Is quality better than quantity?

[guymrob]

Hi guys,

Many years ago manufacturers made great Hi-Fi separates, including recorders like MD, DAT and CDR. Now they are gone, Big boys are now making tiny MP3, squezzed as much song into a given size. Including ipod find it way into hifi system that using USB connection. Where is the quest of Hi-Fi? Is there any audiophiles who want to make a statement?

I starting to treasure all these components i owned and when they are gone, who will make them again? The future for high fidelity is slowly dying off... Your comment pls.

http://guymrob.tripod.com/hi-fi.htm

Guy

Edited October 5, 2006 by guymrob

[jonny mac]

As far as I know this is a bit over dramatic. The future of high fidelity is simply not represented by iPods, portable MD or any other such system. The difference is that these things are more available to the general public (especially wen you consider the price of decks). Anyone who thinks that the iPod docking station with integrated speakers that adorns their living-room bookshelf is the cutting edge in high fidelity music enjoyment is mistaken.

Decks are still freely available and as big and expensive as ever.

[bobt]

There are a lot of people who have never heard a good system, let alone an audiophile system, so to them they think that compressed MP3 is what music is all about. Once you have heard a good turntable, tape, or cd, through a quality speaker/amp system, you have a hard time thinking MP3 is quality, it isn't, never was, never will be. MP3 is about saving space, nothing else. What the new generation personal audio is good for is taking a fair amount of music with you, but most are not audiophile, a lot aren't even good, but they are convenient

Bob

[ZosoIV]

....you have a hard time thinking MP3 is quality, it isn't, never was, never will be. MP3 is about saving space, nothing else.

That certainly is a blanket statement, and is simply untrue. MP3 is very capable of being completely transparent to the PCM source with the right encoder (LAME) and the right settings. The fact that compressed audio can be transparent has been proven time and time again by ITU listening tests as well as the extensive testing done at hydrogenaudio.org. It's been my experience that those who claim otherwise are usually quite surprised when they do an actual ABX test and can't hear as well as they claim.

Also, equipment has nothing to do with the quality of compressed audio. I have high-end gear and would be damned if I could ABX a decoded LAME -V0 --vbr new mp3, going from the S/PDIF output on my computer to the input on my amp, compared to the same song played back on my SACD player.

[ATELETRONICS]

I AGREE COMPLETLY

[Stuge]

If you ask me i will definately prefer audio cd's(quality) over mp3(quantity ) or Atrac ,but i depends .If i'm at home ,I will prefer to listen Audio cd ,but if i'm out, I will prefer mp3 .

Edited October 5, 2006 by stuge

[greenmachine]

As to the original question: "Is quality better than quantity?" - Why not have both? I'm enjoying my extensive, [not perfect, but] high quality mp3 collection on a large hdd through high quality [end?] equipment. I can't abx a well encoded mp3 from its uncompressed original either, and i have tried.

[A440]

Also, equipment has nothing to do with the quality of compressed audio.

Weren't you the one complaining about blanket statements?

Playing a 320 kbps mp3 through Ipod earbuds is not going to sound the same as playing it through a home system.

And the digital-analog converter and amplifier power of whatever you are using for playback are also going to affect the sound quality.

[ZosoIV]

Weren't you the one complaining about blanket statements?

Playing a 320 kbps mp3 through Ipod earbuds is not going to sound the same as playing it through a home system.

And the digital-analog converter and amplifier power of whatever you are using for playback are also going to affect the sound quality.

You've obviously missed my point. Equipment does not make an encoder any more or less transparent - were not talking about tapes and analog noisefloors here. A piss-poor 128kbps MP3 will sound just as bad on a high-end system as it does on an iPod, just as a perfectly-encoded LAME --preset insane encoding will be just as transparent to the ear on a high-end system as it will be on an iPod. Coders work with masking curves, quanitization, and noise-shaping - you either hear the distortion caused by these processes because they are over the ATH (absolute threshold of hearing), or you don't. If anything, it's the other way around - cheaper DAC's and crappy shelf-systems are more likely to make an MP3 sound bad by virtue or decoding it improperly or adding noise. Again, that's not the MP3's fault. There is plenty of proof for this phenomenon - visit hydrogrenaudio.org, for example. LAME was tuned on crappy laptop speakers yet performs just as well on high-end headphones. And in actuality, there's a lot of high-end, "audiophile" stuff out there (like tube amps) that people say sounds "better," yet is objectively worse than more modestly-priced gear because it mangles and changes the signal.

Making blanket statements, like saying that MP3's in general sound badly, is like saying that ATRAC sucks because you've heard LP4 and it sounds bad. Compressed audio, when done correctly, can provide the same listening experience as PCM, regardless of whether that's on an iPod or a home stereo. If somebody wants to prove me otherwise, feel free to submit some ABX results to this thread showing a statistically-significant difference between a group of 320kbps MP3s and the originals played back on their stereo. It can be done for killer samples, but in the other 99% of cases, it can't. And I guarantee that ATRAC would likely be worse in killer cases – compared to LAME, it's a poorly-tuned for a codec with so much technical potential (which is opposite of MP3, a codec with technical limitations but highly-tweaked tunings).

[MDGB2]

You ain't LIVED until you've heard your music in Hi-Fi.

Thats why I'm so annoyed at Sony for not bringing out a standalone Hi-MD deck.

Portables will never do the format justice.

[ATELETRONICS]

yea. sony better bring us a deck soon. why are they waiting so long. they only need to make 1 model as long as its a good one.

[dogville]

If you ask me i will definately prefer audio cd's(quality) over mp3(quantity ) or Atrac ,but i depends .If i'm at home ,I will prefer to listen Audio cd ,but if i'm out, I will prefer mp3 .

That's true. I would love to listen to all my music in high fidelity, OF COURSE. I do it at home with my gear. When I'm out, I take my RH-1 and not other because, as far as I know, theres's no portable gear playing in hi-fi. I wish there was but unfortunately we have to use what it is on the market. I usually compress the songs for the rh-1 because otherwise, I would only be able to carry a few songs in WAV in my 1gb cassette. As there's no hi-fi mode on a portable player , I hardly notice any difference, in quality sound, between my 256 atrac compression and a wav file. Be sure that if instead of being 1gb, the media supported 10 gb, I would use wav though.

Regards

Edited October 6, 2006 by dogville

[guymrob]

The fact the new generations have come to accept MP3 sounded good enough for them. This is alarming, coz they may not have heard a quality CD player playing through a high quality amplifier and speakers. Some don't even buy CDs anymore coz they can download songs from internet, like i-tune into their ipod and played through a high quality headphone. Most said it sound great! Some even buy docking stations to play through their Hi-Fi system!

What I trying to bring up this forum are more than just compressed or uncompressed audio. It is the equipment we play on. High quality recording and playback system are getting hard to come by. For the masses, tiny MP3 players hook up to a PC is what they do. The introduction of SACD and DVD players never make it to the masses; only a small handful of people who believe true fidelity can only come from good quality system. Unfortunately, this figure is dying off slowly... coz the big boys no longer make them! I was waiting for Sony to come out a Hi-MD deck for years and it never materialise

The world has changed, audio compression has become a way of life and it is a very sad thing. I used to play LPs, CDs, SACD, DAT and Hi-MD, if they don't make these anymore where are all my collection goes to? I close my case. Thank you.

Edited October 6, 2006 by guymrob

[dogville]

The world has changed, audio compression has become a way of life and it is a very sad thing. I used to play LPs, CDs, SACD, DAT and Hi-MD, if they don't make these anymore where are all my collection goes to? I close my case. Thank you.

You could have said louder but not better. Completely agree with you. It's sad seeing that, for a lot of people, those tiny awful mp3 players are more than enough. They don't mind wether a record sounds like a tin or in real hi-fi

I have sacd and dvd-a and the sound, most of the times, is gorgeous (depending on the recording). Even the multichannel experience is great and if not, listen Grover Washington Junior's "Winelight" dvd-a and you'll see . But this is another topic

[1kyle]

You could have said louder but not better. Completely agree with you. It's sad seeing that, for a lot of people, those tiny awful mp3 players are more than enough. They don't mind wether a record sounds like a tin or in real hi-fi

I have sacd and dvd-a and the sound, most of the times, is gorgeous (depending on the recording). Even the multichannel experience is great and if not, listen Grover Washington Junior's "Winelight" dvd-a and you'll see . But this is another topic

One thing also forgotten here is it really doesn't matter what you do if the original source quality / recording is poor to start with.

Whilst typical MP3 encoded at 128 is in general not very good there's no reason why an encoding at 320 kbs Lame V0 at a variable bit rate shouldn't sound extremely good.

What tends to happen is some people start with already a hideousely compressed sound and then compress it again. Similarly the the quality Music Downloads offer is usaually not very good either and even if you still get your music via "Old Fashioned CD" some recordings are pretty terrible as well so it doesn't matter what you do to the sound --it's going to stay horrible.

As they say in the computer industry GIGO --Garbage in - Garbage out).

Physical Size has nothing to do with Quality -- just take computer hard disks -- a tiny disk can hold nearly 300 GB of data and it's a lot more reliable than a disc which was probably 3 times it's physical size, manufactured a few years ago which could only hold around 20GB.

There is no reason those tiny MP3 players shouldn't produce a decent sound provided the medium has a large enough capacity to record at a decent bit rate --AND OF COURSE PROVIDING THE ORIGINAL SOURCE SOUND IS OK TO START WITH.

Cheers

-K

[milomind]

Unfortunately, in the music industry these days, studios are putting out extremely compressed albums in order to get them louder for radio airplay. The sound has been pre-ruined in the studio.

The fact of the matter is, since the music being produced is already compressed, further compression does little to ruin its sound quality further. The range is already gone. It has loud midrange, and little else.

Now, on the other hand, take a very well produced album of complex range, and variable volumes such as jazz records from the fifties, and you will find that almost any compression at all causes audible distortion of the music.

It's just a sad fact that most pop and rock from the early 90s on has this malaise of over-compression, and is the reason why 80s pop sounds so much richer in comparison. Pick up a Tears For Fears album, and play it against The Fray if you don't believe me.

[greenmachine]

Dynamic compression [what the studios apply] and filesize compression [encoding to a lossy or lossless format] are two different beasts. Actually dynamically highly compressed recordings are usually more difficult to compress in fiesize and thus will result in a higher bitrate [for lossy codecs: to retain sound quality].

Edited October 8, 2006 by greenmachine

[milomind]

Dynamic compression [what the studios apply] and filesize compression [encoding to a lossy or lossless format] are two different beasts. Actually dynamically highly compressed recordings are usually more difficult to compress in fiesize and thus will result in a higher bitrate [for lossy codecs: to retain sound quality].

You are right about that, and I should have made the distinction. I was speaking mainly of multiband compression and its use in the studio and radio. A lot of the stuff that is produced this way sounds crappy to begin with, is what I meant. After that, it doesn't really matter what you do to it, it will still sound like crap. GIGO, like 1kyle said.

Edited October 8, 2006 by milomind

[guymrob]

'Physical Size has nothing to do with Quality -- just take computer hard disks -- a tiny disk can hold nearly 300 GB of data and it's a lot more reliable than a disc which was probably 3 times it's physical size, manufactured a few years ago which could only hold around 20GB'

Well, physical size does have an effect on quality. Manufacturers not only squezze as much songs into a tiny MP3 player as possible by using the highest compression ratio, they reduce the size to the point it is virtually impossible to reproduce the a quality sound of a decent portable CD player. A portable CD player can sound better than MP3 player coz the size; the electronic ciruits are not constrained, good quality components can be used. Unfortunately nobody use that. Talking about hard drive has a storage, the average lifetime is about 2yrs or less easily 'crash' when drop or subject to high vibration. Many of ipod user buy extended warranty just to cover the hard drive, the most expensive part of ipod.

In a removable media like MD, CDR, they have very high reliabilty and with proper treatment they can outlast any hard drives, at least 20yrs and above. And still able to playback after many years. Even solid-state flash type memory have limited read-write capability, and worse, their data retention is less than a few years. So the best media to do achieve is MD, CDR, and they are cheap!

[Sparky191]

Unfortunately the quality of new modern portable CD players is overall inferior to older players. As they are built cheaper, and sound quality is less important than a long list of extra gimicky features and long battery life. So in many cases a well encoded track from a good source usually sounds better on a well regarded MP3 player than a CD portable.

Theres lots of threads on Head-Fi about this.

I haven't heard a HiMD with a HD amp, but some of the MP3 players I have or had, sound (in my subjective opinion) better than my CD portables and also than my MD/HiMD's (no HD amp).

[bjsilva]

It's been my experience that those who claim otherwise are usually quite surprised when they do an actual ABX test and can't hear as well as they claim.

I personally am not convinced of the authority of ABX tests.

Unfortunately since the right brain is not particularly precise and the judgement can be easily influenced by other factors, it completely eludes scientific testing in these matters. But this does *not* diminish the importance of it even a little bit, especially when we're talking about musical enjoyment. For those who are in fact "trained" to listen for compression artefacts, their judgement as to the transparency of compressed audio in ABX tests is just as useless since they're making an entirely left-brained qualitative judgement.

I will happily admit that I would have a difficult to impossible time distinguishing between well-compressed audio and an "uncompressed" digital source. However, who am I to say what my right brain is hearing or not? Just because my left brain can't identify the difference doesn't mean my right brain cannot, and do I really want to risk missing out on one iota of musical enjoyment just because I follow our societies' obsession with left brain thinking?

It's sad seeing that, for a lot of people, those tiny awful mp3 players are more than enough. They don't mind wether a record sounds like a tin or in real hi-fi

I think we need to remember that the vast majority of people listening to music on their iPod (or whatever) aren't *really* listening. They press play and then do something else or go travel somewhere in their mind, occasionally catching a musical line or series of words that stand out. What difference does it make to someone who "listens" like that?

[Sparky191]

I personally am not convinced of the authority of ABX tests.

Unfortunately since the right brain is not particularly precise and the judgement can be easily influenced by other factors, it completely eludes scientific testing in these matters. But this does *not* diminish the importance of it even a little bit, especially when we're talking about musical enjoyment. For those who are in fact "trained" to listen for compression artefacts, their judgement as to the transparency of compressed audio in ABX tests is just as useless since they're making an entirely left-brained qualitative judgement.

I will happily admit that I would have a difficult to impossible time distinguishing between well-compressed audio and an "uncompressed" digital source. However, who am I to say what my right brain is hearing or not? Just because my left brain can't identify the difference doesn't mean my right brain cannot, and do I really want to risk missing out on one iota of musical enjoyment just because I follow our societies' obsession with left brain thinking?

I think we need to remember that the vast majority of people listening to music on their iPod (or whatever) aren't *really* listening. They press play and then do something else or go travel somewhere in their mind, occasionally catching a musical line or series of words that stand out. What difference does it make to someone who "listens" like that?

Personally I think ABX tests are useful in finding out your own preferences. For me that might mean I prefer cassettes over CD's or MP3's.