The Distortion of Sound

[BDeep]

Yeah, I take it for granted I guess, sorry for that. But with 4 GB most streaming services will become an issue I suppose.

[ghettosynth]

Sure, there is a point to be made for streaming audio. Especially on the go. Or of course for storage on phones and such. But it is a mystery to me why I can't have it in house. I would be all over a download/streaming service with a decent catalog that would let me have lossless codecs. No such thing exists.

Beatport, and, in fact, most DJ music providers offer several lossless choices including wavs if you like.


I can count on one hand the number of MP3s that I've paid for. Music marketing seems to be in something of a crisis. I don't buy music just because it's only available in MP3s, I don't buy music because I simply don't need to.

The reality is though, if there were actually a demand for high quality streams, they would exist. I pay for a digitally imported subscription because I listen to several of their house/techno streams A LOT and the ads get old. I'm not sure that I would pay for the quality alone, it's a nice bonus, but I pay just to not hear ads. I think that they know this. I even think that's why they repeat the ads over and over again because they are more annoying that way. Even that isn't lossless. At any rate, higher quality services don't exist because there isn't really a demand. I think that most people are not interested in paying enough to justify the service at the current cost of bandwidth. In essence, the market is just too small.

Look even in this thread you have people saying 256k is good enough. If you can't convince musicians that they need more, then how are you going to convince the general public. They just don't care and they never really have beyond gross distortion. Please, don't try to convince me that a 256k MP3 is an example of gross distortion, it isn't. Your radio going in and out of tune while you're driving between major cities is an example of gross distortion.

[ghettosynth]

Sure, there is a point to be made for streaming audio. Especially on the go. Or of course for storage on phones and such. But it is a mystery to me why I can't have it in house. I would be all over a download/streaming service with a decent catalog that would let me have lossless codecs. No such thing exists.
With Netflix (amongst others) now perfectly streaming HD content and moving towards 4K, I can't imagine that bandwidth really is that much of a deal (again, where one has access to broadband internet). Or maybe they could invest a tiny bit of the research that goes into compressing video into new algorithms for audio of higher quality. That would suit me just fine as well.

(and yeah, didn't read the whole thread, I just started ranting )

It's not your bandwidth that matters, it's the bandwidth cost of the provider measured against the increased revenue from streaming at a higher rate. If available, most customers will choose the higher rate, because more is better, even if they can't tell the difference, but most won't care if it isn't an option, because, well, they can't tell the difference.

Look, that video pointed out correctly that people care a lot more about video quality than they do about audio quality. On Netflix, this really matters and they know that they have to compete here. The marginal improvement in perception of sound quality, however, will probably not sway most customer decisions.

[BDeep]

You're right (unfortunately ). And I won't try to convince you that 256 Kbps is gross distortion, it isn't. And I listen to it all the time on the go. There is however a noticeable difference between that and lossless, even on a crappy system. But yeah, most people probably don't care.
Re: lossless downloads, I meant something like Spotify, not just DJ oriented.

Hmm, I feel like an overaged hippy trying to preach to virtues of vinyl to a crowd that has long moved on

[ghettosynth]

You're right (unfortunately ). And I won't try to convince you that 256 Kbps is gross distortion, it isn't. And I listen to it all the time on the go. There is however a noticeable difference between that and lossless, even on a crappy system. But yeah, most people probably don't care.
Re: lossless downloads, I meant something like Spotify, not just DJ oriented.

I know that's what you meant. I probably should have made the connection more clear. DJs often have to care about sound quality and some are willing to pay for it. It's not free BTW, last time I purchased tracks it was a $1 surcharge, per track, for lossless. In other words, because DJs use the records that they buy to earn some or all of their living, and, they may use their products in many different ways, i.e. as part of a mix, there is a market for lossless tracks.

It doesn't even matter if the difference is real or imagined. The DJ thinks "I'm going to be making a mixtape with this to get me gigs, so I better go for lossless." It's the same point of view that sells expensive business cards, you don't want to risk that first impression on being too cheap. The music is more than just something that a DJ consumes, it is a tool of his trade.

In fact, this is no different than the justification that KVR members invent to justify "pro level" plugins for their hobbyist music. Wether the need is genuine, the market is real. There is no such need, real or artificial, to drive most consumers to purchase higher quality music recordings. This effort by Harmon is a marketing effort to try and change that.

Other similar efforts that have been successful, to some extent, is high(er) end headphones. For better or worse, Beats was able to link sound quality (again, real or imagined), to being a status symbol. Ok, now we're cooking with gas, status symbols are ABSOLUTELY important to a large chunk of the music buying public. When confronted with the inanity of spending $300+ on consumer headphones, owners will quickly point out that it's because they are connoisseurs of sound. What a bonus eh? Not only do you get a new status symbol that not all of your friends have, because, well, everyone has an iphone now, you get a label that describes you as elite.

[A_SN]

Sure, there is a point to be made for streaming audio. Especially on the go. Or of course for storage on phones and such. But it is a mystery to me why I can't have it in house. I would be all over a download/streaming service with a decent catalog that would let me have lossless codecs. No such thing exists.
With Netflix (amongst others) now perfectly streaming HD content and moving towards 4K, I can't imagine that bandwidth really is that much of a deal (again, where one has access to broadband internet). Or maybe they could invest a tiny bit of the research that goes into compressing video into new algorithms for audio of higher quality. That would suit me just fine as well.

(and yeah, didn't read the whole thread, I just started ranting )

It's not so much about the consumer side though, and it's not like Netflix. Netflix doesn't serve as many movies as iTunes or Spotify serves songs, for obvious reasons. Also Netflix is huge, perhaps more than you realise, as it takes up a third of all internet traffic during peak traffic hours and it doesn't come without its share of problems. So why on Earth would any music-delivering company have to quadruple its servers and bandwidth for a difference you only think you can hear? (OK maybe you can actually hear it, but there's not many of you out there) Maybe a less mainstream service can cater to the long tail of people who insist on having perfectly lossless music, but they'd have to operate with different costs. If a mainstream service was to offer you the lossless option then they'd need their whole catalogue readily available in lossless format, that alone would mean multiplying their storage by a few times. Not to mention that Netflix uses lossy compression for everything, you wouldn't ask for lossless movies now would you?

As for audio compression you can't come up with a dramatically more efficient general purpose audio codec than something like AAC, so you won't find a way to lower the bitrates for the same quality by much. As for lossless compression it's already amazing that FLAC can often halve the bitrate, I don't think it can get much better than that. Audio codecs just don't have that much room for improvement as it is, so that part of the equation isn't going to change much for fundamental reasons, not because people can't be arsed making better codecs.

lol Tricky-Loops, you're on a 3G connection right? I feel your pain. I wouldn't even stream if I was you, that's mad.

[BDeep]

I'm not suggesting everyone at any given time should have the highest quality. I never said that. I'd like to have the option. The net is littered with (illegal) high resolution wav and flac files, and I assume people are downloading it. What I want is those files, legal. It's already there - don't get too caught up in models you know today, caching lossless files would be fine for most people that want to use them. It's about finding a solution that works, as Netflix did when they faced the problem of bandwidth, they started using adaptive streaming.

But, unfortunately, the point that there hardly is a business motive to deliver better quality audio, is a good one. And although I care for quality, I'm not naive, I never thought they would actually deliver streaming services of higher quality. I'm just voicing my opinion that I believe it's a real shame that the listening experience (from a quality perspective) has been going down instead of up over the years.
We got a lot in return of course, music everywhere, ease of distribution for everyone.

Regarding the audible differences between lossless and mp3, I figured myself that I was only thinking I could hear it. Until I did some a/b testing. To me it's obvious, YMMV.

[A_SN]

It's about finding a solution that works, as Netflix did when they faced the problem of bandwidth, they started using adaptive streaming.

The thing about adaptive streaming is that it lowers the bitrate of the lossy compression when needed. Clearly you can't do that with lossless audio, which is the equivalent of delivering any random file that can't be further compressed, so there's no way to reduce the total bandwidth or storage, there's no magic clever way around that. The only way around that requirement is decentralisation, or in other words peer-to-peer, which is why you find all the FLAC stuff in torrent form!

It would be interesting if a company ever made a legal peer-to-peer system exactly for that. As in, have an ever growing lossless catalog, have it cut into pieces that are useless on their own to the users of the network (so that when you sign up you download let's say 1 GB of those pieces from the company), the company would disseminate in those pieces each unique part of its catalog a certain number of times (let's say 16) and forget about it, unless the availability of a unique part is getting low in which case it would retrieve it and disseminate it to a few more people. And then when you'd buy something from the catalog you'd download it from all the people who have some of those pieces and those who have the whole thing. This way the company would only need to store itself the new additions to its catalog and distribute them a small number of times, which would be cost effective.

[silversurfer91]

I agree 100% that there is most certainly a noticeable loss of audio quality with compressed files. However, it is not as bad as this documentary makes it seem. MP3's do not completely destroy the listening experience. Get some good headphones, and Bach will still sound like Bach on your phone.