02/411473508/how-well-can-you-hear-audio-qualityrogifan_new said: