The Distortion of Sound

[spidervis]

Pointing out a problem without offering a solution is useless. For me, 22 minutes are too long for telling those.

[SampleScience]

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...

I don't see the link between intended distortion and noise artifacts added to a song and the overall sound quality of music. It's like saying that this documentary doesn't make sense because some of the artists featured in it using distortion pedals. C'mon!

[A_SN]

Pointing out a problem without offering a solution is useless. For me, 22 minutes are too long for telling those.

Actually that's their solution: http://www.clarifisound.com/#?utm_sourc ... paign=Home (you get the link to this directly from HARMAN's frontpage). Long story short this thing is supposed to treat and improve compressed sound, so basically the "documentary" lays out the "problem", and then their Clari-Fi thing is the "solution".

Look at their audio examples, again this is some amazingly disingenuous stuff as the "restored" parts use the old "louder sounds better" effect, and I'm really not sure what else it does to it, besides some EQ for obnoxiously boosting the highs and maybe the lows too, maybe some stereo widening? It sure doesn't restore the spectrum above the cutoff and it doesn't seem to deal with holes. Sounds more like using every cheap trick to make music sound "better" to the same people who think more contrast and more saturation on their TV gives them a better picture, without doing any actual restoration.

[spidervis]

Pointing out a problem without offering a solution is useless. For me, 22 minutes are too long for telling those.

Actually that's their solution: http://www.clarifisound.com/#?utm_sourc ... paign=Home (you get the link to this directly from HARMAN's frontpage). Long story short this thing is supposed to treat and improve compressed sound, so basically the "documentary" lays out the "problem", and then their Clari-Fi thing is the "solution".

Look at their audio examples, again this is some amazingly disingenuous stuff as the "restored" parts use the old "louder sounds better" effect, and I'm really not sure what else it does to it, besides some EQ for obnoxiously boosting the highs and maybe the lows too, maybe some stereo widening? It sure doesn't restore the spectrum above the cutoff and it doesn't seem to deal with holes. Sounds more like using every cheap trick to make music sound "better" to the same people who think more contrast and more saturation on their TV gives them a better picture, without doing any actual restoration.

Thank you for the link, and I have no objection for your second paragraph. But this looks like another marketing (mc donald's) thing to me. We'll pay for the compressed sound, and then we'll get another service to fix it. In fact, there's no problem if you don't listen the "better" sound. What we have is the best until we see the better one. I think, for a song, if mastering is good enough, there should be no problem even for all devices.

[A_SN]

What we have is the best until we see the better one.

I agree except for one nuance, it's that the "restored" version sounds better while actually being worse at the same time. It's like if you make people compare an original picture with a more contrasted, saturated and sharpened version of it, they might like the processed version better, or if you let people compare a yogurt with the same yogurt with sugar thrown into it, they might like the sugary one better. That thing uses effects that by juxtaposition with the original make the original look like the worse one when actually the processed one is worse for having that generic processing blindly applied to it. Or like you said if the mastering is good then there's no problem to be fixed.

By the way I choose to believe that they used a 96 kbps AAC (which is a pretty good quality, still audibly compressed, but quite decent) for their demo because anything significantly lower would make it obvious that they can't actually restore the holes and missing upper end of the spectrum. Ah well, just another day in the bizarre world of music software with strong marketing and weak results.

[FarleyCZ]

I don't get it. Somebody from Harman, company owning several other companies with huge influence on audio technology worldwide, is encouraging me in some kind of "wake up" video to want more quality? Ok, I want. What now? I mean, if they took the money that went into buying Mike Shinoda's and Hans Zimmer's time and throwed it into development of full-fidelity delivery system, they'd be pretty much done right now.

PS: And it might bring them some money, so the DSP cards for Suder's mixing consoles wouldn't need to be SO DAMN EXPANSIVE...

[ghettosynth]

Steve Aoki in a film talking about "nuance" in music. Now that's funny.

[arkmabat]

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...

Some albums I ripped in high-school @ 128 kbps sound pretty bad now. Not terrible but certainly bad. Walmart MP3 (now gone) only had MP3s @ 256 kbps for sale! Crazy stuff.

[Tricky-Loops]

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...

I don't see the link between intended distortion and noise artifacts added to a song and the overall sound quality of music. It's like saying that this documentary doesn't make sense because some of the artists featured in it using distortion pedals. C'mon!

And, do you want your distortion pedals to sound as clean as possible? All this gibbering about bad audio quality nowadays is nonsense. Never in the history of music did we have a better sound quality than now, and we're still not satisfied?

[BDeep]

Yeah, I saw this, and while I generally agree that it's a shame that mp3 compression became the standard, it's questionable at best that many if not all of the featured artists have their music mastered so loud that it's not even "hi-fi" to begin with. But hey, they choose to ignore that little fact!

(and then they even dare to talk about transients - as if mp3 is the only issue nowadays!)

[NAD]

I think this might be edifying for the members of KVR:






Looks simple enough....

[BDeep]

Right.... let me get this straight. First (1) a load of effort is made to achieve the highest audio quality in the studio. Then (2) the loudness is maximised until a sausage© is left. Then (3) an MP3 codec screws up the audio "intelligently" again, by removing bits and pieces. But low and behold, we now introduce another process (4) which then in return does something "intelligent" again by adding information that isn't there anymore, thus screwing things up even further.
Suggestion: let's just skip steps 2, 3 and 4 and give the listener at home some decent quality audio. Same goal, easier to manage, better outcome. It's so simple that their R&D department must have overlooked it.

[A_SN]

Right.... let me get this straight. First (1) a load of effort is made to achieve the highest audio quality in the studio. Then (2) the loudness is maximised until a sausage© is left. Then (3) an MP3 codec screws up the audio "intelligently" again, by removing bits and pieces. But low and behold, we now introduce another process (4) which then in return does something "intelligent" again by adding information that isn't there anymore, thus screwing things up even further.
Suggestion: let's just skip steps 2, 3 and 4 and give the listener at home some decent quality audio. Same goal, easier to manage, better outcome. It's so simple that their R&D department must have overlooked it.

I agree that 2 and 4 are unnecessary, but 3 is necessary because there's a big difference between serving a billion songs at ~1000 kbps and serving a billion songs at 256 kbps or less in terms of bandwidth, storage and the costs they incur (not to mention in the case of radio and other streamings you might need to use even lower bitrate or it won't work at all).

2 and 4 are the kind of thing I was making yogurt analogies about, people feel they make things better even though they make them worse, like... Instagram filters for instance, or canned laughter on TV.

[BDeep]

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 )

[Tricky-Loops]

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 )

Imagine you had a 4 GB download limit for the whole month (which I have), and then we talk again if bandwidth is important...