Ariana Grande's 'Thank U, Next' Breaks Apple Music Record for Most-Streamed Pop Album in First 24 Hours

[jgdeschamps]

Yes, yes, and YES. 256 AAC for a stereo recording is plenty for amazing transparency. There are so many things in the signal chain that matters more at that point. The recording quality/mastering (A BIG one), the speakers, the noise floor of the room, the signal/noise ratio of the play back chain, and especially the shape / acoustics of the room will all become much bigger obstacles to the sound than the playback data rate and format once you hit quality ceiling of 256 AAC.

No offense, but you are using the right words for wrong concepts.
The room where you record has no "noise floor". That concept relates to the signal chain (equipment connected in series or parallel fashion) of microphones, preamps, processors and AD converters. Is the small hiss you get when silence is picked up by the mics and is the result of the voltage of the mentioned signal chain. Generally you can get away with noise floor hiss that lies below -42dB, which means no one will hear it unless you turn the volume way up and have a really good amplifier/speakers combo.
The shape of a room is not an obstacle, is what you actually want to capture along with the character of the instrument or a singers voice. If your room has bad acoustics, have a crappy instrument or the singer has no talent, you'll get bad recordings, thus, not worth deploying to any media. You can compensate those factors with hardware processors or SW plugins to a certain extent, though.
Playback data rate relates to the AD/DC converter sampling rates. Most of the times for recording music, a sampling rate of 48KHz@24bit will suffice. That means you'll capture frequencies of up to 24KHz (above your listening threshold) with a dynamic range of 144dB.
You then bounce your audio to CD quality of 44.1KHz@16bit. You lose frequencies you are not able to hear, and lose some volume, and that's with no compression applied to the file and it's all because of a process called dithering to proportionally lower the dynamic range of 144dB to a range of 96dB without getting sound artifacts.
Why am I mumbling all of this: basically, frequencies above 7 or 8 KHz are where the brightness or sheen of instruments like cymbals, voice, some percussions and strings reside. Also, a room's "acoustic air" lies above those frequencies. When you compress to any format, regularly you lose a lot of the frequencies above 12 KHz (and you already lost some volume!,) so you actually are missing the acoustic environment and sheen a little when you compress to mp4 or AAC. It's basically some sort of 3D characteristic to the stereo sound, the actual breath of a singers voice... small details that give more life to a recording. And it happens to the lower end of frequencies too, regularly below 70Hz. If you take a raw 44.1KHz@16bit WAV file and compare it to any Apple Music file listening to them using AirPods, you'll hear the difference. Not huge, but you'll definitely pick something up and it will be in favor of the WAV file.
As for those 256kbps you are referring to mean how much data you stream per second, and is not directly related to which frequencies you are including or excluding. That depends on the compression parameters you use with your compression software.
In the end is how much frequency and dynamic range -and their balance to one another- you preserve from the original performance. That's a subject for mixing and mastering.
Sorry for the long post, but it's actually my hobby (and I love it! )

 

[CarlJ]

Yes, yes, and YES. 256 AAC for a stereo recording is plenty for amazing transparency. There are so many things in the signal chain that matters more at that point. The recording quality/mastering (A BIG one), the speakers, the noise floor of the room, the signal/noise ratio of the play back chain, and especially the shape / acoustics of the room will all become much bigger obstacles to the sound than the playback data rate and format once you hit quality ceiling of 256 AAC.

In the realm of mixing/mastering, one longstanding problem (I don't know offhand how much of a problem it is with the most recent recordings), is misguided execs (oversimplifying, but it's a typical case) pushing the sound engineers to "make it louder", heavily compressing the dynamic range of the music, making the differences between the loudest and quietest bits almost nil, horribly over-saturating the recording medium... yes, it makes the music "louder", but it throws dynamic range out the window, squishing every bit of the music up to the very top of the range. There have been some particularly egregious examples of successive reissues of the same original album getting the dynamic compression cranked up more and more.

Wikipedia has an article on it: Loudness War, and TVTropes gives it surprisingly good coverage: Loudness War. There's more out there via Google.

 

[0388631]

Even the oldest millenials are 36-38. Perhaps some of you, well, specifically one person is confusing them with Generation Z. You're stuck with the generation you're born in; you don't graduate to the next as you get older.

Don't know who this is, but good for her.

The loudness war is nothing new, and it certainly didn't begin in the 2000s or 1990s.

 

[Shanghaichica]

I guess she had to capitalise on the end of her fake engagement and make sure she used up her sympathy vote. Anyhow good luck to her, she’s been around for a while now so maybe the success has been earned.
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The fake latina keeps on winning

How is she a fake Latina. She’s Italian American.
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She totally ripped off the recent Volvo commercial with the excellent cover of My Favorite Things from the Sound of Music by sampling it on one of her tracks here.

I really don’t get all the fuss about her. She’s nothing more than a poor man’s 90s Mariah Carey. Everything she’s doing Mariah did better.

That doesn’t just apply to Ariana. The artists and bands of the 90s are objectively superior to those of today in nearly every genre. It doesn’t matter if we’re talking about alternative rock, pop, r&b, rap or even country.
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And it’s really more than good enough. CD and SACD still sound better (typically the low end and punch (what’s called presence)) but 256 AAC is enough for 90% of people out there. I have speakers with hi-res tweeters (40 kHz) hooked up to my Yamaha amp and all of the iTunes sounds great.

The FLAC or nothing crowd is a little bit ridiculous. I can guarantee that they wouldn’t be able to tell FLAC from AAC more than half the time.

If something does sound better it will be because the 320 or FLAC file came from a better master. Classic records usually have half a dozen versions out there between regional pressings and a remaster or two. There are databases out there that compile all of the versions and rate them based on dynamic range.

I do think Mariah did it better in her day but my real issue with her is how childlike her voice sounds. I think it’s telling that most of her fans are teenage girls because she still sounds like one when she sings. I am not a teenage girl so apart from the odd song here and there I won’t be listening to her music.

 

[lec0rsaire]

The artists and bands of the 60's are objectively superior to those of the 90's in nearly every genre. Prove me wrong. There, now, how does it feel?

Then again I enjoy listening to music across many eras, from Bach to old blues and jazz, to the 50's, 60's, 70's, 80's, 90's, 00's, 10's... I've listened to Beethoven, the Beatles, Bowie, Elvis, Hendrix, Santana, Van Halen, Talking Heads, Siouxsie & the Banshees, Pink Floyd, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Prince, Bjork, Beck, the B-52's, Fatboy Slim, and Primus today, as well as Ariana Grande, Taylor Swift, and Nicki Minaj (and quite a few others). There's a lot of good music in every era (and plenty of drivel too). People latch onto the music of a then-current era, usually in high school, and seem to like to defend that as being the One True Music (while conveniently remembering only the good parts, forgetting the bad parts, and viewing other eras with a strong "get off my lawn" filter). They're invariably wrong on this. There's lots of good music out there, from every decade, not just the one when you were in high school. Including the current decade.

I don’t disagree. I use the 90s because I still consider it part of the modern era. 60s and 70s music was excellent but it’s similar to how classic movies had a slower pace (long instrumental and guitar solo sections) and longer shots than our modern ADHD era.