Lossless? Really?

Adarkian you are telling me stuff I am not that familiar with and that is the price of downloads on iTunes and I thought that was comparable to Amazon's, which I think compared to the CD are expensive.  But certainly over the years the price of ownership of music software has tumbled and at no time more that the last few years.  I bought my first single in 1959 (I refuse to say what it was from sheer embarrassment) and that was 6 or 7 bob (30-35p) which doesn't sound a lot but when you realise that the average wage then was less £20 a week it shows how expensive it was.

There was very little on the Radio or TV at that time either but nowadays we are saturated with music.  It ain't just Apple that have brought that on, take a look at some of the Classic Rock Box Sets on Amazon, 5 great albums from people like JJ Cale, Paul Butterfield, The Byrds, Mountain or the Jeffersons for £15 or often less.  Some even claim to be remastered but I think this claim is not true because often when you buy these boxed sets you might have 1 or 2 of them already and I haven't found many that sound better than my existing CDs.

Bands only make money nowadays from touring.

Ha! Ha! You must be even older than me. First album was Rubber Soul, which was a Xmas present and I still have, by The Beatles, which in those days was about 32/6d and, as you say, a lot of money. I have The Beatles Remastered and found the quality varied from album to album, not sure if anyone else found that.  Am the proud owner of about 5 White Albums starting with the original mono. What a saddo I am!

Bill

I seem to remember singles costing 6s and 8d in the early/mid 60s. We had a local NEMS store where I bought my first record "I Feel Fine" by some band who used to play at our local town hall.

Brian Epstein's family store? And you are right about the price as you could get 3 singles for a pound, if you were lucky enough to have a pound!

Actually I have girded my loins (whatever that means) and plucked up the courage, it was 'What do ya Wanna Make Those Eyes at me for' by Emile Ford and the Checkmates - I was only 9 or 10.

The second single was 'Mack The Knife' by Bobby Darin.

Yup LPs were 30 bob for a long time, we never had inflation (remember the 3s 9d joke?)  in those days and we had a good football team.  How times have changed.

Sorry not letting that pass without comment, especially as you purport to be a Jefferson Airplane fan

Given the choice I'd sooner blast Thom through my system than anything else out there.  Big Bill I am seriously disappointed in you... 

I'm buying CDs from car boot sales at between 50p and £1 each....  How does that compare to iTunes? 

Is there another issue buried deep beneath the reproduction conversation here?

I remember seeing Radiohead at the O2 (Big Bill please take note) not so long ago and being gob-smacked at the quality of the sound.  Admittedly the speakers were as big as my house but the sound quality was unbelievable - at one point they had three drummers and I felt (as well as heard) every thwack as clear as a bell.

Regardless of format do you think we will ever approach the experience of "being there"?

NO!  And I do own a copy of OK Computer and The Bends (I think it's called) - I haven't listened to it for ages, perhaps I should again.

What is wrong with the Airplane?  The most amazing Electric Psychedelic music, just listen to 'After Bathing at Baxters'.  I was really in to Psychedelic in those days: The Airplane, Spirit, Hendrix, CSN & Y, The Dead, Incredible String Band etc.  Dunno why really.

OK that was an emphatic "no"!

What system do you think bands/artists listen to in the studio when compiling the final mix of an album and then say "that's the sound I want!".  Do you think we can get close to that?

I know we hear the phrase "studio reference" all the time but I assume that's just marketing speak...

Nothing wrong with the Airplane and check out "Hail to the Thief"!

Oh dear, once again I did not mean to open another can of worms. Perhaps on stage theses days, they can present many more channels to our ears than 'simple' stereo HiFi. As to extended music appreciation, I am happy to announce that my latest fixation is Passenger whose music and lyrics I find perfect to my taste. To me, strangely, I think he is a musical LS Lowry. Clever, clever guy!

That may explain the live experience - I'd still be interested in how close we get to studio sound

Here's a bit about how Apple encodes files for distro in the iTunes store:

http://images.apple.com/itunes...tered_for_itunes.pdf

Note -- Apple does not "master for iTunes."  Artists master / have their music mastered, Apple encodes / supplies the encoding tools. 

The phrase "Mastered for iTunes" can be a bit misleading in that regard.

As I said earlier Mark Waldrep (of iTrax fame who claims mp3 can beat any record deck) claimed that the record companies do produce Apple and Amazon masters, not that Apple do it.  So I am not claiming this is true because this source is obviously unreliable.

I just started reading that article pointed to by Bart's link and what I have read so far raises some interesting points, I particularly liked the following:

downloads led the industry in sound quality.

What industry was that then?

It is interesting to note that Apple are asking to be supplied with 24bit recordings but why do they have to be different all the time, everyone says 24/96, they say 96/24 - oh well.  They then convert down to 16/44 using their own process, so they are claiming, therefore, that this process is better than that used by the music industry as a whole.  Some claim.

They go on to say that some converters just remove the least significant bits (LSBs) and this is called truncation.  They also say that they do it via a conversion to floating point first, put simply this means that they are converting a 24 bit integer (a whole number) to its equivalent 16 bit number by dividing by 2 to the power 24 and multiplying by 2 to the power 16.  This process won't always produce an integer so they use floating point (a decimal number) as an intermediate stage.  Once they have this they can then convert to a 16 bit integer but they will do it by rounding off, for example 245.2346 will give 245 but 245.6574 will give 246, truncation will give 245 in both cases.  So this process will be more accurate than simple truncation but it will NOT remove quantisation errors as they seem to claim.  All conversions from 24 to 16 bit will have increased quantisation errors, it is a fact of life.  But at least Apple recognise that quant errors are significant, many Analog haters refuse to accept that quantisation errors have any significance below the Nyquist frequency.

I also find it difficult to believe that none of the record companies use this method. I think it more likely that this method will be part of the software on the kit they use.  It ain't exactly complex or ground breaking is it?

I will carry on reading this article.

ps I had a moan about Apple earlier in this post so it seems a good time to have another moan at them.  They completely adhere to the 'design over functionality' credo.  The USB connector they supply with the iPad has a completely smooth plug on the PC end and if I plug it in next to another one I find it almost impossible to pull out.  I have quite big fingers and they just slide over the surface of the plug.  Even if its not next to another plug it is still difficult to remove because of the slippy surface.  Right I am done for the moment.

Start talking about bands and music in general and blokes come back at you with acts you have never heard.  Ain't that a great thing!

Andarkian I have never heard of Passenger but looking at the loads of positive comments om Amazon I should give him a go.

As to live performances.  Where to start?  I think that moment when they first turn the amps on and you hear the 50Hz mains hum, that is so exciting.  I suspect with the new generation of solid-state amps that has now disappeared.  Or the moment when an orchestra all tune to an A, just sets you off.

I remember seeing Pink Floyd at the Wembley Arena (not the stadium) on the 'Dark Side of the Moon' tour.  They were just into the encores and were doing 'Careful with that axe Eugene' and just at this moment a load of gate-crashers were charging through an entrance near where we sat and were pursued by a bunch of mean-looking security operatives.  Just as they all appeared the screaming started on 'Careful with that axe Eugene' and they started letting of fireworks from the top of the speaker stacks.  So the place was filled with driving rock, screaming and intense light - I think they were using the stuff in flairs.  What a moment that was and if you can find me a hifi that will reproduce all that then I will have a couple please.

I agree with the above observation. If Apple were really genuinely interested in audio quality, as opposed to simply making the best of a big compromise presumably for commercial reasons, then surely  they would offer ALAC as well for downloads (I would even forgive them for not providing FLAC).

It would appear that Apple have all or most of these lossless masters, some at 24/96, therefore surely there  should be a great supply of  lossless media.

I genuinely fail to understand the rationale for enforcing the reduction of media quality for the consumer by Apple. At least give a choice with differentiated pricing.

Simon

Amen Simon.  Apart from us 'lunatic fringe' hifi fans who else is interested in audio quality?  Not Apple or Amazon, it's just a business.

And is it true that standard CDs are already compressed?  If so wouldn't it be great if someone was able to flog us the original file...

Trouble is that for the record companies it is such small beer.

I don't think many kids are that worried about sound quality.  The daughter of friends of ours uses some pair of ultra-trendy cans on an iPad (Beats or something similar) and it sounds OKish.  So I said listen to my B&W P7s on my Uniti, which sounds amazing, "Not as good as my cans on the iPad came back the reply".  Just what do you say?

Which reminds me.  On the back of my UnitiLite is an analog out socket and it looks kinda DIN like but it looks different to cables I have for a Quad tuner and preamp I have.  Anyone know what it is please?

Then I can use a Headphone amp I built a while back - 30W Class A, but wound down a bit, which is great 'cos it don't get quite so hot!

Madgerald, most mastering for modern commercial music that I am aware uses compression to varying degrees. It can make the sound more intense. There were great pioneers of this in the early days in the 60s with producers such as Joe Meek and Les Paul who used to use the characteristics of recording level saturation onto magnetic tape to compress the sound and make it more intense - especially vocals. These days I expect its all done digitally - many compression techniques I have come across can be very creative and can make a track come alive - and indeed it can be overdone and  ruin a track - and I have plenty of examples of that as well.

But dynamic compression is not the same as lossy encoding - I cant think of too many positives other than smaller file sizes for the latter.

Simon

I've just played Open Your Window by Reverend and the Makers to my 8-year old son (his favourite song) on my hifi and asked him how it compares to an ipod with bog standard earphones from an i-phone.

He says he cant tell the difference.  I despair of this modern generation....

So it is encoding that is the enemy not compression?