KVR Audio

highkoo · Post by **highkoo** » Sat Jul 12, 2014 3:44 pm

Despite the inclusion of Steve Aoki, this is really great, and too short-

GeckoYamori · Post by **GeckoYamori** » Sat Jul 12, 2014 8:38 pm

I've grown very distasteful over documenatires over the years and this one is no exception. That part about 11 minutes in especially reeks of bullshit. No regular compression algorithm is going to change the sound like that. Not the stuff you get from iTunes or Spotify, not even when processed through YouTube or SoundCloud (let's not forget the irony of this whole video being on YouTube in the first place). It's downright misleading.

If anything it's shitty modern mastering practices and psuedoscience surrounding audiophiles that makes music turn out that way, and that's going to happen regardless wether the music is bit reduced or not.

A_SN · Post by **A_SN** » Sun Jul 13, 2014 3:06 pm

Wow this is an intensely dishonest "documentary", which is actually a commercial for HARMAN ("HARMAN TECHNOLOGY BRINGS MUSIC BACK TO LIFE", really...). The height of dishonesty is at , they use an extremely low bitrate (so low that there's nothing above 10 kHz and big holes in the spectrum from the compression), but the really dishonest thing is that they represent the sound's waveform as if it was passed through a limiter with a pretty low threshold (which it is not) whereas in reality the waveform itself looks just like the rest, if a bit lower, see:

"Compression has stripped emotion from every note." << no it hasn't because unless all your music is in 32 kbps like the sad little song above you probably couldn't hear the difference between your ~200 kbps VBR MP3 and the uncompressed original, or even measure a significant difference by nulling.

The truth is (and I expect most people on KVR to already know that) is that the losses due to MP3 compression these days (this isn't the MP3 compression of 15 years ago which was worse even at the same bitrates) isn't such a big deal (or arguably you can't hear the difference as much as you think you can), mostly if you listen to it on the kind of headphones you can carry around, or in your car, or on your crappy laptop/phone speakers. But hey, HARMAN equipment doesn't sell itself now does it?

highkoo · Post by **highkoo** » Sun Jul 13, 2014 3:13 pm

Yeah, their examples are obviously inanely exaggerated but I didnt even notice the 'product placement'...

nineofkings · Post by **nineofkings** » Sun Jul 13, 2014 3:15 pm

The most interesting thing about this documentary was the tangent that Hanz Zimmer and others went on about the "McDonalds generation of music consumers." All in all, I think this documentary isn't aimed at people who already know about this kind of thing (obviously). It's to bring awareness of a fact that many people don't truly understand, and if they do that through celebrity interviews, all the better to attract attention.

Endor-8o8 · Post by **Endor-8o8** » Sun Jul 13, 2014 4:10 pm

A_SN wrote:The truth is (and I expect most people on KVR to already know that) is that the losses due to MP3 compression these days (this isn't the MP3 compression of 15 years ago which was worse even at the same bitrates) isn't such a big deal (or arguably you can't hear the difference as much as you think you can), mostly if you listen to it on the kind of headphones you can carry around, or in your car, or on your crappy laptop/phone speakers.

Can't believe I'm reading that kind of comment on an audio forum...I have some crappy speakers and I can tell you that there's some obvious differences between a 256kbps MP3 and a WAV or FLAC file, even with my headphones. Just listen to the stereo field, the transient (for example on a piano of acoustic guitar), the high frequency range gets blurry (hihat, cymbals, voice clarity). The point of the documentary (not only a pure commercial claim) is to bring in light the fact that more and more people listen to music through youtube (shittiest audio compression in the galaxy) or through laptop speakers and this is just insane to do so. As a musician and as a listener I can't imagine paying for shitty mp3 on iTunes or Amazon store instead of a good old CD quality. There are not so many distributors who offer the possibility to buy FLAC format. It means you keep buying music but at a lowest quality. It's not just about what you can or can't hear, it's also about how your brain receives and perceives these acoustic infos. There's some frequencies that aren't loud enough for you to hear them, but your brain and your neurological system will perceive them and then you're gonna react differently to a track. To me music is all about details, precision, frequency richness and tones...it's a shame that people are getting used to that mp3 crap. Initially we needed to use mp3 mainly because of the internet speed and the price of data storage. Storage is far less expensive now, you can have 1To for around 70bucks so there's no need to reduce the output that much and with high-speed connections there's no need to compress audio that much too. I mean we're talking about a reduction around 80% of the original output (from 1411 kbps to 320 kbps). 80% just flushed away. To me it's insane...

A_SN · Post by **A_SN** » Mon Jul 14, 2014 1:32 am

Endor-8o8 wrote:Can't believe I'm reading that kind of comment on an audio forum...

Why not? What I said is perfectly reasonable. Like I said compression loss is not that big a deal and you can't hear the difference as much as you think you can. See this for instance http://www.music.mcgill.ca/~hockman/doc ... on2009.pdf look at the charts, even people with great ears on awesome equipment and a controlled environment have a tough time telling CDs from 256 kbps MP3s apart.

My point is the "documentary" literally claims that MP3 compression ruins everything, it makes people 4 times less likely to bob their heads and robs all the emotion in every note, and that's just dishonest, as the people targeted (i.e. average people, not you and your super engineer ears that can tell a 256 kbps MP3 from a FLAC from a car stereo while driving on the freeway with the windows down) cannot even hear the difference with the high quality equipment they do not have in the controlled environment they never get to experience. You can identify bigger problems with common listening setups than what this "documentary" is all about without thinking about it too much, like, where's the documentary about people listening to music on systems with awful frequency responses that steal the soul of music and make Paul Hardcastle sound about as good as Skrillex?

OK I won't dispute that YouTube's compression sucks soundwise, but if you're gonna listen to music from YouTube on laptop speakers you clearly don't care about high fidelity, that's just the modern equivalent of recording music from the radio on tape and playing it back on a walkman. But if you pay for something, let's say through iTunes, then you get a 256 kbps AAC (which is better than a 256 kbps MP3), and like I said you can't hear loss from the compression as much as you'd think.

Oh and as proof (sort of) that "MP3 crap" isn't that bad, here, look at this, http://arss.sourceforge.net/examples.shtml#Lena I put a picture into a 256 kbps MP3 and it came out looking the same, even though it's spectrally very dense.

Edit: Oh here's a good analogy, it's like complaining about the poor quality of images on sites like Instagram and blaming it on JPEG artifacts.

Tricky-Loops · Post by **Tricky-Loops** » Mon Jul 14, 2014 1:51 am

I have to listen to 32 or even 22 kbps mp3 because of my internet connection limitation, and despite that my ears are still alive...

The difference between a 32 kbps mp3 and a 320 kbps mp3 is mainly that the dynamics are decreased, the volumes are more imbalanced and the bass is much louder in a 32 kbps mp3. But I cannot hear any dramatic distortion that would make me unable to listen to it...

A_SN · Post by **A_SN** » Mon Jul 14, 2014 10:50 am

Tricky-Loops wrote:I have to listen to 32 or even 22 kbps mp3 because of my internet connection limitation, and despite that my ears are still alive...

The difference between a 32 kbps mp3 and a 320 kbps mp3 is mainly that the dynamics are decreased, the volumes are more imbalanced and the bass is much louder in a 32 kbps mp3. But I cannot hear any dramatic distortion that would make me unable to listen to it...

lol I used to download 32 kbps MP3s straight to floppy disks because my hard drive was acting up (and I'd save them on tape), and it was half a notch better than AM radio.

Though I'd say the main difference is actually the total lack of high frequencies above a certain cut off (which goes down with the bitrate), smeared transients but more importantly black holes in the spectrum (mostly in broad noises because those are more entropic than anything else, which is why drums sound like hell). But the "emotion" was still there, we've listened to music in lo-fi from the beginning and even in the era of CDs which was the pinnacle of quality we still listened to taped music from noisy FM broadcasts. We've always had lo-fi and hi-fi coexisting, and this time is no different. But a 256 kbps MP3 or even better AAC is way hi-fi enough for almost everyone, if you think it's not good enough for you then you're part of the audiophile elite who always felt compelled to go the extra mile to ensure they get the best quality possible.

SampleScience · Post by **SampleScience** » Mon Jul 14, 2014 4:36 pm

Once, I listened to an experimental music tape on a very old Panasonic Walkman. I was expecting it to sound really bad, but I was shock when I realized that, quite the contrary, it sounded very good! That very old Panasonic Walkman must have been a high quality and expensive item of it's time. I also have a portable CD player and after I tested it I realize how cheap is our new technology. So I tend to agree with what is said in this documentary. Most people wants convenience over quality. They want a cheaper experience so they can do things faster and with more ease. It's a sign of our time. Everything must be faster and easier. It's Taylorism applied to music.

trimph1 · Post by **trimph1** » Mon Jul 14, 2014 7:48 pm

Marketing men will do what marketing requires

Tricky-Loops · Post by **Tricky-Loops** » Mon Jul 14, 2014 8:00 pm

We're at a point of history where producers have to ADD noise/tape hiss/vinyl crackling to make the recordings less sterile and then people complain about distortion?

Mister Natural · Post by **Mister Natural** » Mon Jul 14, 2014 10:47 pm

for my compositions : I work at 44.1 / 24bit but only publish my pieces as .mp3 (for free)

If Heineken beer (or whoever) wants to buy the piece from me to use as the background soundtrack of their next marketing campaign, they can damn-well pay for the .wav files @ 44.1/24 totally free of any "distortion"

peace

xoxos · Post by **xoxos** » Tue Jul 15, 2014 1:28 am

true to form, many ahem.. "hollywood villains" do reveal their plans beforehand, and as such, i thought the title of this film was fair warning, as "distortion" is not qualified and as such the title could well have been intended to mean "the lie we are telling about sound".

isn't it sad about people who tell you about things.

trimph1 · Post by **trimph1** » Tue Jul 15, 2014 5:22 pm

Tricky-Loops wrote:We're at a point of history where producers have to ADD noise/tape hiss/vinyl crackling to make the recordings less sterile and then people complain about distortion?

Yep. And, if am not mistaken some of them who complain about distortion were the same dang ones who complain about the sterility...

The Distortion of Sound