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Re: [ARSCLIST] Lossy compression losing quality (was Re: [ARSCLIST] Pristine Audio and the Milllennials . . .)
For what it's worth, the bare minimum lossy quality I can listen to for any period of time with
music is 192kbps MP3. That would be 96kbps for monophonic material, but I prefer 256kbps for stereo
and 128kbps for mono. Podcasts, you're at the mercy of the producer and some are horrible-sounding,
especially the ones with video.
-- Tom Fine
----- Original Message -----
From: "Matt Sohn" <mahatma57@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <ARSCLIST@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Tuesday, December 11, 2007 4:02 PM
Subject: Re: [ARSCLIST] Lossy compression losing quality (was Re: [ARSCLIST] Pristine Audio and the
Milllennials . . .)
>And I still wonder whether one, particularly I, can tell the difference.
Howard
Hi Howard,
I have 13,000 songs on my iPod, all ripped in AAC at 128kBs. They sound just fine to me, and the
convenience of having that vast library at my fingertips is worth any percieved loss in quality,
as I do most of my iPod listening in the car.
On the other hand, when I do my archiving work, I transfer at 24/44.1, ultimately delivering 16bit
CDRs and 24/44.1 BWF files on DVD and/or hard drives. The reason for this is to preserve the
highest fidelity from the original analog source. The ultimate destination for the material may be
CDRs or mp3s or whatever, but the idea is to have a high quality digital preservation master to go
back to if necessary.
When I take off my preservationist hat and put on my record collector hat, I find my priorities
change somewhat. One of my favorite things to do is to clean a record on my Keith Monks record
cleaner, and and listen to it while I record it into my computer. One of my least favorite things
to do is to go back to those records on the hard drive and edit and name all of the tracks on the
records, top and tail them, run them through some scratch removal software, normalize them and
convert them into mp3s (with tags), so I end up with lots of whole albums, as 1 big wav file,
sitting on the drive that I can't access as quickly or easily as my CDs in iTunes. I plan to
eventually do these things of course, but for now, it's comforting to know I have copies of the
records in a semi-secure location. If the drive dies, I still have the records, already cleaned,
to go back to, and I don't have to play them again unless I want to.
When I started listening to recorded music, it was on a transistor AM radio, and then a Sony AM/FM
clock-radio. My first record player was a Califone (the kind you used to see in the classroom,
with the button you push down to stop the record). When I got a Sansui reciever and some Bose
speakers after high school, I thought that was the bees knees!
That was around the time I started taking better care of my records.
In all of those scenarios, I loved the music I heard. A great song is a great song, whether it's
on an SACD or an AM radio. Nowadays, it seems one can buy into this music thing at varying levels
of quality. Most are perfectly happy with fair-to-good mp3 encoding for most scenarios, but then
there those who percieve higher quality, and crave it.
I say if it sounds good to you, it is good. If you are transferring stuff for your own enjoyment,
transfer it at the highest quality that makes sense for your scenario. If you are doing stuff that
is unique, or particularly rare, give a thought to higher sampling rates for a preservation copy.
As you noted, the wav file for any given piece of audio is going to be about 10 times bigger than
a 128k mp3, so if you want lots of stuff in a small space, mp3 makes sense. When I got my first
(30 gig) iPod, I filled it up with wav files, and had about 700 songs. Then I converted all ot the
wavs to mp3s and got about 6000 songs. That's a lot more songs!
On my computer, I have many removable drives, and I can add more as I need them at relatively low
cost, so I see no need to compress the audio I store on them. Unfortunately, hard drives are not
the safest place to store data over time, and with ever-increasing drive size, we have the
potential for bigger crashes. I think the average consumer doesn't worry about the longevity of
the drive holding all those family photos, and videos of the wedding or whatever.
When I'm working on a project, I have multiple copies of everything saved on multiple removable
drives, and after a while, that storage space really starts to add up. For my own stuff, it's
worth 4-500 to be able to store a terrabyte of audio, but another 4-500 for a backup drive.. gives
me pause. The main thing though is that I have all of that stuff *somewhere else* if I need to go
back to it. I had all my records in a storage locker for 5 years, and couldn't play one of them if
I wanted to (which was frequently, and very frustrating). Eventually, I will be able to carry them
around with me in my pocket. Wow! What is more valuable to me?
I wonder about my niece and nephew (ages 7-8). With the boundless choices that now exist, what are
they going to choose to listen to (when they are given a choice)? Right now they are hooked on
American Idol, and love to listen to the performers they know from there. Their father plays the
guitar, and they both seem to display some interest in it, so I'm giving them both mini
stratocasters for christmas, so hopefully they can learn about making their own music.
Sorry to ramble so..
-Matt Sohn