A Look at Apple's 'Mastered for iTunes' Program and its Effect on Sound Quality

[cargath]

Originally Posted by ftaok

C'mon. You know what he meant. He was using "digital" as in "digital distribution".

Sorry, i wasn't sure if he knew what he was talking about, he didn't even know where to get CDs. And i don't blame him. CDs are obsolete. People who still want a physical medium buy vinyl again and most people are satisfied with downloads.

Originally Posted by doctorossi

Increased resolution across the entire audible spectrum.

Which you don't need, because of Shannon-Nyquist, which enables you to exactly replicate the entire audible spectrum with double the sampling rate, so 44k is more than enough.

[dj-anon]

Originally Posted by overcast

If you're happy listening to music on your Dr Dre Beatz headphones, more power to you.

ABX tests. Try them.

[chrmjenkins]

Originally Posted by Exhale

Unfortunately until "Mastering Engineers" stop with the "Loud is good" ********, none of this matters.

Its literally the practice of polishing a turd.

Listen to some real music and you'll find the engineers don't do that.

[derbothaus]

Originally Posted by cargath

I want them to sell ALAC too, but i'd happily bet you all my money that this statement wouldn't survive a blind test.

Bet away. It depends on what you play it through. A standard Mac soundcard will be very hard to tell. A Metric Halo ULN-2 with Amarra playback and beyer cans as I have and you bet your ass you can tell.

[louis Fashion]

Why do people watch movies on a telephone?
Why do people listen to music with ear buds?
Not for the experience, that is certain.

Now when you want a nice evening at home, you fire up the big flat screen for movies etc. Or turn a on nice two-channel Amp with some respectable speakers. Source material? CDs or those round black things your dad has stuffed under the bed, certainly not some compressed file from the, gasp, internet. Enjoy.

I think we are way into the apples and oranges on this thread.

[iBug2]

Originally Posted by malnar

Market confusion. Most people don't know what it is. Apple doesn't want to have to educate them, nor convince them it's worth the trouble. And those who do care are in the extreme minority - there's a small amount more than them who know and still don't care. In the end, most people will not care because they won't hear the difference, ever - period.

Also, don't forget devices are still very limited in storage. How much lossless stuff could people carry on their 16gb iPhone? Not a whole lot. The option to compress to AAC (at 128/192/256) is adding yet another step to the operation that people don't want to deal with. Some people, like my parents, don't ever have their iPhone interface with their computer.

iTunes already has "compress to 128/256 while uploading to iDevice" option. So the size of the devices shouldn't matter at all.

And Apple can always offer ALAC vs 256 like they offer 720p vs 1080p for downloads right now. So it's not about the confusion, must be something else. Maybe it's only about negotiations with the studios.

[overcast]

Originally Posted by doctorossi

"Esoteric nonsense"?! I'm not sure how to simplify a concept like 'increased resolution'.

Know how a Blu-ray disc looks more detailed than a DVD? Know how a DVD looks more detailed than a VHS tape?

It's like that, but with your ears instead of your eyes.

Is that good? Or is that still "esoteric nonsense"?

No, it's not like that with your ears. Your ears have a frequency limit at which they can hear, 44khz sampling rate covers that. We will reach a limit on video resolution as well, researchers have said around 4000 lines will accurately reproduce a photograph. Are you going to argue 10,000 will be better at that time?

[Eric S.]

I grew up listening to AM radio so 128Kbps has always seemed perfectly acceptable to me.

Less than 5% of my iTunes database is downloaded from Apple; the rest is ripped from CDs and sounds fine to me.

[overcast]

Originally Posted by dj-anon

ABX tests. Try them.

I have, and I will agree on lower end speaker systems it's very difficult to discern. However a poor recording is easily noticeable on accurate systems.

[iBug2]

Originally Posted by derbothaus

Bet away. It depends on what you play it through. A standard Mac soundcard will be very hard to tell. A Metric Halo ULN-2 with Amarra playback and beyer cans as I have and you bet your ass you can tell.

Not necessarily. Blind tests on 256 vs FLAC have mostly failed. If you have golden ears, possibly you can tell. But I have tested them on a 15k costing stereo and even I couldn't tell most of the time. But there's still the psychological factor, owning a lossless vs owning 256, even if you won't hear the difference. And that factor alone creates a better listening experience.

----------

Originally Posted by overcast

No, it's not like that with your ears. Your ears have a frequency limit at which they can hear, 44khz sampling rate covers that. We will reach a limit on video resolution as well, researchers have said around 4000 lines will accurately reproduce a photograph. Are you going to argue 10,000 will be better at that time?

4000 lines? Depends how much distance between the lines there are.

But after 2k horizontal resolution, movies we watch will seem the same even if they double it.

[doctorossi]

Originally Posted by cargath

Which you don't need, because of Shannon-Nyquist, which enables you to exactly replicate the entire audible spectrum with double the sampling rate, so 44k is more than enough.

It enables you to reproduce the necessary frequencies, but it's still a (stair-stepped) mathematical estimation of an analog curve. Increasing the sample rate increases the fidelity to that analog curve. Period. Of course, how much that difference can be heard is another question, but in the abstract, there is still an accuracy gain in an increased sample rate.

[louis Fashion]

[QUOTE=cargath;14797013]Sorry, CDs are obsolete.


Ha, I bet you believe in "the cloud" also. Just you wait until an EMP burst wipes out the cloud. You will rue your words.

[jephrey]

Some really good points in the article if anyone read it...

I've always been for maintaining the best archival copy and then listening in the best format for listening. I'd like the source 24/96 files myself and then let me be the one to choose how I compress it for listening.

I still think the 24bit gives more headroom at the low end as well. I feel like the bit-rate is increasing the resolution, not just the ceiling (but this article gives me the impression that you're just allowing for louder audio). I understand the sample rate should be double your listening frequency, so 48kHz doesn't sound like too much overkill - luckily, I have a lot of live music in the 24/48 format and I feel that may be a sweet spot. More headroom than a CD, Peaks at the peak of human hearing, not the average. Finally, changing from 96kHz to 48kHz is an easier re-sample than 44.1kHz.

So regardless of how Apple receives the files, I'm one for distribution at 24/96 or 24/48.

But, that's just like, my opinion, man.

JF

[songa]

a

[derbothaus]

Originally Posted by iBug2

Not necessarily. Blind tests on 256 vs FLAC have mostly failed. If you have golden ears, possibly you can tell. But I have tested them on a 15k costing stereo and even I couldn't tell most of the time. But there's still the psychological factor, owning a lossless vs owning 256, even if you won't hear the difference. And that factor alone creates a better listening experience.

I must have golden ears then. Been telling people for years Did you listen to the 15K stereo through headphones? Not psychological at all. Transients are relaxed and smoothed out. Warmth and room ambiance are brought back in. It is hard for me to make out the difference between ALAC and AIFF. But any 320khz or under AAC/MP3 and I can hear it.

[bawbac]

Originally Posted by cargath

Sorry, i wasn't sure if he knew what he was talking about, he didn't even know where to get CDs. And i don't blame him. CDs are obsolete. People who still want a physical medium buy vinyl again and most people are satisfied with downloads.

<Looks out window> Sky is blue, grass is green, Mall Stores carry CD's, media stores still exist and sell these obsolete disc thingys.

I can't tell you how long we've all been hearing the war drums that CD/Disc based media is "going" to be obsolete in the near future but it hasn't happened.

May be in another 20 years, the drums will finally play its tune.

[rwilliams]

Originally Posted by Rocko1

This hold true for newer music, but plenty of music was engineered fantastically and yet is ruined by the crappy low bitrate. 256 is simply not enough for anyone who has a decent ear.

I guess it depends on what your definition of a "decent ear" is.

[doctorossi]

Originally Posted by louis Fashion

Just you wait until an EMP burst wipes out the cloud. You will rue your words.

Don't worry- Optimus Prime will save us.

[bawbac]

Originally Posted by songa

most people wouldnt pass a blind test because most ppl listen to their ****** compressed music through ****** apple ipod ear buds. compressed audio generally sucks, but your audio is only as good as your bottleneck....if ur listening to lossless audio on a ****** pair of speakers through a ****** D/A converter...what are you wasting your time for. this whole apple "remastered" ******** is just that - a better mastering job. its still compressed audio and it still is lacking dynamic range etc compared to uncompressed lossless audio. will you be able to hear the difference? probably not unless you have a trainer ear, but i guarantee if you listen to a quality reproduction through a good set of speakers/phones you will FEEL the difference, unconsciously at least. the avg listening probably cant determine this subtle difference with an untrained ear, especially when most avg listeners are listening to avg quality headsets/speakers. but its there, and if you know what you're looking for you can feel it and hear it in the music. i dont buy for second that apple in some amazing genius matter was able to pull "better quality" sound from what is essentially nonexistent - u cant make something out of nothing.

You also need to take in to consideration that people have led themselves to believe that a PC with powered PC speakers connected to their internal sound card is a "stereo system."

The acceptance for low audio quality is the norm.
Heck, some will use their cell phones for a stereo with connected powered speakers.

[cargath]

Originally Posted by benpatient

well, it's not from the sample rate, but a higher bit size (for example 24bit) allows for much larger dynamic contrast (difference in volume).

True, but as long as the loudness wars are going on you won't gain anything :/

Originally Posted by derbothaus

Bet away. It depends on what you play it through. A standard Mac soundcard will be very hard to tell. A Metric Halo ULN-2 with Amarra playback and beyer cans as I have and you bet your ass you can tell.

No one who ever said something like this survived a blind test. Sadly i can't try this myself, because no one i know can afford such an expensive system, so you can state anything you want and i'd have to believe you. Or not. No one was ever able to prove what you are saying, so why would i believe you? Also, Amarra was already exposed as fraud. Something played through Amarra might sound different and better to your ears, but it's not exact playback anymore, because it does something to the original audio signal to "improve" the sound.

[knucklehead]

Originally Posted by dj-anon

Meh... all the people asking for their placebo (lossless formats,) when AAC is transparent at around 160 kbps. iTunes files are 256 kbps.

To be fair, there are some well known, fairly infrequent instances of audible artifacts even at high bit rate AAC compression. Lossless is best to have if you have the space for it.
But right on about the placebo effect running wild here. All these claims going on here can --and should-- be backed up by blind testing ---- but many would rather just blindly let their mouths run on ... and on ... and on ..... and on .....

[rwilliams]

Originally Posted by louis Fashion

Ha, I bet you believe in "the cloud" also. Just you wait until an EMP burst wipes out the cloud. You will rue your words.

But wouldn't an EMP burst also wipe out everything we currently listen to music on anyway?

[emvath]

I personally can't tell a difference above 160 kbps mp3 and source material. Having said that, I rip into 320 or v0 just to get the warm fuzzies knowing that it sounds "perfect" to me.

[dj-anon]

Originally Posted by overcast

I have, and I will agree on lower end speaker systems it's very difficult to discern. However a poor recording is easily noticeable on accurate systems.

Poor recording is unrelated to the accuracy of AAC. Thinking that most people are able to objectively (through ABX tests) differentiate between AAC@128kbps and a lossless source, would be optimistic.

I've done these test on rooms with acoustic treatment, using professional monitors monitors, near-field and far-field. Heck, I even did an ABX test with a Line Array system, just because I could.

The current quality of iTunes tracks (AAC@256kbps) renders impossible the task to objectively differentiate it from a FLAC or ALAC file. If anything, I will grant that lossy files still suffer from artifacts, although can only be properly heard in a critical listening situation (good equipment and quite room.)

[bawbac]

Originally Posted by doctorossi

Don't worry- Optimus Prime will save us.

Electronics+EMP = fail