Right, and people stick with those crappy earbuds, which can render even high quality sound mediocre in the listening. I use some Phillips earphones that have a hole on the side away from the eardrums to provide a bass boost. I didn't pay much attention to it until, trying to save money, I tested a cheaper pair of standard earphones in the store: the sound was weak and tinny, really pitiful! Even though my music is sampled at high bitrates, it made it sound like crap.
----- Original Message ----- From: "Mr. Worf" <hellomahog...@gmail.com> To: scifinoir2@yahoogroups.com Sent: Tuesday, May 11, 2010 11:22:40 PM GMT -05:00 US/Canada Eastern Subject: Re: [scifinoir2] In Mobile Age, Sound Quality Steps Back I think also it is as the article mentioned a de-emphasis on quality equipment. So instead of quality sound devices we get mediocre playback of low quality small sound files that result in lousy audio quality. On Tue, May 11, 2010 at 2:54 PM, Keith Johnson < keithbjohn...@comcast.net > wrote: Agreed, but I think it's in how we raise our kids. They can listen to the latest pop stuff all they want, but if they're given a solid introduction to better music--based on truly talented instrumental and vocal performances--they'll carry that with them. A good example is the refreshing crop of younger R&B artists like Neo and others who are actually vocally gifted in addition to being able to put on a show. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Mr. Worf" < hellomahog...@gmail.com > To: scifinoir2@yahoogroups.com Sent: Tuesday, May 11, 2010 2:41:56 PM GMT -05:00 US/Canada Eastern Subject: Re: [scifinoir2] In Mobile Age, Sound Quality Steps Back I think the problem is that like what the article mentioned, most people cannot tell the difference between low quality and high quality without pointing it out to them. Most of the music that is out now lacks dynamic range anyway so the quality of sound wouldn't matter as much. (the exception to that is a few R&B artists.) At some point music will be reduced to "rhythmic noise." On Tue, May 11, 2010 at 10:01 AM, Keith Johnson < keithbjohn...@comcast.net > wrote: It's sad to hear that some folks are getting used to lesser quality in sounds, though i guess I shouldn't be suprised in this fast-food, reality-show, crappy-moving loving time. As for the sound quality, I've never settled for lower quality in my music. To me, the idea of portable music is only the *convenience*, not the quality. Since digital encoding tech first became available, therefore, I've always used the highest possible sampling rate when I've recorded music to my hard drive or MP3 player. Back in the day, that meant I'd have a limited number of songs, but it was worth it for the quality, as I could easily tell the difference in quality. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Martin Baxter" < martinbaxt...@gmail.com > To: scifinoir2@yahoogroups.com Sent: Tuesday, May 11, 2010 7:00:29 AM GMT -05:00 US/Canada Eastern Subject: Re: [scifinoir2] In Mobile Age, Sound Quality Steps Back Funny you should post this, Mr Worf. I read this on Wired.com yesterday, and almost posted it. Suck It, iPod: Meet the King of Geeky Portable Audio Devices http://www.wired.com/reviews/product/pr_hifiman On Tue, May 11, 2010 at 12:30 AM, Mr. Worf < hellomahog...@gmail.com > wrote: In Mobile Age, Sound Quality Steps Back By JOSEPH PLAMBECK Published: May 9, 2010 • Sign in to Recommend • Twitter • comments (184) • Sign In to E-Mail • Print • Reprints • Share Close • Linkedin • Digg • Facebook • Mixx • MySpace • Yahoo! Buzz • Permalink • At the ripe age of 28, Jon Zimmer is sort of an old fogey. That is, he is obsessive about the sound quality of his music. Enlarge This Image Joshua Bright for The New York Times Mario Suazo, 11, listens to his iPod at the Port Authority Bus Terminal. Related The 9th Annual Year in Ideas: Good Enough is the New Great Enlarge This Image Joshua Bright for The New York Times An Ayre Acoustic sound system with Sonus Faber speakers at Stereo Exchange in Manhattan. Price: $125,000. Readers' Comments Readers shared their thoughts on this article. • Read All Comments (184) » A onetime audio engineer who now works as a consultant for Stereo Exchange, an upscale audio store in Manhattan, Mr. Zimmer lights up when talking about high fidelity, bit rates and $10,000 loudspeakers. But iPods and compressed computer files — the most popular vehicles for audio today — are “sucking the life out of music,” he says. The last decade has brought an explosion in dazzling technological advances — including enhancements in surround sound, high definition television and 3-D — that have transformed the fan’s experience. There are improvements in the quality of media everywhere — except in music. In many ways, the quality of what people hear — how well the playback reflects the original sound— has taken a step back. To many expert ears, compressed music files produce a crackly, tinnier and thinner sound than music on CDs and certainly on vinyl. And to compete with other songs, tracks are engineered to be much louder as well. In one way, the music business has been the victim of its own technological success: the ease of loading songs onto a computer or an iPod has meant that a generation of fans has happily traded fidelity for portability and convenience. This is the obstacle the industry faces in any effort to create higher-quality — and more expensive — ways of listening. “If people are interested in getting a better sound, there are many ways to do it,” Mr. Zimmer said. “But many people don’t even know that they might be interested.” Take Thomas Pinales, a 22-year-old from Spanish Harlem and a fan of some of today’s most popular artists, including Lady Gaga, Jay-Z and Lil Wayne. Mr. Pinales listens to his music stored on his Apple iPod through a pair of earbuds, and while he wouldn’t mind upgrading, he is not convinced that it would be worth the cost. “My ears aren’t fine tuned,” he said. “I don’t know if I could really tell the difference.” The change in sound quality is as much cultural as technological. For decades, starting around the 1950s, high-end stereos were a status symbol. A high-quality system was something to show off, much like a new flat-screen TV today. But Michael Fremer, a professed audiophile who runs musicangle.com , which reviews albums, said that today, “a stereo has become an object of scorn.” The marketplace reflects that change. From 2000 to 2009, Americans reduced their overall spending on home stereo components by more than a third, to roughly $960 million, according to the Consumer Electronics Association, a trade group. Spending on portable digital devices during that same period increased more than fiftyfold, to $5.4 billion. “People used to sit and listen to music,” Mr. Fremer said, but the increased portability has altered the way people experience recorded music. “It was an activity. It is no longer consumed as an event that you pay attention to.” Instead, music is often carried from place to place, played in the background while the consumer does something else — exercising, commuting or cooking dinner. The songs themselves are usually saved on the digital devices in a compressed format, often as an AAC or MP3 file. That compression shrinks the size of the file, eliminating some of the sounds and range contained on a CD while allowing more songs to be saved on the device and reducing download times. Even if music companies and retailers like the iTunes Store, which opened in April 2003, wanted to put an emphasis on sound quality, they faced technical limitations at the start, not to mention economic ones. “It would have been very difficult for the iTunes Store to launch with high-quality files if it took an hour to download a single song,” said David Dorn, a senior vice president at Rhino Entertainment, a division of Warner Music that specializes in high-quality recordings. The music industry has not failed to try. About 10 years ago, two new high-quality formats — DVD Audio and SACD, for Super Audio CD — entered the marketplace, promising sound superior even to that of a CD. But neither format gained traction. In 2003, 1.7 million DVD Audio and SACD titles were shipped, according to the Recording Industry Association of America . But by 2009, only 200,000 SACD and DVD Audio titles were shipped. Last year, the iTunes Store upgraded the standard quality for a song to 256 kilobits per second from 128 kilobits per second, preserving more details and eliminating the worst crackles. Some online music services are now marketing an even higher-quality sound as a selling point. Mog , a new streaming music service, announced in March an application for smartphones that would allow the service’s subscribers to save songs onto their phone. The music will be available on the phone as long as the subscriber pays the $10 monthly fee. Songs can be downloaded at up to 320 kilobits per second. Another company, HDtracks.com , started selling downloads last year that contain even more information than CDs at $2.49 a song. Right now, most of the available tracks are of classical or jazz music. David Chesky, a founder of HDtracks and composer of jazz and classical music, said the site tried to put music on a pedestal. “Musicians work their whole life trying to capture a tone, and we’re trying to take advantage of it,” Mr. Chesky said. “If you want to listen to a $3 million Stradivarius violin, you need to hear it in a hall that allows the instrument to sound like $3 million.” Still, these remain niche interests so far, and they are complicated by changes in the recording process. With the rise of digital music, fans listen to fewer albums straight through. Instead, they move from one artist’s song to another’s. Pop artists and their labels, meanwhile, shudder at the prospect of having their song seem quieter than the previous song on a fan’s playlist. So audio engineers, acting as foot soldiers in a so-called volume war, are often enlisted to increase the overall volume of a recording. Randy Merrill, an engineer at Masterdisk, a New York City company that creates master recordings, said that to achieve an overall louder sound, engineers raise the softer volumes toward peak levels. On a quality stereo system, Mr. Merrill said, the reduced volume range can leave a track sounding distorted. “Modern recording has gone overboard on the volume,” he said. In fact, among younger listeners, the lower-quality sound might actually be preferred. Jonathan Berger, a professor of music at Stanford, said he had conducted an informal study among his students and found that, over the roughly seven years of the study, an increasing number of them preferred the sound of files with less data over the high-fidelity recordings. “I think our human ears are fickle. What’s considered good or bad sound changes over time,” Mr. Berger said. “Abnormality can become a feature.” An earlier version of this article misstated the common unit of measurement for the transfer rate for digital audio formats. It is kilobits per second, not kilobytes. It also rendered the name of the New York company Masterdisk incorrectly. -- Celebrating 10 years of bringing diversity to perversity! Mahogany at: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/mahogany_pleasures_of_darkness/ -- "If all the world's a stage and we are merely players, who the bloody hell wrote the script?" -- Charles E Grant http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQUxw9aUVik -- Celebrating 10 years of bringing diversity to perversity! Mahogany at: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/mahogany_pleasures_of_darkness/ -- Celebrating 10 years of bringing diversity to perversity! Mahogany at: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/mahogany_pleasures_of_darkness/
