you know those hamster wheel generator things?.. we got those but with our dog-sled dogs 
works like a charm.
R
I couldn’t resist
Back to the conversation at hand, I think that “they” are hoping that people get used to the system with DVDs and can eventually switch music to a similiar system. So by mixing music to work well in mp3s they may be starting a migration to such a system.
I tried to read all the posts to ensure this wasn’t already mentioned, but
I thought there was something about higher quality audio formats available for a slightly greater price in the Macworld Keynote. Ofcourse I just tried to find some on iTunes or mention of it on the apple site to no avail.
Personally, while I listen to music from my ipod in my car, the ipod is just a way to carry tons of music with me for convenience, so the better compression = more songs = = ) If I really want to listen to music then it’s time for the Technics to start spinning.
This post really made me think about something I’ve been thinking more and more lately, is that with the popularity and profitability of ringtones, when are some of these “artists” going to produce the song for the ringtone?
peace
r*
I’ve been trying to think of a way to sum up this article in a visual way, and I think I might have succeeded.
Imagine if we were talking about video. Maybe a new compressed DVD standard comes out that is popular, but it only displays grayscale. As the new DVD standard gets more popular, directors and producers will start to make their movies to be filmed in grayscale. As it continues to become even more popular, the studios might even go back and re-edit movies to be grayscale.
Now, sometimes B&W films are nice. But we would be missing the benefits of color. Just as the loud music is nice, but we are missing out on richer music. I hope this makes sense.
Recent findings
After having dug to a depth of 10 meters last year, New York scientists
found traces of copper wire dating back 100 years and came to the conclusion
that their ancestors already had a telephone network more than 100 years ago.
Not to be outdone by the New Yorkers, in the weeks that followed,
California scientists dug to a depth of 20 meters, and shortly after, headlines in
the LA Times newspaper read: ‘California archaeologists have found traces of
200 year old copper wire and have concluded that their ancestors already had an
advanced high-tech communications network a hundred years earlier than the NewYorkers.’
One week later, ‘Moose Jaw Times Herald’, a local newspaper in
Saskatchewan reported the following:
‘After digging as deep as 30 meters in sagebrush fields near Moose Jaw,
Ole Johnson, a self-taught archaeologist, reported that he found absolutely
nothing. Ole has therefore concluded that 300 years ago, Saskatchewan
had already gone wireless.’
Isn’t a huge portion (if not all) of this conversation moot based on the idea that you can’t get high fidelity out of earbuds? I don’t think Apple ever argued that the music they sell be played on a high end stereo. If HiFi is your passion…don’t you buy the CD or Vinyl?
I also see this a lot like Beta and VHS when that battle was going on. Beta was better quality. But when it comes right down to it, the large percentage of the population doesn’t care. I would imagine that is very much the same for MP3. It has proven to be good enough. The niche markets care, but the masses simply do not.
And yes…I am in the masses that don’t care and find MP3 good enough.
awesome! haha.
R
really though, your second post is on the money. any sound is only as good as what you listening to it thru. earbuds and most stereos (home/car) are indeed crap, so why worry about a few top frequencies… biggest difference i do find is older stereo systems/speakers tuned for a warmer analog sound compared to newer systems. i prefer the warmer sounds any day. at the moment, i’ve got a pair of 20yr old B&O Redline speakers connected to a H/K receiver, and find the sounds quality (mp3 or CD) is far nicer to listen to than most new HTIB or bookshelf systems.
R
Ip just hit it. Pristine quality is nothing if your headphones are garbage, especially adding in the ambient noise from being outside, etc… Some say apple buds are just a step above a cup and string. I threw mine out after listening to them once and went back to my cheapy $14 Sony buds. Also from the audiophiles that use the in ear buds, the ipods don’t sound that good. You need to use a headphone amp to get better sound out of them (for the few that can notice the difference).
You’ll most likely get your best sound at home with a really high end audio system or real headphones but for the real audiophiles, I’m sure that’s where they’ll have their high quality source music. For the majority of the market though, 256 or 320 kbs is more than enough, especially listening through your average boombox or earbuds.
i cant stand the std apple earbuds, but also find that most earbuds dont even fit my ears. i DO love the apple in ear ear phones (or whatever they’re called). the sounds is 200x better, full bass, and only $40 or so, so a good deal compared to some more expensive Shures’. i haven’t to be honest tried to many others, as i feel terrible using non-apple stuff with my ipod. gotta keep it pure. 
R
There are sounds that the ear buds can produce that are not stored in lower bandwidth MP3s. For example, I’m not an audiophile, but I like Kitaro. There is one album in particular that I like, but it has been out of print for over a decade. Because I couldn’t find it, I downloaded it. The bandwidth was 160 kb/s or something. I couldn’t listen to it more than once. Kitaro, famous for weird drums and electronic high and low sounds, sounded like absolute crap on any stereo. The high sounds buzzed and the low sounds just crapped out. If Kitaro was only available as download, I think no one would ever give the music a listen. And that’s the point. The MP3 is limiting the musicians ability to be creative.
In a way you’re reinforcing my point. If you had said that the 160 kb/s limited U2’s, or Celine Dingdong’s music to non-listenable I don’t think the iPod and iTunes marriage would have ever worked.
The fact that I have never heard of Kitaro plays some bearing on this. He/she/they may be huge in Germany. But when it comes right down to it, iTunes doesn’t cater acoustically to the skinny end of The Long Tail.
I’ve been working on an evolutionary product phase analysis for the gramophone the last couple of weeks, and one of the things I noticed is that Hifi is coming back big time. The social value of listening to records together, getting up to flip the record, beats the crap out of thousands of kids walking around like zombies with headphones rusted to their scalps (me included)
This was also mentioned in the Times article linked in this topic earlier. Vinyl sales rose 15% (!!) in 2007 compared to 2006, and especially smaller, independent labels are experiencing much higher sales.
This last thing may be connected to what Mr-914 said about ‘underground’ music. It is a good thing that the market for more advanced, non-popular music stays intact. Especially smaller independent bands would be killed by the loss in profit caused by downloading, if the downloads were of high enough quality for the fans.
So what I’m trying to say, I think, is that iTunes selling popular music of crappy quality keeps smaller bands alive.
mvisbeek: That’s interesting! I’d like to know more about what you find out. I’ll take another look at that times article too.
IP: It’s not just Kitaro, although he’s an extreme example. I’ve also found some Dick Dale to be un-listenable when downloaded. I think I’m keeping the music companies in business by buying CDs.
I thought of this early on this thread and I thought it was off topic so I didn’t post my thoughts. It still may be off topic, but here it goes anyways.
I think this is generational though. My generation grew up buying a physical thing (record, cd, tape cassette, I’m not old enough for 8-track) that had music in it. The total experience of listening to music included first learning about a particular band/album/song. You then had to physically go out and hunt for it at a record store. Once you have the thing in your hand, there is a period of anticipation till you finally unwrap the thing (an experience in itself) and pop it in an appropriate music player and hit play. And then while you are listening to it, you can hold the sleeve/case in your hand and look at the pictures and read any liner notes that may be included with the cd or record.
Many times when I’m waxing nostalgic with someone about the first time you heard so-and-so great artist/album/song, I’ll remember a lot of that experience. So in a way, that experience is part of the music for me.
But for this digital generation of kids, this experience can happen and be done with in a matter of minutes. Nothing wrong with that, but I think listening to music and our relationship to it will continue to change as we go forward. Before the rage of the internet and modern day music production on a computer, I always had this sense that musical artists were talented and “few and far between”. Nowadays, everyones a musician it seems. Because you can reach a huge audience so quickly these days - talent is secondary to appeal.
I hate to be a technophobe, but i realized something a while ago…
my relationship with music has changed negatively since I started downloading music. I think it has to do with what eddison is talking about, sort of a cheapening of the whole experience.
I guess I don’t want the convenience anymore, I’ve gone back to buying everything in physical form. I’m feeling the same way about a lot of online purchasing. I’m trying to set something up with my local bookstore so I can get them to order new books for me to avoid amazon. This way when a shipment comes in I can walk to the store to pick it up instead of one book being shipped directly too me. I’d rather support my local independent bookstore at a premium, than let all of the profits collect in Jeff Bezos bank account. Maybe I’m naive, but I’d like to try.
The digital music revolution did indeed change my relation with music, but it’s not all bad.
One thing I really think is GREAT is that I know so much more music than I would know when I’d only be buying CD’s. Every day I search and find new upcoming artists, listen to their music and a lot of times it’s great music I would never have come by otherwise.
Things like Last.fm have had a greatly positive influence on my relationship with music. This would never have happened without the digitization of music.
Now, people prefer crappy sound:
O’Relly Radar quotes Professor Berger as saying that it’s the “sizzle sounds” that people are loving because it’s what they’re comfortable with.
Man, I cannot believe i didnt see this thread a year ago. I am a firm believer in good quality audio, and fully agree that the MP3 is leading the demise of good recordings. That being said, I still think that there will always be enough of a market to justify keeping the real artists with engineers that care about quality.
As far as the young people preffering the MP3 sound, I wonder how accurate that is. Im thinking that the material itself had something to do with the end result. If they played a pop song that most young people enjoy in 128k form, then some slow jazz in wav form, Im thinking that the person will most likely select the better song, not the recording. I have a very good ability to listen and pinpoint recording aspects, and have noticed that most people cant do it. It makes it difficult to justify buying four 30 band EQ’s and time alignment on tweeters that are only 4 inches off.
Also, on the comment about the vinyl coming back. I went to an audio fest a few months ago and I would say over 50% were using turntables as the source. Granted, this was a bunch of audiophiles with $200k setups, but there is definitely a push toward the vinyl these days.
My kids are like that too, they confuse quality with loud and now equate that nasty rattle sound of the speakers about to blow as being good and loud. Not quite the same thing as the mp3 distortion but I have really sat and shown them the difference between a clear sound, and that distorted wobbly stuff they listen to just to be loud but they’re fine with the distortion as long as it gets them the volume they want.
It’s the same with them preferring the “fullscreen” version of movies because they don’t like the tops and bottoms cut off on the widescreen versions! But that’s another topic.
This is a subject that has been on my mind quite a bit lately. My wife bought me a 1Tb external drive for my birthday a few weeks ago specifically to use as a music file server through iTunes.
I have a fairly extensive vinyl collection which I use occasionally, and a mind boggling number of CDs. The vinyl stores very nicely in about 3.5 feet (100cm) of shelves under the stereo. The CDs, on the other hand, take up so much more space. I have a very large apothecary chest that holds 500, another cabinet that holds 250, and about 3 or 4 CDR spindles of about 50 each that don’t have cases. About half of the CD cases are broken, and as I often cart armloads out to the studio or in my car, theyre just impossible to keep in order.
For the past few weeks I’ve been importing all of this music and it has been interesting.
At first I began by converting tracks into MP3 format @ 320kbps. I noticed a sudden drop in volume as the first track is finished and the MP3 takes over for the CD sound. I thought 320 kbps bitrate would be nearly indistiguishable from the original CD sound quality, but it was just denial. I winced every time it happened.
Finally, last night I couldn’t take it any more. I wiped it all off and started over using the Apple Lossless format instead of MP3. So far so good. I like the sound much better now and I don’t think I can tell any difference. There is definitley no noticeable difference (to my ears) when the converted file takes over for the CD.
At any rate (no pun intended), I’m loving the new toy. Having everything organized and instantly at hand in the house and in the studio is wonderful. Now I’m going to box up the Cds and store them in the basement.