Neil Young's Catalog Returns to Apple Music After He Said Streaming Has 'Worst Quality in History'

[Shirasaki]

For this reason (and others) I stopped buying from iTunes a long time ago. Mostly because there are now plenty of other online retailers (or from the artist directly so they get more) that sell lossless or high resolution albums for the same price or less than iTunes. If someone offered you more for the same or less you'd take it right?

iTunes is only marginally cheaper even than buying new release physical CDs in a shop and CD stores often discount older albums significantly while iTunes rarely does. With iTunes you're paying for (minor) convenience and sacrificing almost everything else.

Yep. There are a lot more online music sellers in Japan selling hires music to customers with marginally higher price per album and a bit higher price on iTunes.
My music library is also filled with hires and cd quality music.
Many times, I just pay a little bit more, the quality I get from that album is way better than iTunes version.

learn how your ears work

Perhaps we need to learn how our Brains work. Ear cannot process sound information.

 

[simonmet]

Dude, if someone "upscales" AAC files to some sort of lossless codec, they're going to be degrading the sound quality of that AAC so badly that I'm not surprised you can tell the difference.

It is much easier to tell the difference between a non-transcoded lossless file and a very poorly transcoded lossy file. It's been scientifically proven that the human ear cannot differentiate between a file at iTunes Plus quality (actually, even lower that iTunes Plus quality) and a totally uncompressed WAV file, given that all other things are equal including mastering and playback equipment.

Huh? I don't think you understood my post. I've never done such conversions. Why would I?

My point is that in order to prove it to someone else (online) they may prefer to make the files look identical so I can't cheat by simply looking at the file size and metadata. I thought that was pretty clear. Further, I believe that implementing a super-sample of frequency at a scale that is a whole integer won't produce detectable adverse affects on sound quality because the timing of each sample remains the same. Fractional scaling would technically change the timing but it's not clear given that you're super-sampling not sub-sampling how much or whether that would be detectable either. Certainly doing a fractional sub-sample (or any sub sample for that matter) is about the worst thing you can do to the audio file.

Even my high-resolution skeptic brother had to admit the difference was obvious and I could clearly distinguish the two even through the MacBook Pro's speakers (set at the higher res). This is a cursory finding involving one album only so far and there may be other variables affecting the result of which I'm not aware, but I feel confident enough in my claim to post it despite knowing how controversial the topic is. I'm going to test the other hi-res albums I own soon to see if I feel similarly. Should I create 256 down-sampled AAC from the high-res source and test that as well?

Of course at 88/24 the data rate is approximately 10 times that of 256 kbps AAC (accounting for lossless savings in both) so I'd be disappointed and surprised if there wasn't a difference.

I haven't yet done listening tests comparing standard lossless CDs to high-res but in the past when I've compared iTunes AAC to lossless CD I thought they were very close (possibly even indistinguishable) and I think 256 kbps AAC will be much closer to standard CD than the improvement I'm hearing in this particular high-res album.

 

[ccurzio]

If the user finds the quality good enough the Artist should not insert his view, and just let people purchase their material.

Uh, no. An artist has every right to control how their art is experienced.

That said, Young was being a complete tool in this case. "the worst quality in the history of broadcasting or any other form of distribution?" Really? The guy is 70 years old. I know he remembers 8 track tapes, the muffled recording equipment of the 1950s, AM radio, monaural recording, cassettes, and other antiquated technology. I know because I'm younger than him and I know about all of those things - and every single one of them sucks infinitely harder than anything modern and digital.

 

[threesixty360]

People just like songs. Sound quality doesn't really change their enjoyment of a song otherwise we wouldn't have listened to tapes and crappy mono radios! If your relying on impeccable sound quality to make your tracks enjoyable rather than songwriting and composition then perhaps your not in the right business.

Convenience, being able to listen to a song when you want, where you want is far more important to most people than absolute sound quality.

 

[towg]

Back when I was a young whippersnapper we used to tape record an LP using a microphone placed carefully next to the record player speaker.

 

[sbailey4]

Apparently Money > Quality

Yeah. Anyone ever listen to his music would notice his quality ain't all that to start with. I would agree with your statement. More about $$ than anything.

 

[kingpushup]

Business is business