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On audio fidelity

April 9, 2007 in cd, ipod, itunes, music, radio, video | 4 comments

I’m flying between Winnipeg and Ottawa, listening to a favourite Coltrane recording. I thought I’d get down a few musings (laments?) on digital music and audio fidelity prompted by the EMI/Apple announcement.

Dynamic range, warmth and depth have all but disappeared it seems in today’s music recordings. Music is compressed in recording, in mastering, in broadcast; often at all three stages. The loudness effect is ubiquitous. Broadcast audio is so pumped that it never seems to vary more than a few db. What results is music that is shallow, cold, harsh and without any kind of imaging or space.

Our new formats don’t help things. We have gone from vinyl (with its many short-comings, granted), to cassette tape, to Compact Disc, to MP3. Even though CDs have potentially more bandwidth than vinyl, it’s not used.

For most people MP3 and AAC files compressed at 128k have become the way they listen to music. Add to the mix iTunes EQ settings (which usually counter, or undo, any ‘psycho-acoustic’ EQ inherent in the MP3 and AAC file compression) and the result is unlistenable.

Do our ears not know any better anymore?

Has the convenience of iPods, iTunes Music libraries and huge hard drives won out over sound fidelity?

Has the requirement to sell music on the radio, in movies, in video games and on the web over crappy computer speakers made the dumbing down of recordings necessary?

Has the focus on computer rigs done away with the concept of home audio systems?

Maybe the music that’s being consumed as 128k MP3 files doesn’t need — or deserve — better engineering or more bandwidth.

Is anything likely to reverse this trend, or will high quality audio become even more of a niche interest?

ps. It’s often said that we are now more discerning with video than we are with audio, what with the prevalence of gigantic plasma and LCD displays and “surround sound” in home theatre systems.

I don’t think so. Check out a TV retailer, where the colour on the display models is so saturated and overblown the reds almost make your eyes bleed. Or what about the stretching of a 4:3 aspect ratio image to cover a wide panel display? Every bar’s got’em. And what about the compression artifacts in a digital cable or satellite-to-home? A fast-moving image sequence is horribly chunky. People don’t seem to mind watching the ridiculously distorted images, over-saturated colours, and overly compressed video. I can’t bare it.

As with music, it probably doesn’t help that most of the broadcast “content” is shite.

5 digital music rules of thumb

February 28, 2007 in cd, ipod, itunes, music, podcasts | No comments

I was thinking about the iPod’s fifth anniversary, and how the iPod and the MP3 have revolutionized how we interact with recorded music. I thought I’d offer up 5 things I’ve learned about keeping a digital music library in the last 5 years or so. (I’m told that numbered lists make great blog entries.)

  1. Use MP3. Although file formats like OGG and AAC/MP4 offer some advantages in quality (OGG) and features (AAC/MP4), nothing is as portable as the MP3 file format. I can play the same MP3 file on any computer, in the car, on my iPod, and on almost any mobile device. Other file formats don’t offer the same “encode once and forget it” possibility.
  2. Go big. While on the “encode once” theme: Encode at the highest possible bit rate you can afford in terms of storage space. For the longest time I encoded at 192k out of concern for file size and drive space. I now encode at 320k knowing that hard drive prices continue to drop dramatically. More importantly, at 320k the audio fidelity of a well encoded MP3 file is absolutely indistinguishable from CD audio. At 320k I’ll never rip that same file to MP3 again.
  3. The MP3 encoder in iTunes is not great. Use LAME instead. It’s open source and free. Blacktree (maker of Quicksilver) even makes an iTunes interface for LAME (iTunes-LAME Encoder) so you can encode with LAME from within iTunes. Couldn’t be easier.
  4. It can be a real housekeeping chore, but it’s crucial to be meticulous with your files’ ID3 tags. Meta data is your friend. Make sure you fill in the ID3 info religiously. ID3 tags will help tame the largest of digital libraries and they’ll make perusing your MP3 collection a pleasure. Use an application like Media Rage to get your meta data in ship shape. Once your ID3 tags are in order set iTunes to “Keep iTunes music folder organized” and “Copy files into iTunes folder when adding to library” (preferences/advanced) and your iTunes library will look a thing of beauty.
  5. Back up.

Who knew?

January 2, 2007 in cd, music | 2 comments

I can’t remember the last time I bought a CD in a record store (do they still call them that?), other than maybe as a gift. Just before Christmas I was killing some time in the local HMV. Mostly I was noticing how little music is actually in a music store these days. As a lark, I checked the “T” bin for Teenage Head.

Now, I’ve been looking for a copy of their album Frantic City for years — It’s one of those hugely evocative aural romps down memory lane — to absolutely no avail; not in stores, not mail order, not online, not even from any of the dodgier sources.

I had long misplaced my vinyl copy. (I’m convinced somewhere in this city, in some friend’s basement, there’s a stash of my LPs we’ve all forgotten about.)

Long story short, there it was, at the HMV … in the mall. Go figure.

I don’t think our car stereo has ever been cranked as loud.

Anyway, if you’re the friend with the forlorn stack of vinyl in your garage, could you check it for L’Etranger’s deput EP? Thanks.

Christmas music, of a kind

December 25, 2006 in cd, music | No comments

There’s music that I oddly associate with Christmas as much as Deck the Halls and Jingle Bell Rock. ‘Oddly’, because the music in question has absolutely nothing to do with Christmas really, except in my memory.

I’m referring to seminal records that I received as Christmas gifts in my youth. Records I now can’t help but associate with Christmas (fondly). It was usually one album per Christmas, two in exceptional years.

After Christmas breakfast, I spent most of the rest of the day, and most of the rest of the Christmas holidays, playing the LPs over and over again until, by the time school started again, the records were as familiar to me and worn out as discs that had been in my fledgling but cherished collection for years.

(There’s something special about albums bought or received in my youth. They were few and far between and so very carefully chosen. Downloading the entire back catalogue of a given artist over P2P is just not the same thing. So I’m told, anyway.)

Maurizio’s Christmas favourites: Let it Be - The Beatles, ‘77 - Talking Heads, In Through the Out Door - Led Zeppelin and that perennial Yuletide chestnut, London Calling - The Clash.