As an audiophile, I'm shitting my pants every time people talk about going digital.
Why?
Because most people don't know of things such as Vorbis and FLAC, they only know of MP3.
So what are we going to do?
Now that Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails are no longer apart of a record label and have gone indie they will release their music on their sites, but what if they only give out mp3s?
As we get further more people are getting lazy and start depending on smaller files to fit on cheaper, smaller hard drives.
>>1
realise that the format doesn't really matter as long as you can feel a beat?
I don't care if it's FLAC or WavPack as long as I hear the music with great quality.
> MP3
Nothing wrong with it. The resulting audio difference between it and other formats is minuscule and often barely noticeable by the human ears.
The difference between any recording and live music in a good room is very striking.
> going digital
I'd rather the music I bought sound the same as the day I bought it 20 years down to road, thanks.
> smaller files
What?
> cheaper, smaller hard drives.
Since when are hard drives getting smaller?
Believe it or not, some people actually don't have 500gb+ hard drives!
>>4 Even if a 320kbs MP3 doesn't sound much different from source or a 192kbs vorbis, it fucking takes up twice as much space as the latter.
Mp3 is so obsolete. :(
As for bands self-publishing, I'd be surprised if they don't sell CD's on their site.
I swear it guys, we're letting computers do too much for us, we'll end up just like the matrix.
> The difference between any recording and live music in a good room is very striking.
I think this is mainly due to compression or other processing on the recording. I've recorded some acoustic drumming and playing that back sounds almost like being there for me. However, the recording is extremely dynamic -- about 30 dB quieter than most studio music (even disregarding the "loudness war"), while still peaking at full scale.
(Does everyone understand what I'm saying here? If not: 30 dB is a quite large volume difference, and "peaking at full scale" means it momentarily hits the maximum digital volume level.)
On the lossy/lossless thing, I once thought that as lossy codecs improved, lossless would pretty much disappear. But lossy codecs are only designed to sound OK when piped directly to the sound card. EQ, compression, and other processing in the player will expose the information loss. Also more importantly, we're in an age where everything will be remixed, recycled, sampled, podcasted... If we're all using lossy audio, this means transcodes, which sound bad after just a few generations, with even the best lossy codecs.
I do wish netlabels (20kbps excepted) would use better encoding. Very few use lossless, and none of the big ones. Kahvi Collective use Vorbis -q8, which is almost always transparent, so that's good. Kikapu seem to be using LAME V0, which is usually transparent. But a lot of netlabels are still using 192 CBR (pointless, as LAME V2 sounds better for slightly smaller size) or worse. There's a lot of ignorance on encoding properly, it seems.
> I think this is mainly due to compression or other processing on the recording.
No, it's due to acoustics.
Speakers simply don't produce the same noise as an instrument. Excluding electric instruments that rely on a speaker to function anyway.
> lossy
Lossy is the antithesis of digital.
lol audiophiles
http://www.ilikejam.dsl.pipex.com/audiophile.htm
>>10
haha, that's great.
The loudness war has raged for more than a decade now, and it destroys sound quality much worse than MP3. If >>1 wants high-quality recordings of Radiohead and NIN, he should be worried about the clipping and overuse of (dynamic range) compression in their mastering.
That said, double-blind listening tests do tell us (repeatedly) that even at high bitrates MP3 is not always transparent, so while MP3 has its place, it makes sense to offer lossless.
OP here, after a few months of research and maturing, I have come to the conclusion that >>1 is an idiot.
192kbps MP3 or V0 > Lossless.
Digital is fine yes
These are the things we don't have to do, with .flac and such:
-handle it by the sides!
-get up every 30 or less minutes to flip the record over
-dust a disc off, carefully enough not to scratch its delicate surface
-care for an expensive needle
-find an audio receiver with phono inputs on it [fortunately though most of us or our parents probably have a few kicking around]
-align the belt so you see the dots on the turntable, making sure it plays at the correct pitch
-etc